MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Communications Forum: "The Campaign and the Media 1
2008-09-25 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
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.

Playing with Stuff: The Material World in Performance
2008-09-18 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
John Bell
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.

The Myths and Politics of Media Violence Research
2008-09-11 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson
Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson 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
2008-09-05 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Junot Díaz
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.

The 10th Annual CMS Media Spectacle
2008-04-28 19:00 - 22:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
An honored tradition returns on April 28th at 7PM when CMS presents the tenth annual Media Spectacle. The event, founded by Chris Pomiecko, celebrates his love for filmmaking by showcasing the finest video projects created by MIT students, staff and faculty.
Historically, the event has received submissions of every genre from experimental to documentary to narrative works created on every conceivable platform and device (mobisode anyone?). Since the dawning of YouTube and other user-generated video websites, the number of submissions has increased substantially. This endeavor has also been aided by Campus Movie Fest, a corporate-sponsored organization which invades universities internationally to teach students how to make films and supply them with the equipment to do so, all free of charge. That effort, combined with the fine video courses offered here at MIT through course 4, will certainly provide a wide array of choices to select from this year.
The event is hosted by Professor Henry Jenkins and judged by esteemed members of the CMS community as well as Cathy Pomiecko, the sister of the late CMS program administrator Chris Pomieicko. After all of this year’s selected pieces are screened, the undergraduate winner for best film will receive a cash prize and the Chris Pomiecko Trophy followed by the Michaelangelo Antonioni Award for the best non-undergraduate entry.
Submissions will be accepted until April 10th in any format (DVD preferred) with a maximum running time of 30 minutes. We also ask if you could indicate your MIT affiliation when entering. All entries may be sent to Generoso Fierro, MIT, NE25-385, 77 Masssachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139. Please direct all questions to generoso [at] mit [dot] edu.

Theatrical Science: Automata, Exhibition, and Claude Shannon's Epic Theater of Science
2008-04-28 16:00 - 18:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
In the mid-1950s at Bell Labs, America’s wealthiest and most influential industrial research center, mathematician Claude Shannon began theorizing, writing about, and building automata. Initially conceived as laboratory playthings and thought experiments, these devices emerged as minor celebrities in 1950s science and popular culture. In this lecture, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (Northwestern University, MIT Visiting Scholar) situates these artifacts within postwar exhibition and publicity practices at Bell Labs, which regularly re-constructed specialized research as sensual theaters for scientific play and the popular imagination. Tracing these artifacts’ migration from the laboratory to postwar television and popular press, and borrowing from the work of Bertolt Brecht, Geoghegan develops a concept of theatrical science that bridges research methods in the history of science and media studies.
Co-presented with the Program in Science, Technology and Society.

Slightly More Than Expected from a Band of Novelists: On How and Why a Group of Writers Called Wu Ming Set to Disrupt Italian (nay, European) Literature and Popular Culture (and then Came to Boston to Brag About It)
2008-04-02 17:15 - 18:00 | MA, United States
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.
Wu Ming’s works include 54, a novel with dozens of characters (including Cary Grant and Marshall Tito) set in 1954; the screenplay for Guido Chiesa’s movie Radio Alice (2004); and numerous “solo” novels, including Wu Ming 1’s New Thing (2004). They have also collaborated with musicians, actors, comic authors, playwrights, film-makers, graphic artists and academics in a plethora of multimedia and transmedia projects.
The group’s most recent novel, Manituana, was published in Italy in March of 2007. It is the first episode of an 18th-century pan-Atlantic trilogy which will keep them writing at least until 2012. Manituana reached as high as #4 in the Italian bestseller charts, and translation rights have been purchased by French and Spanish publishers. Manituana is also at the center of a complex transmedia project which is briefly described at http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/giapdigest36.htm. All of their books are freely downloadable from their website, http://www.wumingfoundation.com.
Event open only to the MIT Community.
Funded (in part) by a Director’s Grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT.

CMS Class of 2008 Thesis Presentations
2008-03-21 11:00 - 18:00 | MIT Building 35, Room 225, 127 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
The CMS Class of 2008 will be giving their thesis presentations on Friday, March 21, 2008 from 11AM to 6PM in room 35-225. The event is open to the public; CMS students, faculty, associates and friends of the program are all warmly welcomed to attend. 10:30-11:00 AM
Coffee and Pastries

11:00-11:45 AM
Information Visualization for the People
Michael Danziger
An analysis of the field of information visualization focusing on the theoretical and methodological challenges associated with conceptualizing and designing visualization as a mass medium.

