Mary Flanagan
MIT Building 4, Room 231 Cambridge, MAPushing the boundaries of medium and genre across writing, visual arts, and design to innovate in these fields with a critical play centered approach.
MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies
Studying Media and Making Media
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Miguel Sicart: “Play in the Age of Computing Machinery”
MIT Media Lab, Room 633 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MAGames scholar Miguel Sicart of the IT University of Copenhagen looks at the culture, aesthetics, and technological implications of play in the age of computers.
Jonathan Sterne, “Who Tunes Whom?: Auto-Tune, the Earth, and the Politics of Frequency”
MIT Media Lab, Room 633 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MAMcGill's Jonathan Sterne gives a cultural history of auto-tune as a form of signal processing, drawing on patent documents, interviews, operational protocols, tuning standards and competing acoustemologies.
Meredith Schweig and Rebecca Dirksen: “Taiwanese Rap and Haitian Music and Reconstruction”
MIT Media Lab, Room 633 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MAIn this presentation, Meredith Schweig explores the gender politics and practices of the Taiwan rap scene.
Kate Crawford, “Squeaky Dolphin to Normcore: Anxiety and Big Data Culture”
MIT Building 4, Room 231 Cambridge, MAKate Crawford is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research (Social Media Collective) and a Visiting Professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media. She is currently working on a new book.
Barry Werth and The Antidote: Reporting from Inside the World of Big Pharma
MIT Media Lab, Room 633 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MABarry Werth's most recent book, The Antidote: Inside the World of Big Pharma, gives an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at how a cash-starved startup became one of the great triumphs of American bio-tech innovation.
Susan Murray, “‘Natural Vision vs. Tele-Vision’: Defining and Managing Electronic Color in the Post-War Era”
MIT Media Lab, Room 633 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MASusan Murray on the discourses that framed and managed color use and reception not only in the standardization period, but also during RCA and NBC's early attempts to sell color to consumers, sponsors, and critics.
Tarleton Gillespie: “Algorithms, and the Production of Calculated Publics”
MIT Media Lab, Room 633 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MAIn this talk Tarleton Gillespie will highlight one particular dimension of these algorithms, their production of calculated publics: algorithmically produced snapshots of the “public” around us and what most concerns it.
Philip Jones: “Gaming in Color”
MIT Media Lab, Room 633 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MAGaming in Color is a full length documentary of the story of the queer gaming community, gaymer culture and events, and the rise of LGBTQ themes in video games.
Sinan Aral, “Social Influence and The Dynamics of Online Reputation”
MIT Media Lab, Room 633 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MAMIT Sloan's Sinan Aral will argue that a new science of online identity could help guide our business, platform design, and social policy decisions in light of the rising importance of online reputation and social influence.
Philip Napoli, “Media Impact Assessment and Beyond: Thoughts on the Treacherous Task of Quantifying Journalistic Performance”
MIT Media Lab, Room 633 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MAThis presentation by Rutgers' Philip Napoli will focus on ongoing research that seeks to define and assess the field of media impact assessment.
Caetlin Benson-Allott, “By Design: Or, What Remote Controls Can Teach Us about the Nature of Control”
MIT Media Lab, Room 633 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MAGeorgetown's Caetlin Benson-Allott on how the technical and design evolution of remote controls reveal how the seemingly most inconsequential of media devices have shaped the way users cohabit with mass media, consumer electronics, and each other.
Helen Nissenbaum, “Resisting Data’s Tyranny with Obfuscation”
MIT Media Lab, Room 633 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MAHelen Nissenbaum: "Obfuscation is a compelling 'weapon-of-the-weak,' which deserves to be developed and strengthened, its moral challenges countered and mitigated."
Doris Sommer, “Welcome Back, to the Humanities as Civic Engagement”
MIT Media Lab, Room 633 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MADoris Sommer's new book "The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities" revives the collaboration between aesthetic philosophy and democratic development.
CMS Alumni Panel
MIT Building 4, Room 231 Cambridge, MAThree Comparative Media Studies alums -- Sam Ford, Rekha Murthy, and Parmesh Shahani -- return to discuss their post-graduate lives.
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The CMS graduate program has its home in Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Part of MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences