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CMS News Archives
 The CMS Colloquium Series is intended to provide an intimate and informal exchange between a visiting speaker and CMS faculty, students, visiting scholars and friends. Subjects relate to the various media we create and consume each day: film, TV, comics, videogames, the internet, and the vast body of emerging media that's being created as you read this.
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A long lifetime of developing electronic consumer products has taken Ralph Baer from vacuum tube through microprocessor designs. Although the technology has undergone vast changes, the underlying motivation for, and execution of, the process has not changed radically. Baer cited numerous examples of specific product designs that made it all the way through the process to a successful product and drew some conclusions from that experience that shed some light on the continuum of invention, development, and marketing novel product ideas.
Presidential elections are considered decisions on politicians' virtues and reflections of public values. On an ongoing basis, polling data and snap punditry engorge the body politic between elections. Taken together, these judgments on leadership and partisanship - on statecraft and stagecraft - lie at the core of democracy today. Tucker Eskew explores the permanent campaign of the last ten years. What is "message discipline" in an era of atomized opinion leadership - a necessity or a fool's errand? Are the parties inevitably devoted to different styles of communication, and is this era's favored approach inextricably the domain of the new Administration? Can unfettered dialogue, as an expression of freedom, be a pure benefit to society, or is "Fire!" being texted in a crowded coffee house? Consistent with his conservatism, Eskew will have firm answers to some of these and other questions. Reflecting his consulting firm ViaNovo's "new ways", he welcomed dialogue on all.
MiT6 Plenary 5
Panelists:
Mary Bryson, University of British Columbia
Marlene Manoff, MIT Libraries
John Durham Peters, University of Iowa
Thomas Pettitt, University of Southern Denmark
Moderator: James Paradis, MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies
MiT6 Plenary 4 | Panel Questions
Panelists:
Gavin Grant, Small Bear Press
Jennifer Jackson, Donald Maass Literary Agency
Robert Miller, HarperCollins
Bob Stein, Institute for the Future of the Book
Moderator: Geoff Long, MIT
MiT6 Plenary 3 | Panel Questions
Panelists:
Claude Mussou, INA France
Pelle Snickars, Swedish National Archive
Richard Wright, BBC Research and Information
Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT and Utrecht University
MiT6 Plenary 2 | Panel Questions
Panelists:
Jessica Clark, Center for Social Media (American University)
Ellen Hume, Center for Future Civic Media (MIT)
Persephone Miel, Media Re:public and Internews Network
Respondents: Dean Jansen, Participatory Culture Foundation
Jake Shapiro, Public Radio Exchange (PRX)
Moderator: Pat Aufderheide, American University
MiT6 Plenary 1 | Panel Questions
Panelists:
John Miles Foley, Univ. of Missouri
Lisa Gitelman, Harvard Univ.
Rick Prelinger, Prelinger Archives
Ann Wolpert, MIT Libraries
Moderator: Peter Walsh, Andover Newton Theological School
This panel explored theoretical, methodological, and practical issues surrounding the study of media circulation in an age of increasing global connectivity. "Global media" often serves as a placeholder for media outside Anglo-American academic settings, with "global" gesturing towards "Other" media ecologies. This panel brought together scholars and practitioners who wrestle with the simultaneous indispensability and inadequacy of Anglo-American paradigms - both for media practitioners and scholars - in Asian, African, and Latin American contexts. In what ways can we move away from the "national" as the pre-eminent analytic frame? How do media producers in the global south grapple with the challenges and opportunities of globalization? What role are audiences playing in shaping media circuits? In tackling these and other questions, panelists Jonathan Gray, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University; Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia; African filmmaker Abderrahamane Sissako; and CMS alum Aswin Punathambekar SM '03, Communication Studies, University of Michigan explored ways in which recent developments in diverse settings worldwide might inform and revitalize our understanding of how media circulates. Henry Jenkins will moderate this forum which kicks off the sixth Media in Transition conference at MIT.
Chris Claremont is best known for his 17 year unbroken run on the X-Men comic series -- a feat in world building that has supported many uses, from comics to movies to video games and more. Now Chris is returning to that world, with a new comics series titled X-Men Forever. This time, the rules are different. Mr. Claremont addressed thoughts and considerations that go into building a world that can support years of use, and variations. How has the concept of world-building changed over time? What is the purpose of continuity? Multiplicity? How to take into account growth and risk, and play outside the rules. Questions and answers followed.
A discussion about the inducement of pleasure, fantasy fulfillment, and the mediation of
intimacy in a socially-networked gaming paradigm such as World of Warcraft (WOW) this event was held in conjunction with the exhibition SHADA/JAHN/VAUCELLE, "Hollowed," which includes the WOW Pod, a collaborative project by Cati Vaucelle & Shada/Jahn. Panelists included Jean-Baptiste Labrune, Postdoctoral Associate at the Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab; Raimundas Malasauskas, Curator, Artists Space (NYC); Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program; Marisa Jahn, Artist in Residence, MIT Media Lab; Steve Shada, artist collaborator; Cati Vaucelle, PhD candidate Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab; and Laura Knott, Curatorial Associate, MIT Museum.
The widespread adoption of computer-based methods of digital recording technology has profoundly changed film scoring practices around the globe, not least in Hollywood. This panel will explore those changes with attention to current techniques compared to those of past generations. Our speakers, Paul Chihara of UCLA and Dan Carlin of the Berklee College of Music, are widely respected professional film scorers as well as teachers. Drawing on their own experiences in film production, they explored the decisive changes in personnel, economics, and stylistic values at work in Hollywood today. Moderator Martin Marks of MIT provided historical perspectives and guided the discussion with questions for the panelists concerning the music of landmark films past and present.
A fluid text is any work that exists in multiple versions. What are the ethics and legality in the creation, sharing, and ownership of textual versions? What are the boundaries of textual appropriation? How does technology abet appropriation; how might it assist in the useful designation of boundaries? Is the law keeping up?
Hofstra University professor John Bryant explores the larger applications of the notion of fluid text to culture, and in particular identity formation in a multicultural democracy. Wendy Seltzer is a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and is a visiting professor at American University. She founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats, and to research the effects of these threats on free expression.
Jennifer Robertson, Professor of Anthropology University of Michigan
In humans, gender--femininity, masculinity--is an array of performed behaviors, from dressing in certain clothes to walking and talking in certain ways. These behaviors are both socially and historically shaped, but are also contingent upon many situational influences, including individual choices. Female and male bodies alike can perform a variety of femininities and masculinities. What can human gender(ed) practices and performances tell us about how humanoid robots are gendered, and vice versa? Robertson explored and interrogated the gendering of humanoid robots manufactured today in Japan for use in the home and workplace. She showed that Japanese roboticists assign gender to their creations based on rigid assumptions about female and male sex and gender roles. Thus, humanoid robots can productively be understood as the vanguard of a "posthuman sexism," and are being developed in a socio-political climate of reactionary conservatism.
Robert Putnam has suggested that the political consciousness and civic engagement of the post- World War II generation may have taken shape in bowling alleys and other spaces where community members gathered. Might the political consciousness of the new generation be taking shape in and around popular culture? Are we seeing a blurring of the roles of citizen and consumer? Is this fusion between entertainment and news a good or a bad thing? What links exist between our cultural and our political preferences? How are activists and political leaders utilizing metaphors from popular culture as resources to mobilize their supporters? Is it possible that aspects of our popular culturemay generate utopian visions that fuel political change? These and other questions were explored by panelists Johanna Blakley, deputy director of the Norman Lear Center at USC; David Carr, media and culture writer for the New York Times; and Stephen Duncombe, associate professor at NYU and author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. Henry Jenkins moderated.
Randy Testa, Vice-President of Education and Professional Development, Walden Media, LLC will discuss what it means to create educational content in tandem with commercially released family films, film adaptations of children's literature. He will also discuss why Walden Media as a film studio has recently moved into publishing children's literature as another platform for storytelling and content acquisition.
This talk, with Celia Pearce, Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech and Director and the Emergent Game Group and Experimental Game Lab, explored the connection of identity to virtual place, referencing in particular anthropology, humanist and socio-geography and Internet studies to look at the construction and performance of "fictive ethnicity" tied to a specific, though virtual and fictional, locality. To illustrate, Pearce used the example of the "Uru Diaspora," a game community from the defunct massively multiplayer game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (based on the Myst series), which immigrated into other games and virtual worlds, adopting the collective fictive ethnicity of "Uru Refugees," and referring to Uru as their "homeland."
