"10 Things Corporations Can Learn from Pro Wrestling" and more from Sam Ford via Fast Company
CMS alum and Convergence Culture Consortium researcher Sam Ford this week worked as a guest blogger at Fast Company, writing about spreadable media as well as his favorite topic, pro wrestling:
If we buy into the fact that corporate America needs to understand popular culture to really be able to relate to its audiences and communicate effectively--Grant McCracken's idea of the "chief culture officer" that I wrote about last week--then what better place to start than pro wrestling? It's very existence feels like an anomaly, with fans loading arenas by the thousands and gathering around television sets by the millions to watch (primarily) men performing the illusion of one-on-one sporting competition, while most fans know that what they are watching is for show.
[...]
I've found wrestling often acts as a carnival mirror to our culture, stretching and magnifying the underlying fears, prejudices and tension points amongst us. However, I think wrestling provides all sorts of learning that corporate America should pay attention to as well.
From the CMS blogs: "Google Wave: Innovating Innovation at the Expense of Innovation"
Today on the Convergence Culture Consortium blog, Alex Leavitt moves past the Google Wave hype to examine how it might actually fare, based on lessons learned from other recent innovations like YouTube.
Like YouTube, Google Wave is a platform (instead of video, based around collaborative communication) that is beginning to aggregate a community. But I have a question: Will Google Wave crush the innovative potential of its users?
"Breaking Down Advertising's Walls": CMS researcher Sam Ford in Fast Company
Sam Ford is a CMS grad, a CMS researcher, and a director of the communications company Peppercom. He's also now a blogger at Fast Company.
In his first post, Ford writes about convergence culture's reasonable obsession: breaking down walls between media.
My movement from an academic working with industry to an academic within the industry was driven by my interest in how companies and their audiences converse; what better place to study that conversation than public relations? In my position today at Peppercom, I remain especially interested in why and how the industry and the academy should collaborate around media and the humanities. My posts here at Fast Company this week will focus on this theme: what can the industry learn from the academy, and vice versa?
Color (or the Lack of It) at Comic-Con...And Beyond
Grad student Florence Gallez, who interviewed Henry Jenkins at Comic-Con for the upcoming issue of the CMS newsletter In Medias Res, pens an opinion piece for The Tech about the lack of diversity at the same conference:
[W]hen it comes to race, all is not well in Comic-land and in the entertainment world it inspires -- a fact I was reminded of at Comic-Con at every turn. It was clear that some great minds are hard at work on improving the situation, but evidence of concrete change was hard to come by. Just take that very Souvenir Book and count the featured non-white "past Comic-Con office-holders and supporters" who have shaped the past 40 years, and you will see that one hand largely suffices.
[...]
Ethnic Caribbean actress and Star Trek star Zoe Saldana puts the lack of diversity more bluntly: "There aren't enough African-American superheroes. Or Asian-American superheroes. Have you ever met a superhero named Juan Gonzales? I would kill for that."
We're just a week away from sending the fall 2009 issue of our newsletter In Medias Res to the printer. It promises to be a great issue, including pieces on technology in rural Peru and an interview from Comic-Con with Henry Jenkins.
We couldn't help but contrast the glossy 40-page publication that's about to come out with what Alex Chisholm graciously put together back in 2002. So here it is, lovingly scanned: the very first issue of In Medias Res...
CMS/NML's McWilliams writing for The Guardian (UK)
Jenna McWilliams, education researcher and curriculum specialist at Project New Media Literacies, recently picked up a new side-gig: columnist for The Guardian online.
Her first two posts are up now--the first on the film State of Play and its ignorance of how journalism works in the digital era--and the other, published yesterday, questions Rupert Murdoch's recent proclamation that news online will inevitably revert to a pay-per-view model. A taste:
The technology guru Clay Shirky writes that "It's not a revolution if nobody loses," and the first losers in this particular revolution were broadcast media outlets (TV, newspapers, magazines) and cultural elites whose social status relied on the ability to control who had access to the news, what stories they had access to, and what they did with that information.
If Murdoch is right that "the current days of the internet will soon be over," it will only be because a small handful of corporations own the vast majority of media outlets. My sense, though, is that he's wrong: That even if newspapers return to a pay-for-view model, the people will rise up against and then roll right over it by making the same content available for free elsewhere online and developing new uses for social media that subvert the efforts of Murdoch and others.
So keep an eye on Jenna's Guardian pieces. And be sure to comment quickly--the Guardian is running its own experiment by allowing comments only for the first two days after publication.
CMS grad students Driscoll and Diaz's chiptunes study featured on BoingBoing's Offworld
From the good things in unexpected places dept.: academic journal Transformative Works has devoted its latest issue to the subject of games, and chief amongst its best pieces is MIT students Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz's exhaustive look at the history and rise of the chiptune genre.