11:45 AM – 12:30 PM
New Potentials for ‘DIY’ Music Making: Social Networks, Old and New, and the Ongoing Struggles to Reshape the Music Industry
Evan Wendel
An historical and comparative exploration of “independent” music scenes and their associated social networks during both the post-punk period of the late-1970s and early 1980s, as well as the current music climate which is increasingly defined by online networks. The larger contention is that the potentials for ÒindependentÓ musicians to maintain viability, and even achieve success, outside of a terrain traditionally structured by the mainstream recording industry are greater today than ever before, especially when informed by an understanding of the successes and shortcomings of past practices.

12:30-1:15 PM
Targeting Digital Youth in Web 2.0 China
Liwen Jin
A recent Netpop survey reports that Chinese Internet users are much more likely to use user-generated content to make purchasing decisions than Americans (58% to 19%). They also are much more likely to participate in forum discussions and blogs. Web 2.0 technologies originate in the United States. But why does this East Asian society embrace more of the web 2.0 activities than its Western counterpart? This thesis will examine this question from societal, cultural and psychological perspectives in order to discuss new marketing strategies to target the young and dynamic population in China’s cyber communities.

1:15-2:00 PM
Lunch

2:00-2:45 PM
Underground Tunnels, Neon Signs, and Asian-American Identity: The Many Dimensions of Visual Chinatown
Debora Lui
What is Chinatown? Is it an imaginary construct, a real location, or a community? Is it an ethnic enclave only available to insiders, or a fabricated environment designed specifically for tourists? This thesis attempts to reconcile the multiple ways in which Chinatowns in the U.S. are conceived, understood, and used by both insiders and outsiders of the community.

2:45-3:30 PM
Public Interest in the Broadband Age: Media Policy for the Network Society
Stephen Schultze
What does “public interest” media policy mean in the broadband age? Using a three-pronged set of methods consisting of historical survey, contemporary case study, and immediate policy recommendations, this thesis seeks to distill a unified theory of the public interest in media policy.

3:30-3:45 PM
Coffee Break

3:45-4:30 PM
The Modular, Mechanical and Wacky World of Slapstick: Sound/Image Relationships in the Looney Tunes
Andres Lombana
A comparative and multimedia analysis of the sound/image relationships developed by the Warner Brothers animation studio in its Looney Tunes series. This thesis focuses on two theatrical animated cartoons: “Porky in Wackyland” (1938) and “Dough for the Do-Do” (1948).

4:30-5:15 PM
Tactical Cities: Negotiating Violence in Karachi
Huma Yusuf
This thesis uses the theories of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau to examine how everyday practices help the residents of Karachi, Pakistan, negotiate the violence that is endemic to their city. In this construction, remembering, blogging, and navigating heavily trafficked roads become ‘tactics’ that create ‘representational spaces’ symbolically free of violence.

5:15-6:00 PM
Reception

Please visit http://cms.mit.edu/people for individual profiles of the Class of 2008. PDF copies of the theses will eventually be available at http://cms.mit.edu/research/theses.php.

Katie Jacobs: "It's Never Lupus! Fox's House, M.D. and the New Procedural Drama"
2008-02-26 19:00 - 21:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 325, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Katie Jacobs
Katie Jacobs is co-showrunner of the hit NBC series House, M.D., nominated for two consecutive seasons for the Emmy Award for Best Drama Series. Among the show’s many awards have been a Peabody Award and a Humanitas Prize. Previously, Jacobs served as co-showrunner on the critically-acclaimed ABC series Gideon’s Crossing, starring Andre Braugher, as well as the futuristic CBS legal drama Century City, and she produced the Emmy-nominated telefilm A Father for Charlie, starring Louis Gossett, Jr. Jacobs made her directorial debut this past season on House, helming the episodes “Half-Wit” with guest star Dave Matthews as well as the season finale, “Human Error”. Before turning her focus to television, Jacobs produced several films, including Alan J. Pakula’s thriller Consenting Adults and the Carl Reiner comedy Fatal Instinct. Jacobs is a product of the graduate film school at NYU.
Event open only to the MIT Community.

From Film to Videogames
2008-01-29 14:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 237, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Discussion of adaptation with Matthew Weise: How film genres get translated into videogames.

Is This On? (Learn To Be a College DJ)
2008-01-28 19:00 | MIT Building 50, Room 030, 142 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Checking levels, making a segue, cueing vinyl (vinyl-what’s that?).
Get to know your campus radio station (WMBR) as DJ Generoso teaches you various skills of doing a radio show. Then, learn some history of WMBR (the first punk rock radio show in the USA), have a tour of the station and obtain membership information.
Freshly baked cookies and milk will be provided because Andy would’ve wanted it that way.

Beowulf - a FREE screening!
2008-01-28 19:00 | MIT Building 26, Room 100, Access Via 60 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sony Imageworks in conjunction with MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program and LSC present a screening of the 2007 Robert Zemeckis/Neil Gaiman scripted film: BEOWULF! Attendance is FREE!
In the age of heroes comes the mightiest warrior of them all, Beowulf. After destroying the overpowering demon Grendel, he incurs the undying wrath of the beast’s ruthlessly seductive mother, who will use any means possible to ensure revenge. The ensuing epic battle resonates throughout the ages, immortalizing the name of Beowulf.

Board Game Workshop
2008-01-28 14:00 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In each session established board games will be played and modifications based on game play will be made.

18th Annual Salute to Dr. Seuss
2008-01-21 19:00 - 21:00
Gather around, boys and girls of all ages, for a celebration of the sublime and wacky world of Doctor Seuss. You will hear Prof. Henry Jenkins read from his works and talk about Seuss’s relationship to Modern Art and popular culture. We will also screen his remarkable live action feature film, 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. An MIT Tradition marches forward.

GAMBIT Game Lab Tour
2008-01-18 17:30 | GAMBIT Game Lab, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
This event is a guided tour of the new MIT-GAMBIT videogame laboratory. Interested participants are asked to gather in the lobby of 5 Cambridge Center at 3:30PM on Friday January 18th 2008 when they will be escorted to the 3rd floor. The tour concludes with our weekly Friday Games at GAMBIT where you will have a chance to play some of the newest videogames available and meet GAMBIT staff and students. Refreshments will be served.

Qualitative Research Workshop
2008-01-16 18:00 - 2008-01-31 18:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 135, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Joshua Green and Grant McCracken
This course will provide students with an introduction to qualitative research. Working in small teams, students will design and conduct a qualitative project designed to propose strategy for media and cultural organizations – an indicative project would look at ways to revitalize PBS to keep pace with participatory culture. Students will receive an intensive introduction to planning and conducting qualitative research including ethnographic and participant observation methods based on real world case studies.

Jaroslav Švelch: "Czech Underground Rock Music: Forbidden Fandom"
2008-01-14 17:00 | MIT Building 1, Room 132, 33 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jaroslav Švelch
Account of Czech underground rock music of the 60s, 70s and 80s when rock music was considered suspicious and counterrevolutionary by the communist government. The bands and fans were operating illegally or semi-illegally which gave rise to specific models of fan communities. Features rare audio and historical documentation to show the cultural context of media during that period.

GAMBIT Videogame Lecture Series
2008-01-14 - 2008-01-18 | MIT Building 2, Room 151, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Members of Comparative Media Studies’ GAMBIT Research Staff will deliver from 2-3PM each day a different videogame-based lecture.
Monday 14 Jan Storytelling in Games: The Adventure Game Genre
Tuesday 15 Jan Once More With Meaning: Expanding the Emotional and Thematic Scope of Digital Games
Wednesday 16 Jan Bringing commercial videogames into the classrooms
Thursday 17 What is the Casual in Casual Games?
Friday 18 Jan We’re Swimming in Blood and We Feel Fine: Czech Gaming Culture of the Early 90’s
Contact: Philip Tan, NE25-367, x4-9129, philip@mit.edu
Clara Fernandez-Vara
Storytelling in Games: The Adventure Game Genre
Mon Jan 14, 02-03:00pm, 2-151
Doris Rusch
Once More With Meaning: Expanding the Emotional and Thematic Scope of
Digital Games
Tue Jan 15, 02-03:00pm, 2-151
Pilar Lacasa
Bringing commercial videogames into the classrooms
Wed Jan 16, 02-03:00pm, 2-151
Jesper Juul
What is the Casual in Casual Games?
Thu Jan 17, 02-03:00pm, 2-151
Jaroslav Svelch
We’re Swimming in Blood and We Feel Fine: Czech Gaming Culture of the Early 90’s
Fri Jan 18, 02-03:00pm, 2-151

Futures of Entertainment 2
2007-11-16 - 2007-11-17 | MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Futures of Entertainment 2
The logics of convergence culture are quickly becoming ubiquitous within the media world. Audiences are being encouraged to participate in a wider range of sites. Transmedia principles are being adopted by content producers in a broad range of fields. ‘Engagement’ is being discussed as crucial to measurements of success. Futures of Entertainment 2 brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications. This year’s conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, metrics, measurement, and accounting for audiences, cultural labor and audience relations.

Moby-Dick Performance and Conference
2007-05-10 | Mixed Magic Theatre, 500 Mineral Spring Avenue, Pawtucket, RI, United States

Love May Not Be in the Afternoon Anymore: A Q&A with Soap Opera Writer Kay Alden About How the Genre Is (and/or Should Be) Changing with the Times
2007-05-02 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 146, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Kay Alden
Longtime soap opera writer Kay Alden will talk with about her decades in the industry with CMS graduate student Sam Ford ’07 who is writing his thesis about soap operas. Alden worked for more than 30 years on The Young and the Restless, the top-rated daytime drama that she served as head writer for from 1998 to 2006. Recently, she took on a consulting position with ABC Daytime and continues working with the genre during what is seen as a period of substantial change for the daytime television industry. Ford’s thesis, “As the World Turns in a Convergence Environment,” focuses on the shifting technologies and cultural patterns that are affecting daytime television.

Media in Transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age
2007-04-27 - 2007-04-29
Media in Transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age
Our understanding of the technical and social processes by which culture is made and reproduced is being challenged and enlarged by digital technologies. An emerging generation of media producers is sampling and remixing existing materials as core ingredients in their own work. Readers are actively reshaping media content as they personalize it for their own use or customize it for the needs of grassroots and online communities. Of course, the idea that artists build on earlier traditions or that new texts speak to and about earlier texts is scarcely a new idea. This fifth Media in Transition conference aims to generate a conversation that compares historical forms of cultural expression with contemporary media practices.

CMS Media Spectacle
2007-04-23 19:00 | MIT Stata Center, Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
In honor of Chris Pomiecko, the former program administrator of Comparative Media Studies.
The event showcases films, videos, video podcasts, and mobisodes produced by MIT (and Wellesley) affiliates, staff, students and faculty. In a multitude of styles, subjects, and duration.
At the end of the evening the best undergraduate submission will receive the Chris Pomiecko prize.
Free and open to the general public!
PUNCH AND PIE!
For more information, contact:
Generoso Fierro
617 53 5038
generoso AT mit DOT edu

Michael Cuthbert: "Ambiguity, Process, and Information Content in Minimal Music"
2007-04-19 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Michael Cuthbert
Recent trends in music composition push bounds by creating pieces which are either more complex or simpler than works of the past. And yet, our ability to understand and be interested in the compositions at these extremes has kept pace. In this talk, Michael Cuthbert will show how simple minimalist processes give rise to highly ambiguous structures, while many of the most complex moments are reducible to easier to comprehend processes. The effect of potentially endless works–including sections of Beethoven symphonies–will generalize the talk to other musical styles and other media. Cuthbert, visiting assistant professor of music at MIT, has worked extensively on fourteenth-century music and on music of the past 40 years. A recipient of the Rome Prize of the American Academy, Cuthbert earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2006.

10 Things You Won't Like About Professional Game Development
2007-04-18 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 14E, Room 304, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Matthew Weise is an MIT/Comparative Media Studies alum who has been working since his 2004 graduation in the mobile games industry.
There will be a Q & A Session with Matt Weise after the lecture.

MIT European Short Film Festival 2007
2007-04-13 - 2007-04-15 | MIT Building 10, Room 250, 222 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
MIT’s Third European Short Film Festival offers a unique glimpse into the most recent short-film productions from Europe, with a special focus on productions from European film schools and award-winning films from recent Festivals in Europe. This year’s topics are:

New Identities/Social Realities
Transformations
Mitteleuropa/Central Europe

The festival is co-sponsored by Foreign Languages and Literatures, Comparative Media Studies, and several European cultural institutions. The films for the festival are selected by a group of humanities faculty and CMS graduate students.
All films will be shown in Room 10-250, the programs start at 7:00 pm.
Free Admission – All films with English subtitles.
We look forward to seeing you at the festival.
For further information please see the festival website or contact the festival organizer, Kurt Fendt.

Evangelicals and the Media
2007-04-05 17:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
American evangelicals have a long history of engagement with the media, dating back to Great Awakening of the late eighteenth century. Today evangelical groups are active in all media, from the Internet and cellular telephones to print journalism, broadcasting, film, and multi-media entertainment. In this Forum, our speakers discuss the social and political impact of the evangelical movement’s use of media technologies. Gary Schneeberger is special assistant for media relations to James Dobson, founder and chairman of the evangelical group Focus on the Family (www.family.org). Diane Winston is the Knight Chair in Media and Religion in the USC Annenberg School for Communication and author of Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army. The Forum will be moderated by the Rev. Amy McCreath, MIT’s Episcopal chaplain and coordinator of the Technology and Culture Forum at MIT (web.mit.edu/tac).

"This One's Gonna Be a Slobberknocker": A Q&A with WWE's "Good Ol' J.R." Jim Ross
2007-03-22 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 370, 182 Memorial Drive (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
“Good Ol’ J.R.” Jim Ross
Jim Ross, the longtime voice of World Wrestling Entertainment, joins CMS graduate student Sam Ford to discuss the unique blend of reality and fiction in the world of American professional wrestling. Ross will talk about how WWE’s distribution across multiple media platforms creates an interesting storytelling atmosphere, and he will share experiences from his many years in the television industry as wrestling has moved from broadcast to cable and pay-per-view and now to DVD distribution, on-demand, and the Web. See Ross’s Web site at www.jrsbarbq.com.
NOTE: This is the first of two colloquia about American professional wrestling being organized this term by Sam Ford ’07. Ford is teaching a spring class on the pro wrestling industry and is a researcher for the Convergence Culture Consortium. He is a weekly columnist for the Ohio County Times-News in Hartford, Ky., and performs in pro wrestling events on occasion. A third colloquium on April 26 with Sharon Mazer will also examine aspects of wrestling.

Old World, New World: How Communities, Culture, Connectivity, and Commerce are Changing How We Create Culture, Media, Education and Politics
2007-03-15 17:00 | MIT Building 2, Room 105, 182 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Alan Moore
Alan Moore, CEO of engagement marketing company SMLXL and co-author of Communities Dominate Brands, believes that community-based engagement initiatives and the enabling of peer-to-peer flows of communication within organizations, and those that engage with them, will replace the traditional media orthodoxies of government, management, business, media distribution and marketing.

Girls-Games-Japan: Why it is different to be a female gamer in Japan and how we can make a change in the West.
2007-03-13 17:00 | MIT Building 14E, Room 304, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Barbara Lippe
Women’s culture has existed for centuries in Japan. Today, it extensively shapes Japan’s popular culture – even its game industry. Gender-blending, androgyny and the challenging of gender roles lie at the core of specific game genres produced by and for females in Japan. Whereas in the West most professional attempts to address a larger number of female gamers and to engage a greater female workforce in the game industry have failed, Avaloop – an independent game development studio in Austria – is about to change this profoundly. By taking the global de-disneyfication into account and employing female creative leads, its game Papermint has not only already gained a large fanbase of non-traditional gamers but even manages to blend games with the notion of bourgeois “high culture”. Papermint’s success is based on its practical realisation of Barbara’s research on Japanese gaming and girl culture, as well as the game’s wholly original artistic concept created by a diverse team.
About the Speaker
Dr. Barbara Lippe is the lead artist at the Vienna-based game development studio Avaloop Ltd, currently working on Austria's first virtual world. Barbara previously worked as a character artist at the Tokyo-based design company FuriFuri Co. Her unique characters were published in the character design encyclopedia Pictoplasma by Die Gestalten Verlag. Her art has been exhibited in London, Damascus, Budapest, Seoul, Singapore and San Francisco. She was a juror for the Golden Nica Award of the Ars Electronica Festival in 2002 and a columnist for CONSOL.AT, the leading Austrian video game magazine. Recently, she has been elected into the organising committee of the Nordic Game, the largest game developers' conference in Scandinavia. Barbara holds a Master’s degree in multimedia art and a PhD in cultural studies with a doctoral dissertation on girls, video games and Japan titled "Game Boys for Play Girls!". She hosts discussions and workshops in Austria, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK. Her academic and job-related interests include virtual characters, fan cultures, user-generated content, global youth scenes, leisure behaviour and gender, as well as game scenes and markets in Asia.