Globalization is eroding the notion of national cinema. As foreign-language remakes, globalized labor pools, and international co-productions become ever more common, distinct national cinemas are being replaced by a variety of transnational cinemas. Anime, often considered a uniquely Japanese cinematic form, is no exception. This talk will explore one recent example of transnational anime: Tekkon Kinkreet, the first Japanese anime to be written and directed by Americans. Christina Klein is associate professor of English and American Studies at Boston College. She is the author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 and is currently writing a book about the globalization of U.S. and Asian film industries.
Michael Mateas is an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz where his research focuses on artificial intelligence (AI)-based art and entertainment. As head of the Expressive Intelligence Studio at Santa Cruz, he is involved in such projects as automated support for game generation, automatic generation of autonomous character conversations, story management, and authoring tools for interactive storytelling. Mateas is a collaborator on the interactive drama Facade (see interactivestory.net).
The Obama campaign's extensive deployment of digital media, especially its tech-savvy outreach to the young, was widely reported before the election. Some predicted that this digital advantage would make a decisive difference. Did it? What role did the Internet play in the election? How has it changed presidential politics? What are the future implications of the impact of new media on journalism and on American society? These and other questions will be addressed by Marc Ambinder, who covers politics for The Atlantic; Cyrus Krohn, the director of the National Republican Committee's eCampaign; and Ian V. Rowe, who headed up MTV's coverage of the presidential election.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Future Civic Media and the Technology and Culture Forum
Tak Toyoshima's comic strip Secret Asian Man has brought to light the challenges of being Asian American in America. Challenges like not being able to find his name on a key chain at souvenir shops, being asked where he was delivering the Chinese food that he just picked up and being his friend's default camera technician. In 2007, SAM began syndication through United Features and has since become a daily strip featured in papers across the country. SAM's focus has broadened beyond purely Asian-American race relations, and now discusses themes that involve dynamics between groups to which we all belong: race, gender, political, religious, left-handed, sexual orientation, dog people...etc. In this informal presentation, Toyoshima explores the relationship between his preferred content (the exploration of Asian-American identity), his medium (comics), and his mode of distribution (syndication primarily through independent newspapers). How does Secret Asian Man address the historical role of racial stereotypes in comics as a medium? What might his experiences as an independent comics producer tell us about the opportunities offered by alternative media?
With Ho Che Anderson, Jeet Heer and Diana Tamblyn
Comics have emerged as a key means of interpreting and disseminating controversial and contested histories: Chester Brown's Louis Riel, Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, Joe Sacco's Palestine, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis are just some of the works that take definitive social and political conflict as their topic. Why has historical material become so important for comics art? What unique opportunities does comics allow for critiquing and revising dominant historical narratives? These are the questions our speakers discussed, in relation to their own work and to the comics world in general.
Diana Tamblyn is writing a biography of Canadian arms trader and weapons engineer Gerald Bull; Ho Che Anderson authored King, a 3-volume biography of MLK; and Jeet Heer is a historian and a leading comics scholar.
 A pioneering scholar of the Enlightenment and of the history of the book, Robert Darnton is the director of the University Library and the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard. A former Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow, his books include The Business of the Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History, and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France. He has written extensively on the impact of digital technologies on the culture of print and on the responsibilities of libraries in the computer age.
In this Forum, Darnton discussed and took questions about the emergence of the discipline of the history of the book, the future of books and reading, and his own vision of the ways in which new and old media can reinforce each other, strengthening and transforming the world of learning.
With respondent Diana Henderson, Greenblatt speaks on the transformation of literary study in America and his own career as a teacher and writer.
This presentation delivers a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's three-person submersible, Alvin. Meditating on the sounds rather that the sights of the dive, Helmreich explores multiple meanings of immersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of Alvin as a submarine cyborg, he shows how interior and exterior soundscapes create a sense of immersion, and he argues that torquing media theory to include water as a medium can make explicit the technical structures and social practices of sounding, hearing, and listening that support senses -- scientific, everyday, and anthropological -- of embodied sonic presence. Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies life scientists, from those who engage in the computer modeling of living things (Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, University of California Press, 1998) to those who work in deep-sea environments (Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, University of California Press, 2009). He is particularly interested in the limits of "life" as an analytical category for contemporary biology.
How have American news media responded to this historic presidential campaign? Is it true, as many have suggested, that the influence of newspapers and television has declined in the digital era? Have the media become more partisan and polarized? More preoccupied with polls and campaign strategy than with substantive issues? Has the coverage by traditional media been qualitatively different from that by online news sources? In this first of two forums on the campaign and the media, noted journalists Tom Rosenstiel, who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington D.C., and John Carroll, a local reporter and media critic who teaches at Boston University, will offer report cards on the current state of American political journalism.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Future Civic Media and the Technology and Culture Forum
This presentation / lecture / infomercial examines the nature and implications of object performance both as a global cultural tradition and as a contemporary medium that dominates our culture. While performing objects traditionally include puppets, masks, icons, and other "things", the more recent innovations of film, television, and the internet can also be seen as aspects of our need to play with stuff. In all cases, the central dynamic of this form involves a focus on the material world instead of humans. The talk will be accompanied by images from 20th-century avant-garde film and performance work. John Bell began his performance work with Bread and Puppet Theater, after which he earned a Ph.D. in theater history at Columbia University. He is a founding member of the award-winning Great Small Works theater company of Brooklyn, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, and Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut. This spring he will be directing a "Living Newspaper"-style production about the politics of global healthcare with MIT students. His latest book, American Puppet Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), examines particular moments of puppet, mask, and object theater in the United States over the past 150 years. He is a trombonist with the Somerville-based Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, and organizer of the upcoming October 12th HONK! Festival Parade from Davis Square to Harvard Square.
Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson will present findings from their book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do (Simon & Schuster, 2008), including the complex ways in which video games may benefit or disadvantage children. They will also talk about myths and politics in media violence research, and how they influence the views of academics and mass media. Lawrence Kutner, Ph.D. and Cheryl K. Olson, Sc.D. are cofounders and co-directors (with Eugene Beresin, M.D.) of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital. They are both on the psychiatry faculty of Harvard Medical School. Kutner received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and trained at the Mayo Clinic. He's a licensed psychologist and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He wrote the "Parent & Child" column for the New York Times as well as five books on child development. Olson was principal investigator for a $1.5 million study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice on the effects of video games on young teenagers, which formed the basis for Grand Theft Childhood. She has a Doctor of Science degree in health and social behavior from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a postdoctoral certificate in pharmaceutical medicine from the University of Basel.
A conversation with Junot Díaz, regarding questions of genre and secondary world construction in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and the Caribbean, and the failure of realism as a narrative strategy to describe the deep history of the New World. Díaz is the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at MIT. He is the author of Drown and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the John Sargent First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.
Los Angeles artist and special effects virtuoso Pat O'Neill filmed The Decay of Fiction (2002) in the landmark Ambassador Hotel, once the center of Hollywood celebrity culture. His film blurs the boundaries between architectural investigation, urban documentation, and aesthetic exploration. At once a poetic homage to classical film genres, it is also a suggestive indication of how remembering the city is changing in response to new technologies. Edward Dimendberg is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and German at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004), co-editor of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (1994), and currently serves as Multimedia Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.
The current generation of young citizens is growing up in an age of unprecedented access to information. Will this change their understanding of democracy? What factors will shape their involvement in the political process? Lance Bennett is Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor of Communication and Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, where he founded and directs the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement. Ingeborg Endter is the outreach manager for the MIT Center for Future Civic Media and a graduate of the electronic publishing group at MIT's Media Lab where her research focused on creating collaborative community uses of the Internet. She previously served as a program manager for the Computer Clubhouse Network, a collaboration between the Boston Museum of Science and Media Lab that provides an after-school learning environment where young people from under-served communities use technology for creative self-expression. Alan Khazei co-founded City Year, which enlists more than 1,200 young adults, in 16 communities across America and in Johannesburg South Africa, for a year of full-time community service. He is currently founder and CEO of Be the Change, a non-partisan citizens' civic organization.
Much discussion of our impending digital future is insular and without nuance. Skeptics talk mainly among themselves, while utopians and optimists also keep company mainly within their own tribal cultures. This forum challenges this unhelpful division, staging a conversation between Yochai Benkler and Cass Sunstein, two of our country's most thoughtful and influential writers on the promise and the perils of the Internet Age.
In the year 2008, artists and businesspersons navigate the vast divide between the world of independent filmmaking and the Hollywood studio system as the lines between the two become increasingly more blurred. As pop culture integration - the fusing of music, sports, dance, event programming, reality, and other subcultures geared toward mainstream audiences while highlighting the genre demographic - has become the lifeline for both the artistic and commercial filmmaker, where do you find the happy medium, or is there one anymore? Writer, producer, distributor, and president of Tri Destined Films, Gregory Anderson has been called a part of the "new" Oscar Micheaux movement as a trailblazer for independent film distribution. Gregory created Stomp the Yard, one of the most profitable dance films of all time, and produced, marketed, and theatrically distributed the independent film Trois, one of the Top 50 highest grossing Independent Films of its release year according to Daily Variety.
Wu Ming 1 is a founding member and representative of the Wu Ming Foundation, a collective of writers from Italy. Most members of the collective were deeply involved in the Luther Blissett Project, an international experiment in culture jamming, radical pranksterism and guerrilla mythology that ran from 1994 to 1999. During that time, a group of LBP activists wrote a controversial novel titled Q, which was published to much acclaim in 1999. In January 2000 the authors of Q founded the Wu Ming Foundation, which takes its name from a Chinese word meaning either "anonymous" or "five names" depending on how the first syllable is pronounced. The name is meant both as a tribute to dissidents ("Wu Ming" is a common byline among Chinese citizens demanding democracy and freedom of speech) and as a refusal of the celebrity-making machine which turns authors into stars.
Denis Dyack is the founder and president of Silicon Knights. In this capacity, he oversees the creation and development of games, and continues to further the growth of the company. Dyack is a noted authority on interactive software development and offers valuable insight into the process of designing next-generation games that appeal to the masses. Under Dyack's direction, Silicon Knights has evolved into one of the top independent interactive software developers in the world. Dyack (B. Phed, H. B.Sc, M. Sc.) founded Silicon Knights in 1992 after publishing Cyber Empires in 1991. Since that time, Silicon Knights has moved from creating PC games to premiere AAA console titles, such as Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain for the original PlayStation. Working with Nintendo as a second party, Silicon Knights created the critically acclaimed Eternal Darkness. Together with Nintendo, Silicon Knights worked with Konami to create another critically acclaimed game, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. Dyack and his team are currently working with Microsoft on the Too Human trilogy for the Xbox 360, and developing an exciting new game for Sega of America.
A salient feature of contemporary TV has been the appearance of programs that appeal more widely across national boundaries than many earlier television shows. Examples include a range of reality shows such as Big Brother or Survivor as well as fiction series such as Ugly Betty, which undergo relatively small facelifts before being introduced to new audiences. And many American programs – e.g., Lost, Desperate Housewives – travel abroad with no alterations, as country-specific promotion and distribution strategies adjust them to their new national contexts. In this forum, distinguished media scholars Eggo Müller, Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio will discuss the origins and significance of the international distribution of television formats and programs.
Continue reading "Podcast: Communications Forum: "Global Television"" »
The prime-time series has been a central narrative form in America for the last half-century, as the Hollywood movie had been in a previous era. Are the radical transformations of television in recent years challenging this domination? How has series TV changed over the past 20 years? What does the prolonged writers' strike signify for the future of TV fiction and the medium as a whole? Leading writer-producer John Romano (Third Watch, Party of Five, Hill Street Blues) will address these and related questions in a candid conversation illustrated by clips from significant series.
Non-traditional and viral marketing campaigns raise questions about the content status of advertising and the authenticity of commercial art. This panel discussion will consider the challenges of engaging audiences in non-conventional ways, looking at the status of viral media and the nature of non-traditional marketing campaigns. Berkman Center Fellow and C3 Consulting Researcher Shenja van der Graaf will moderate the converation with Natalie Lent from Fanscape and Mike Rubenstein of The Barbarian Group.
Co-sponsored by the Convergence Culture Consortium
This is the sixth in a series of seven audio podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment 2 Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
A video version of this and all other available sessions are also downloadable.
This is the fourth in a series of seven audio podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment 2 Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
A video version of this and all other available sessions are also downloadable.
This is the third in a series of seven audio podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment 2 Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.
A video version of this and all other available sessions are also downloadable.
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