From the earliest hardware hacking days of the Atari 2600, to the landmark creation of the SID chip (right, used most famously in the Commodore 64) to the concurrent Amiga cracking/tracking/demo scenes, Driscoll sets up the aesthetic roots of what would later be embraced by the likes of upstart (and still prolific) netlabel micromusic.net.
Matthew Weise: "Press the 'Action' Button, Snake! The Art of Self-Reference in Video Games"
It is useful to think about the boundary between player and fiction as an elastic membrane -- a threshold -- rather than a wall, like Adams does. Drawing attention to how this threshold functions through self-reference can actually enhance fiction rather than destroy it. It can draw the player and game fiction together rather than driving them apart.
Sam Ford: "Centenarian Newspaper Columnist Leaves Us Many Storytelling Lessons"
Sam Ford--CMS alum, research affiliate with the Convergence Culture Consortium, and Director of Customer Insights for Peppercom, a PR agency--writes in the Huffington Post about the late Rev. John C. Morris, storyteller extraordinaire:
John didn't look like most neophyte columnists, though, mostly because of his life experience. He was 101 years old. And, throughout the past few years, this man -- who never used a computer a day in his life, as far as I can tell -- taught me some valuable lessons about media and about storytelling. When he died a few weeks ago, Morris closed the final chapter on the unlikely story of a man who was surely the world's oldest newspaper columnist.
CMS grad Huma Yusuf's article points to resolution
Writing today after a two-month hiatus, I am moved to think about
solutions rather than problems. Perhaps this burst of positivism can be
attributed to the fact that the weather in Boston is finally pleasant,
after a long, bitterly cold winter and a short, stifling heat wave.
Perhaps the prospect of seeing Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
campaign together at the end of this week in a bid to unify a divided
Democratic party is making me optimistic and foolhardy enough to think
that under extenuating circumstances (like a tense presidential race)
even enemies can find something in common. Perhaps seeing Pakistan
splashed across international newspaper headlines in the past few weeks, rarely in a positive context, is making me feel desperate enough to
think outside the box. Whatever the reason, I'm going to use the
following paragraphs to suggest that Dr A Q Khan might help diffuse
mounting tensions between Pakistan and the US as well as Afghanistan.
Read full text of CMS Grad Huma Yusuf's article "Greater Transparency in Policymaking Remediation" here.
Comparative Media Studies in the age of YouTube and Wikipedia
In the latest Chronicle of Higher Education, CMS Director Henry Jenkins writes about the need for media studies to evolve from separate disciplines (film, photography, literature, ...) into something resembling our own program's current mode, comparative media studies, and how the networked, digital landscape continues to shape this change.
He writes, "media studies needs to become comparative, ... to reflect the ways that the contemporary media landscape is blurring the lines between media consumption and production, ... [and] to respond to the enormous hunger for public knowledge about our present moment of profound and persistent media change."
Each media-studies program will need to reinvent itself to reflect the specifics of its institutional setting and existing resources, and what works today will need to be rethought tomorrow as we deal with further shifts in the information landscape.
...
Until we make these changes, the best thinking (whether evaluated in terms of process or outcome) is likely to take place outside academic institutions -- through the informal social organizations that are emerging on the Web. We may or may not see the emergence of YouNiversities, but YouTube already exists. And its participants are learning plenty about how media power operates in a networked society
CMS Director Henry Jenkins on Congress and MySpace
Henry Jenkins recently published a short op-ed piece for the Boston Globe editorial page about Congress and the pending Deleting Online Predators Act.
Time Magazine may have celebrated the new realm of user-generated content with its Person of the Year cover story. That doesn't mean Congress is comfortable with young people's participation in the online world.
Jenkins posts to Media Commons' new blog as inaugural video curator
CMS director Henry Jenkins, as a guest video curator for Media Commons' In Media Res blog, posts "Holding Out For A Hiro," a short piece about the character Hiro Nakamura (salary man, otaku, "superhiro," superfan) from NBC's new ensemble show, Heroes.
Read the article and feel free to comment and contribute to the discussion.
Professor Henry Jenkins has contributed an article at PBS.org debunking eight major myths about video games and their social impact. The myths in question?
"The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence."
"Scientific evidence links violent game play with youth aggression."
"Children are the primary market for video games."
"Almost no girls play computer games."
"Because games are used to train soldiers to kill, they have the same impact on the kids who play them."
"Video games are not a meaningful form of expression."
CMS alum and Convergence Culture Consortium researcher Sam Ford this week worked as a guest blogger at Fast Company, writing about spreadable media as well as his favorite topic, pro wrestling: