Past Groups

Convergence Culture Consortium

The Convergence Culture Consortium (C3), continuing now as the Futures of Entertainment conference, explored the ways the business landscape is changing in response to the growing integration of content and brands across media platforms and the increasingly prominent roles that consumers are playing in shaping the flow of media. C3 connected researchers and thinkers from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program with companies looking to understand new strategies for doing business in a converging media environment. The consortium provided insights into new ways to relate to consumers, manage brands, and develop engaging experiences, strategies to cut through an increasingly cluttered media environment and benefit from emerging cultural and technological trends. The Consortium expanded the role of industry leaders by bridging the gap between academic and market research: partners gained access to both broad-perspective thought leadership and focused analysis on events and campaigns.

Project New Media Literacies

Project New Media Literacies, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and now based at the University of Southern California, explores participatory culture with an eye toward identifying the social and cultural skills that we think young people should learn and be given the chance to practice in order to successfully navigate a contemporary media culture. It is our belief that young people need to both make and reflect upon media and in the process, acquire important skills in teamwork, leadership, problem solving, collaboration, brainstorming, communications, and creating projects. NML is developing a range of materials, including an application that will house interactive learning challenges offering teens a rich variety of ways to explore and practice the skills needed in the new media culture; a series of teachers' strategy guides designed to show the fit between media literacy principles and traditional school content; and a case book for media ethics (in collaboration with Harvard's Project Zero).

NML is part of a larger initiative that MacArthur has launched to explore the social and educational opportunities the new media landscape offers, involving coordination and collaboration with classrooms and after school programs and other researchers at Indiana University, Global Kids, Zoey's Room, Common Sense Media, University of California-Berkeley, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.