Platforms in the Public Interest: Lessons from Minitel
2017-09-21 17:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Julien Mailland (Indiana University) and Kevin Driscoll (University of Virginia)
Platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook dominate the internet today, providing private infrastructures for public culture. These systems are so massive that it’s easy to forget that the digital world was not always like this. More than two decades before widespread Internet access, millions of people in France were already online, chatting, gaming, buying, selling, searching, and flirting. This explosion of digital culture came via Minitel, a simple video terminal provided for free to anyone with a telephone line. After thirty years in service, Minitel offers a wealth of data for thinking about internet policy and an alternative model for the internet’s future: a public platform for private innovation.
Julien Mailland studies telecommunications networks design, law, and policy through the lens of history. He is an assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University’s Media School, a research associate with the Computer History Museum Internet History Program, and a lawyer with the fintech industry.
Kevin Driscoll studies popular culture and computing. His research builds alternative models for platform governance and online community from the internet of the 1980s and 1990s. Recent projects examine dial-up BBSs in the US and Minitel in France. Kevin is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.

The Mediated Construction of Reality: from Berger and Luckmann to Norbert Elias
2017-09-28 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nick CouldryProfessor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science
In this talk Nick Couldry outlines the project of his recent book, The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity October 2016, co-written with Andreas Hepp). The book offers a critical reevaluation and rearticulation of the social constructivist ambitions of Berger and Luckmann’s 1966 book The Social Construction of Reality while radically rethinking the implications of this for a world saturated not just with digital media, but with data processes. Couldry outlines how a materialist phenomenology can draw not just on traditional phenomenology, but on the social theory of Norbert Elias, particularly his concept of figurations, to address the challenges of social analysis in the face of datafication. Elias, Couldry argues, is a particularly important theorist on whom to draw in making social constructivism ready to face the deep embedding of the social world with digital technologies, and more than that, to outline the challenges for social order of such a world. More broadly, Couldry will argue for a reengagement of media theory with the broader tradition of social theory in the era of Big Data, in the face of a radical expansion of what media are and how mediation is embedded in everyday social orders.
Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is currently a Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research Lab, and during 2017-2018 a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University. He is the author or editor of twelve books including most recently The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Ethics of Media (2013 Palgrave, coedited with Mirca Madianou and Amit Pinchevski), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics After Neoliberalism (Sage 2010).

An Evening with Sarah Vowell
2017-10-05 18:00 - 20:00 | MIT Building 26, Room 100, Access Via 60 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor for public radio’s This American Lifeand has written for Time, Esquire, GQ, Spin, Salon, McSweeneys, The Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Times.
Overthrown Hawaiian queens, religious zealots, swindlers, cranky cartographers, presidential assassins, and the people who visit their memorials on vacation are all fodder for historian and humorist Sarah Vowell. Vowell’s seven nonfiction books, many of which have topped the New York Times’ best sellers list, explore America’s not-so-squeaky-clean past and creates a framework for understanding our modern day values. Vowell brings her wit to the MIT Communications Forum for a moderated discussion with MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing director Seth Mnookin on what makes the past so funny, the connections between historical research and modern journalism, and much more.
Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor for public radio’s This American Lifeand has written for Time, Esquire, GQ, Spin, Salon, McSweeneys, The Village Voice, and the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of seven books including Assassination Vacation, Take the Cannoli, and The Partly Cloudy Patriot. She lives in New York City.
Moderator: Seth Mnookin is the director of the MIT Communications Forum and director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the “Science in Society” award from the National Association of Science Writers.

This event is sponsored by the MIT de Florez Fund for Humor and is free for the MIT community and the general public.

Ecological Criticism in the Age of the Database
2017-10-12 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sean Cubitt, Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London
The ecological principle that everything connects with everything else should be a perfect match for the network principle of contemporary digital communications. But there is a problem that comes with the arrival very large, proprietorial databases. This is partly to do with the sheer number of images and videos produced and circulated, partly to do with the form they are stored in, and partly because their dynamics share at least as much with contemporary capitalism as with the natural environment. New analytical tools for dealing with big data promise to reform classical humanities methods so we can conform our research to this new kind of object. In this paper Sean Cubitt asserts the value of anecdotal evidence against the rise of statistics, but at the same time wants to confront the difficulties in bringing about an encounter between readers (human or otherwise) and the mass image constructed by social media and search giants.
Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London and Honorary Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne. His publications includeThe Cinema Effect, Ecomedia, The Practice of Light: Genealogies of Visual Media and Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technology. Series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press, his current research is on political aesthetics, media technologies, media art history and ecocriticism.

Mapping Climate Change: Contested Futures in New York City’s Flood Zone
2017-10-19 17:00 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Liz Koslov, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT
As seas rise, coasts erode, deserts spread, and permafrost melts, climate change is altering everyday life in many places. Even with immediate, drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, sufficient warming is already “baked in” to ensure ongoing disruption. What this disruption will look like, however, depends not only on the extent of global warming and its effects but also on the way these effects and their attendant risks are measured, mapped, and managed. In this talk, we will explore how certain places come to be seen as “at risk” in anticipation of climate change, and what this way of seeing means for their inhabitants. Drawing on fieldwork over four years in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the talk will focus on the fraught development and implementation of new FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) flood maps for New York City, where hundreds of thousands of people and billions of dollars in property now lie in the high-risk flood zone.
Liz Koslov is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT and holds a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU. Her research examines the cultural, political, and social dimensions of climate change adaptation. She is currently at work on her first book, Retreat: Moving to Higher Ground in a Climate-Changed City, under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press.

Cloud Policy: Anatomy of a Regulatory Crisis
2017-10-26 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jennifer Holt, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Jennifer Holt examines the legal and cultural crises surrounding the regulation of data in “the cloud.” The complex landscape of laws and policies governing digital data are currently rife with unresolvable conflicts. The challenges of distributing and protecting digital data in a policy landscape that is simultaneously local, national, and global have created problems that often defy legal paradigms, national boundaries, and traditional geographies of control. She examines these challenges with an eye towards their shared histories with obscene phone calls, wiretapping organized crime figures, the PATRIOT Act, Facebook, and the battles over net neutrality. Ultimately, these intertwined histories of policies related to privacy, data security, and digital freedoms become most instructive when they are brought to bear on the current regulatory crisis, revealing the growing stakes for the digital futures of culture, information, and citizenship.
Jennifer Holt is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Empires of Entertainment and co-editor of Distribution Revolution; Connected Viewing; and Media Industries: History, Theory, Method. She is currently writing a monograph about the history of US digital media policies. She is also a co-founder of the Media Industries journal.

CMS Graduate Admissions Information Session
2017-11-16 11:00 - 13:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
CMS Graduate Admissions Information Session
Come meet faculty and students, learn about the program and ask questions. Light refreshments provided.
November 16, 2017
11AM-1 PM
E51-095

Can’t make it here? Participate via live stream on our YouTube channel. We’ll have a chat room open, so you can ask questions and respond as if you were in the room.

Fall 2017 Alumni Panel: Matthew Weise, Karen Schrier Shaenfield, Ainsley Sutherland, and Beyza Boyacioglu
2017-11-16 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Join us for this year’s alumni panel, when we hear from four alums of the graduate program in Comparative Media Studies as they discuss their experience at MIT and what their careers have looked like in the fields a CMS degree prepared them for. As in past years, we’ve scheduled the panel for the same day as the graduate program information session.
Panelists this time around include:
Matthew Weise, CMS ’04
Matthew Weise, ’04, a game designer and educator whose work spans industry and academia. He is the CEO of Empathy Box, a company that specializes in narrative design for games and across media. He was the Narrative Designer at Harmonix Music Systems on Fantasia: Music Evolved, the Game Design Director of the GAMBIT Game Lab at MIT, and a consultant for Warner Bros., Microsoft, PBS, The National Ballet of Spain, and others on storytelling and game design. His work, both creatively and critically, focuses on transmedia adaptation with an emphasis on the challenges of adapting cinema into video games. Matt has given lectures and workshops on film-to-game adaptation all over the world, and has published work on how franchises like Alien, James Bond, and horror cinema in general are adapted into games. Links to his writing and game design work, including his IGF nominated The Snowfield, can be found at www.matthewweise.com.

Karen Schrier, CMS ’05
Karen Schrier, ’05, an educator, innovator, and creative researcher who is always looking for collaborators and new connections. She is an Associate Professor at Marist College and Director of the Games and Emerging Media program. She also runs the Play Innovation Lab, where she researches and creates games that support learning, ethical reflection, and compassion. Her recent book, Knowledge Games, was published last year (Johns Hopkins University Press), and was covered by Forbes, New Scientist, Times Higher Education, and SiriusXM. Dr. Schrier also edits the book series, Learning, Education & Games, which is published by ETC Press (Carnegie Mellon), and she is the president of the Learning, Education & Games group of the IGDA (International Game Developers Association). She holds a doctorate from Columbia University, master’s from MIT, and a bachelor’s from Amherst College. In addition, Karen and her family (husband, cats, 5 year old and 2 year old) currently live in the Hudson Valley but are hoping to move to Pound Ridge, NY in the winter.

Ainsley Sutherland, CMS ’15
Ainsley Sutherland, ’15, a media technologist and researcher working in immersive computing and human-computer interaction design. Her project Voxhop, a tool for voice collaboration in virtual reality, is a 2017 j360 Challenge winner funded by the Knight Foundation and Google News Lab. She was a 2016 fellow at the BuzzFeed Open Lab, as well as a researcher in the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab at MIT. She has cofounded Mediate, an MIT DesignX-backed company that enables collaboration in and analysis of 3D environments. She has an M.S. from MIT in Comparative Media Studies, and a B.A. from the University of Chicago, in Economics.

Beyza Boyacioglu, CMS ’17
Beyza Boyacioglu, ’17, is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and artist. Her work has been presented at MoMA Doc Fortnight, IDFA DocLab, Morelia International Film Festival, RIDM, Anthology Film Archives amongst other venues and festivals. She has received grants and fellowships from LEF Foundation, MIT Council for the Arts, Flaherty Seminar, SALT Research and Greenhouse Seminar. She was an artist in residence at UnionDocs in 2012 where she co-directed “Toñita’s” — a documentary portrait of the last Puerto Rican social club in Williamsburg. She is currently producing a cross-platform documentary about Turkey’s gender-bending pop legend Zeki Müren. The project is comprised of a feature film “A Prince from Outer Space: Zeki Müren”, a hotline and a web experience. Currently, Boyacioglu works as a Producer at the MIT Open Documentary Lab.

Science Writing Admissions Information Session
2017-11-17 14:00 - 16:00 | MIT Building 14E, Room 304, 160 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Science Writing Admissions Information Session
Come meet faculty, learn about the program and ask questions. Light refreshments provided.
November 17, 2017
2-4PM
14E-304

Can’t make it in person? Participate via live stream on our YouTube Channel. We’ll have a chat window open, so you can participate as if you were in the room.

Has Silicon Valley Lost Its Humanity?
2017-11-30 18:00 - 20:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Silicon Valley innovations have given rise to a class of tech titans wielding immense economic and political influence, and has paved the way for a cultural shift towards individualism with historically little regard for marginalized groups left in the wake. Noam Cohen, a former New York Timestechnology columnist and author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, argues that this type of disruption often flies in the face of empathy, civility, and even democracy itself, leading to problems ranging from the rise of fake news to the growing divide between the “haves” who benefit from these technologies and everyone else. Cohen joins Northeastern University assistant professor of journalism and Wired Magazine contributing editor Jeff Howe for a moderated panel that focuses on the ethical push and pull between the drive for innovation and preserving our own humanity and moral codes.
Speakers
Noam Cohen covered the influence of the Internet on the larger culture for the New York Times, where he wrote the “Link by Link” column beginning in 2007. His first book, The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, was published in October, 2017.
Jeff Howe is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a contributing editor at Wired Magazine. He is the author of Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Businessand co-author of Whiplash, How to Survive Our Faster Future.
Sara M. Watson is a technology critic who writes and speaks about emerging issues in the intersection of technology, culture, and society. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, The Washington Post, Slate, and Motherboard. She is an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and author of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s report on the current state of technology coverage.

This event is sponsored by Radius at MIT and is free for the MIT community and the general public.

The Emotional Politics of Piracy, Or Why We Feel Intellectual Property Infringement as National Trauma
2017-12-07 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Anjali Vats, Assistant Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College and Assistant Professor of Law, Boston College Law School
Embracing the recent turns toward the study of public feelings, this talk examines the emotional politics of intellectual property “piracy.” Situating the figure of the pirate within larger narratives of Americanness, meritocracy, hard work, and postrace advanced in political speeches and media representations, it reads public feelings about the exceptional inventiveness and industriousness of US workers as context for intellectual property policy. Specifically, couching piracy as the unjust theft of the work of industrious and uniquely creative Americans fosters sentiments of pride, entitlement, resentment, and anxiety. When taken together, these public feelings transform intellectual property infringement into racialized piratical trauma, which threatens the very fabric of the nation. The everdayness and banality of piratical trauma fuels desires for intellectual property maximalism and intellectual property criminalization, which reproduce the very conditions which gave rise to the trauma.
Anjali Vats is Assistant Professor of Communication and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College and Assistant Professor of Law, by courtesy, at Boston College Law School. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Created Differences: Intellectual Properties and Racial Formation in the Making of Americans which considers how intellectual property discourses shape our understandings of race, citizenship, and the capacity to engage in valuable intellectual labor. She has published articles in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication, Culture & Critique, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Southern Communication Journal. She has also co-authored law review articles in the Duquesne Law Review and Wayne Law Review. In 2016, Professor Vats was awarded an AAUW Postdoctoral Fellowship and an Exemplary Diversity Scholar Citation from the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. Prior to teaching, she clerked for the Honorable A. William Maupin of the Supreme Court of Nevada.

India and Indianisms: Documentary Master Classes
2018-01-09 - 2018-01-23 | Open area opposite E15-320, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Anandana Kapur, Fulbright Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab
Enrollment: Unlimited: No advance sign-up
Attendance: Participants welcome at individual sessions
Come attend screenings of documentary films followed by discussions on a few things that define India today – love, innovation and spies. We will also talk about approaches to documentary filmmaking, behind the scenes choices and DIY tips for those who want to make a film of their own. Anandana Kapur is an award winning filmmaker from India whose works have screened in over 35 countries. She also teaches courses on documentary practice, gender and rights based media.
The last workshop of this screening series will showcase excerpts from works in progress. A key focus will be on how documentary aesthetics can shape conversations for change. Some of the suggestions may shape the trajectory of future works!
Ps: Bring some coffee, popcorn or a friend…or two.
Sponsor(s): Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Contact: Anandana Kapur, anandana@MIT.EDU

Much Ado About Knotting

Jan/09
Tue
03:30PM-05:00PM
outside E15-335

Are matches made in heaven or via multi-million dollar enterprises?

Jasoosni: Look who’s watching you!

Jan/16
Tue
03:30PM-05:00PM
outside E15-335

Is that a friend from a gym or an undercover spy?

The Great Indian Jugaad; Conversations

Jan/23
Tue
03:30PM-05:00PM
outside E15-335

The Great Indian Jugaad: MIT loves hacks, India adores Jugaad!
Conversations: Stories by the “Invisible” Women of Delhi

SO BAD IT'S GOOD: An Introduction to Media Analysis Through Watching Bad Media
2018-01-23 - 2018-01-25 | MIT Building 5, Room 217, 55 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Kaelan Doyle Myerscough
Enrollment: contact kaelandm@mit.edu before day you plan to attend
Limited to 20 participants
Attendance: Participants are encouraged, but not required, to attend all three sessions
What is it that makes watching so-called “trashy TV” so fun? What does it mean for a film to be “so bad it’s good?” In such a saturated media landscape, what makes us seek out and enjoy the worst of it? And what is with all of those screenings of The Room?
In this three-day course, we will watch and analyze bad media as an introduction to media studies concepts and fields. Each class will consist of a screening and an extended discussion.
Contact: Kaelan Doyle Myerscough, kaelandm@mit.edu

The Room
Tuesday, Jan 23
03:00PM-06:00PM
The Room: The Anatomy of a Good-Bad Movie. We’ll stage a screening of The Room complete with plastic spoons and a football, then talk about what makes the film so enjoyably bad, why people think this is, and the fandom that has cropped up around it.

Keeping Up with the Kardashians
Wednesday, Jan 24
03:00PM-05:00PM
Keeping Up with the Kardashians: Reality TV, social media, and “trashiness.” We’ll use the Kardashian empire to talk about how and in what contexts people watch TV and consume social media, and how the contemporary internet landscape has reshaped reality TV.
Monster Factory
Thursday, Jan 25
03:00PM-05:00PM
Monster Factory: Bad games and the art of making fun of them. What makes bad games enjoyable, and how is this different from bad film and television? We’ll watch a few works by YouTube creators to figure this out, and then get our hands dirty with character creators and make some monsters of our own.

From Augmented to Virtual Learning: Affordances of Different Mixes of Reality for Learning
2018-02-08 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Professor Eric Klopfer, Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade
Mixed realities that combine digital and real experiences are now becoming a true reality. These experiences are being delivered over smartphones as well as increasingly accessible and practical head mounted displays. This ubiquity of devices is in turn making mixed reality the next digital frontier in entertainment, education and the workplace. But what do we know about where these technologies have value? Where do they add to the learning experience? And what theories and evidence can we generate and build upon to provide a foundation for using these technologies productively for learning?
We have been working on mixed realities in education for over a decade and have started to learn about where, when and for whom they can add value. Part of this understanding stems from differentiating the wide variety of mixed realities and focusing on affordances. Landscape based augmented realities, popularized by Pokemon Go, have fundamentally different affordances than smartphone based virtual realities like Google Cardboard, which in turn are different than immersive experiences delivered by headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. The core of our work has been doing research and development to identify these affordances that match with key learning challenges, particular in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). In this talk, Eric Klopfer will draw upon our work in location-based augmented reality games, as well as work in virtual reality. In the realm of augmented reality, he will discuss a long series of design experiments through which we have learned about where these technologies play an important role in learning, primarily around socio-scientific issues. In the space of virtual reality our newest designs and experiments focus on the concept of scale, and how we can use virtual realities to teach about STEM systems at radically different scales. This talk will provide a history and overview of these experiences, including iterations of design research experiments.
Eric Klopfer is Professor and Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at MIT. Klopfer’s research focuses on the development and use of computer games and simulations for building understanding of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

ICTs for Refugees and Displaced Persons
2018-02-22 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Carleen Maitland, co-Director of the Institute for Information Policy and Associate Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University
Expanding use of information and communication technology (ICT) together with the humanitarian reform agenda are changing both the experience of being a refugee as well as humanitarian response. These forces are giving rise to the digital refugee and a new form of humanitarian operations, digital humanitarian brokerage. In this talk, Carleen Maitland presents these two concepts, evidence of their emergence and differences in the role information plays in each. The concepts emerge from a synthesis of scholarship from international law, information and organization science, GIS, computer and data science as presented in her upcoming edited volume Digital Lifeline? ICTs for Refugees and Displaced Persons. The talk culminates in an analysis of the implications of these trends for information policy as well as the research necessary to insure both technologies and policies evolve to mitigate potential harms and amplify potential benefits for refugees.
Carleen Maitland is co-Director of the Institute for Information Policy and Associate Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. Her expertise includes analyses of ICT use in international organizations, particularly those involved in fostering economic and social development as well as humanitarian relief. Her work, reported in over 100 refereed journal articles, conference proceedings, and presentations, has influenced scholarship in the fields of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), communications, information systems and human computer interaction fields. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation, USAID, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and IBM, among others. She has held several leadership positions in both the ICTD and policy communities, currently serves as Associate Editor of the open access journal Information Technology & International Development (USC Annenberg Press). Also, from 2010-2012 she served as a Program Manager in the U.S. National Science Foundation, both in the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.

The (Non)Americans: Tracking and Analyzing Russian Influence Operations on Twitter
2018-03-01 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Deen Freelon, Associate Professor, School of Media and Journalism, University of North Carolina
In late 2017, Twitter and Facebook revealed that agents backed by the Russian government had infiltrated American political conversations for years. Posing as concerned citizens from across the ideological spectrum, these agents surreptitiously spread propaganda disguised as home-grown political chatter. Two challenges, one theoretical and the other methodological, confront researchers interested in studying this campaign of information warfare. First, the fields of communication and political science offer little theoretical guidance about how to study such tactics, which are known as influence operations in military studies and dezinformatsiya in Russian and Slavic studies. Second, Twitter and Facebook removed all such propagandistic content from public view upon confirming their existence, which makes obtaining the data difficult (but not impossible). In this talk, the University of North Carolina’s Deen Freelon will explain how he and his collaborators are addressing these challenges and present key preliminary findings from their ongoing project focused on this campaign.
Deen Freelon is an associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism. His research covers two major areas of scholarship: 1) political expression through digital media and 2) data science and computational methods for analyzing large digital datasets. He has authored or co-authored more than 30 journal articles, book chapters and public reports, in addition to co-editing one scholarly book. He has served as principal investigator on grants from the Knight Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has written research-grade software to calculate intercoder reliability for content analysis (ReCal), analyze large-scale network data from social media (TSM), and collect data from Facebook (fb_scrape_public). He formerly taught at American University in Washington, D.C.

Designing for a Neurodiverse World
2018-03-01 18:00 - 20:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
The world is a neurologically diverse place, but the resources, workspaces and technologies we use often don’t reflect that. Sometimes simple changes can significantly expand accessibility to people who have neurological differences like autism, dyslexia, ADHD, or epilepsy, but designers and policymakers frequently aren’t aware of issues affecting this neurodiverse community. Rosalind Picard, director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, joins neuroscientist Ned Sahin, Empowered Brain Institute CEO Rafiq Abdus-Sabur, computer scientist Karthik Dinakar, and disability advocate Finn Gardiner to explore what it means to be non-neurotypical, barriers to inclusion, and how creators can make their work more accessible.
Rafiq Abdus-Sabur is president and CEO of The Empowered Brain Institute, a nonprofit disability advocacy and support organization for individuals with autism and their families. Rafiq is a board member for Brain Power LLC and founder of the education technology firm, Edgewise Education.
Finn Gardiner is a disability advocate and policy analyst specializing in intersectional disability justice and accessible technology. He is a research assistant at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University where his work focuses on public policies for autistic individuals.
Karthik Dinakar is a computer scientist and the founder of C3PO, or the Cambridge Computational Clinical Psychology Org, a group of interdisciplinary researchers focused on bringing together machine learning, causal inference and clinical psychology.
Moderator: Rosalind Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at MIT, co-director of the Media Lab’s Advancing Wellbeing Initiative, and faculty chair of MIT’s MindHandHeart Initiative. She co-founded the technology companies Empatica, Inc., which creates wearable sensors and analytics to improve health, and Affectiva, Inc., which delivers technology to help measure and communicate emotion.
This event is sponsored by The MindHandHeart Innovation Fund and Radius at MIT. All Communications Forum events are free and open to the general public.

The Tip of the Iceberg: Sound Studies and the Future of Afrofuturism
2018-03-08 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
andré carrington, Assistant Professor of African American Literature, Drexel University
Iconic developments in the artistic and intellectual ethos known as Afrofuturism are closely linked to music: Sun Ra’s experimental jazz, Parliament Funkadelic’s Mothership, John Akomfrah’s film Last Angel of History. What else is on the soundtrack to a livable future? How do we pursue further innovation in the human sensorium without reproducing an “audiovisual litany” that conflates rationality with the colonial gaze and isolates Black creativity to moments of sonic disruption? andré carrington’s present research on the cultural politics of race in science fiction radio drama aims to expand the repertoire of literary adaptation studies by reintegrating critical perspectives from marginal and popular sectors of the media landscape into the advancing agendas of Afrofuturism and decolonization.
andré carrington is a scholar of race, gender, and genre in Black and American cultural production. He is currently Assistant Professor of African American literature at Drexel University. His first book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minnesota, 2016) interrogates the cultural politics of race in the fantastic genres through studies of science fiction fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts.

Visual Representations of Race and Gender: Analyzing “Me” in #IfTheyGunnedMeDown on Tumblr
2018-03-15 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jenny Korn, Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society
On August, 9, 2014, unarmed Black 18-year-old teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by 28-year-old White police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. As media outlets began to cover the story, some news accounts chose an image of Brown that featured him as a high school graduate, in the traditional cap and gown, holding a diploma cover. Other news sources picked a different photo of Brown in a basketball jersey, holding his fingers up in what some termed as a “gang sign.” As a response to the media bias, Mississippi attorney C.J. Lawrence used Tumblr for online social media activism, starting the blog #IfTheyGunnedMeDown with the subtitle “Which picture would they use?” In this talk, Jenny Korn examines the answers of the Tumblr’s participants to the question: If “they” gunned “me” down, which picture would “they” use to represent “me?”
Jenny Korn is a feminist activist of color for social justice and scholar of race and gender in mass media and online communication. Korn is a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Korn has been published in Feminist Media Studies; Hashtag Publics; The International Journal of Interactive Communication Systems and Technologies; The Intersectional Internet; The Journal of Communication Inquiry; Multicultural America; Popular Communication; Harvard University’s Transition; and more. Her publications have won the Outstanding Book Chapter Award from the African American Communication and Culture Division of the National Communication Association and the Carl J. Couch Internet Research Award. Drawing on critical race theories and intersectional feminist theories, Korn explores how the Internet environment resonates user assemblages of race and gender and how online producers-consumers have constructed inventive digital representations and computer-mediated communications of identity.

Sound, the First Rule of Immersion
2018-03-20 12:00 - 13:30 | Open Doc Lab: MIT Building E15, Room 318, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Viktor Phoenix and Jean-Pascal Beaudoin, Headspace Studio
Some say sound is 50% of immersion in VR but also AR and XR. How does it translate to new platforms? How should we think of music, sound, audio and texture in immersive media productions? With its patented sound design, HeadSpace Studio has been designing sound spaces and 360 environments for the pioneering experiences of Felix&Paul.
Jean-Pascal Beaudoin is a sound director, immersive audio re-recording mixer, and music score producer based in Montreal. He is Co-founder & President, Headspace Studio and Head of Sound, Headspace Studio Montreal.
With extensive experience in the world of audio post-production and driven by a combined passion for cinematic storytelling through sound and immersive audio technology, he established himself as a key pioneer in the emerging field of 3D positional audio for cinematic 360 videos and virtual reality.
Along with long time collaborators Felix & Paul Studios, a recognized creative and technology leader in cinematic VR, he co-founded Headspace Studio, the first sound studio entirely focused on virtual reality content. In 2018, the studio expanded to Los Angeles.
With Headspace Studio, Jean-Pascal has worked with important partners on projects such as the Daytime Emmy® Award-winning Cirque du Soleil’s Inside the Box of Kurios, Jurassic World: Apatosaurus, the Primetime Emmy® Award-winning The People’s House: Inside the White House with Barack and Michelle Obama, Space Explorers, a VR series made in collaboration with NASA and SpaceX, as well as Isle of Dogs: Behind the Scenes (in VR) in collaboration with Wes Anderson to be released early 2018.
Viktor Phoenix is a creative and technical audio director with expertise in interactive audio, sound design, and 3D positional audio for immersive media and a passion for non-linear and reactive storytelling. He is Partner & Head of Sound, Headspace Studio Los Angeles.
Viktor has collaborated with talented partners at companies like MPC, Sony Pictures, The Mill, MAP Design Lab, Annapurna Pictures, With.in, The New York Times, Kite & Lightning, ETC@USC, TNT, Lionsgate, Cloudhead Games, and ThreeOneZero on a number of VR projects in recent years, including Documentary Emmy®-nominated The Click Effect, ADR1FT – winner of the 2016 award for Sound Mixing in VR from The National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers, and Insurgent – Shatter Reality VRE – nominated for Best Sound Design at the 2015 Proto Awards.
Phoenix was previously Sound Supervisor for the Sound Lab at Technicolor and held senior positions at AAA game developers Pandemic Studios, an Electronic Arts-owned developer, and Turtle Rock Studios.

Moving Broadband from Sea to Land: Internet Infrastructure and Digital Labor in Tanzania
2018-03-22 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Lisa Parks, Professor in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
As digital networks are extended across the world, new forms of labor are required to enable and sustain mediated communication. This talk addresses the need for further critical conceptualizations of the labor and resource challenges inherent in extending the global internet from urban areas to rural, low-income communities in various parts of the world. The East African country of Tanzania hosts four major undersea cable landings, suggesting that the country’s 51 million people would be well integrated within global broadband fibre optic networks. Despite Tanzanians’ close proximity to major internet gateways and the country’s innovative regulatory climate (van Gorp & Maitland, 2009), limited electrical and terrestrial telecommunication infrastructure prevents most citizens from benefitting from these cable landings. By 2014 only 15% of the population used the internet in Tanzania (Internet World Stats, 2016). This study uses ethnographic fieldwork, including site visits and interviews with workers at network facilities and data centers in Dar es Salaam and the Mara region, to investigate the material conditions undergirding these paradoxical dynamics. Building on her past research on rural connectivity in neighboring Zambia, CMS/W professor Lisa Parks‘ study will also explore how labor and resource conditions have effected an initiative called the Serengeti Broadband Network (SBN), which began in 2007 to establish broadband connectivity across 15 villages in one of Tanzania’s remote interior regions. Ultimately, the talk will draw upon this empirical research to contribute to theorizations of labor, infrastructure, and (dis)connectivity in the digital era.
Lisa Parks is a global media scholar whose research focuses on three areas: satellite technologies and media cultures; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization and surveillance. She is Principal Investigator for MIT’s Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab.

Music Fandom and the Shaping of Online Culture
2018-04-05 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Nancy Baym, Principal Researcher, Microsoft; Research Affiliate at MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
From the earliest days of networked computing, music fans were there, shaping the technologies and cultures that emerged online. By the time musicians and industry figures realized they could use the internet to reach audiences directly, those audiences had already established their presences and social norms online, putting them in unprecedented positions of power. Even widely-hailed innovators like David Bowie, Prince, and Trent Reznor were late to the game. This talk traces the intertwined histories of music fandom and online culture, unpacking the fundamental disruption and its broader implications for interacting with audiences.
Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Research Affiliate in CMS/W at MIT. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Illinois in 1994 and joined Microsoft in 2012 after 18 years as a Communication professor. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity Press), now in its second edition, Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage Press), and co-editor of Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method (Sage Press) with Annette Markham. Her bookPlaying to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection will be published in July by NYU Press. More information, most of her articles, and some of her talks are available at nancybaym.com

CMS Graduate Thesis Presentations - 2018
2018-04-06 10:30 - 17:00 | MIT Building W20, Room 491, 84 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02139
This event is free and open to the public. You are welcome to attend as many or as few presentations as you wish. Livestream available at https://www.youtube.com/MITComparativeMediaStudiesWriting.

10:30 Coffee and Conversation
11:00 Presentations by:
Claudia Lo When All You Have Is A Banhammer
The popular wisdom about internet moderation is, simply: moderators remove stuff. But there is plenty that they do that doesn’t fit in such a simple definition. Through research with large-scale Twitch esports moderators, we can see that there are social and communicative aspects to their work. From making their own moderation tools, creating new policies and developing ethical standards for moderation, what else do moderators do when all we give them is a banhammer?
Aashka Dave When to Start Freaking Out: Audience Engagement on Social Media During Disease Outbreaks
How do perceptions of risk contribute to sensationalized social media spectacles, and how might social media practices further such a practice? This thesis will explore sensationalism and gatekeeping through an examination of how news and public health organizations used social media during the most recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks.
12:30 Lunch Break
1:00 Presentations by:
Vicky Zeamer Internet Killed the Michelin Star: The Motives of Narrative and Style in Food Text Creation on Social Media
Food porn has become mainstream content on social media sites and digital streaming sites. With this comes a change in status—from expert to everyone. As a result, the role of authority figures, in particular chefs, has changed. This thesis illustrates the convergences and divergences in the creation and consumption of food texts today.
Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough Intimate Worlds: Reading for Intimate Affects in Contemporary Video Games
Leveraging affect theory and video game studies, I examine Overwatch, The Last Guardian and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for intimate affects. I read for intimacy as a way to understand how sensations of vulnerability, the loss of control and precarity can become pleasurable in contemporary video games.
Sara Rafsky The Print that Binds: Local Media, Civic Life and the Public Sphere
Aziria Rodriguez Arce Seizing the Memes of Production: Political Memes in Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican Diaspora.
Mariel Garcia Montes Youth and Privacy in the Americas
How do youth allies promote young people’s critical thinking on privacy, in informal learning contexts in the Americas? This thesis look at ways that educators and allies work to think about, critique, engage with, and circulate ideas about youth online privacy.

Vibranium Culture: Race, Gender, Technology, and History in Black Panther (#WakandaUniversity)
2018-04-12 15:00 - 16:30 | MIT Black Students’ Union Lounge (Building 50, Room 105), 142 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States

The City Talks: Storytelling at the New York Times's Metro Desk
2018-04-12 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Emily Rueb – Photo by Leslye Davis
As attention spans shrink and the representation of factual information is under scrutiny by the public, news organizations need clear, engaging storytelling that reaches readers where they are. In this talk, Emily Rueb, a reporter for The New York Times, will share insights gained in bursting boundaries of traditional storytelling for The New York Times’s Metro desk. Weaving video, audio, illustrations and text across multiple platforms, she chronicled aspects of New York’s complex but rarely seen infrastructure, like the power grid and the water system, and also its overlooked neighbors, like red-tailed hawks. Her talk will also look at what’s next for an organization that cherished its customs but has come to realize that its most important legacy values cannot survive without steady, rapid integration of new techniques.
Ms. Rueb writes and produces New York 101, a multimedia column explaining infrastructure. At the Times, she pioneered new approaches to storytelling for the breaking news blog, City Room, where she covered Hurricane Sandy and major elections, and created a niche writing about avian life. She also edited Metropolitan Diary. Her New York 101 series examined the power grid, road construction, organics recycling and the water system. Winner of an Emmy and a Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism, Rueb also has contributed to The Financial Times, BBC Scotland, Time Out Paris and Cleveland Magazine.

Republican Resistance in the Age of Trump
2018-04-12 18:00 - 20:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Stuart Stevens, Republican political consultant
Stuart Stevens believes Republicans are in a “GOP apocalypse,” and he’s mobilizing conservatives to stop it.
Stevens is a Republican political consultant who’s worked on presidential campaigns for Bob Dole and George W. Bush, served as the lead strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, and helped elect more governors and US Senators than any other GOP consultant working today. He’s also an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, starting from the earliest days of Trump’s candidacy. Stevens joins MIT Communications Forum director Seth Mnookin to discuss the future of the GOP, how Donald Trump has influenced the American political system, and predictions for the 2018 midterm and the 2020 presidential elections.
Speakers:
Stuart Stevens is a political consultant, author, and founding partner of the consultancy firm Strategic, Partners & Media. Stevens has served as a strategist and media consultant to President George W. Bush, Governor Tom Ridge, and senators Chuck Grassley, John McCain, Thad Cochran, Roger Wicker, Dick Lugar, and many others. Stevens was the lead strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.
Jennifer Nassour is the founder of Conservative Women for a Better Future, a non-profit organization dedicated to electing more conservative women in the Northeast, and former chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party. During her tenure, Republicans won the U.S. Senate seat held by Scott Brown and doubled their ranks in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
Dr. Daniel Barkhuff is president of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, a nonpartisan political action committee that supports veterans who have demonstrated integrity and rational thought as they run for positions in local, state and federal elections. Barkhuff served for 7 years as a member of Naval Special Warfare and is currently a faculty member and emergency medicine doctor at the University of Vermont.
Moderator: Seth Mnookin is the director of the MIT Communications Forum and director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy,won the “Science in Society” award from the National Association of Science Writers.

Between Participation and Control: A Long History of CCTV
2018-04-26 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Anne-Katrin Weber
Closed-circuit television (CCTV) has become synonymous with surveillance society and the widespread use of media technologies for contemporary regimes of power and control. Considered from the perspective of television’s long history, however, closed-circuit systems are multifaceted, and include, but are not limited to sorting and surveillance. During the media’s experimental phase in the 1920s and 1930s, closed-circuit systems were an essential feature of its public display, shaping its identity as a new technology for instantaneous communication. With the emergence of activist video practices in the 1970s, closed-circuit TV became a core feature for alternative experiments such as the Videofreex’ Lanesville TV, where it offered access to community-based media making. This use of CCTV as a tool for participatory media took place simultaneously with the rise of CCTV as a surveillance technology, which had been promoted under the label of “industrial television” already from the early 1950s on. Based on war-driven technological developments, industrial TV implemented televisual monitoring in industrial, educational, and military spheres decades before the global spread of surveillance cameras in public space.
This talk by Anne-Katrin Weber explores the politics of CCTV as they unfold in different institutional and ideological settings. Examining television’s history beyond broadcasting and programs, it focuses on television’s multiple applications and meanings in public space – from the early presentation of television at World’s Fairs to community-based initiatives – and thus highlights the adaptability of closed-circuit technologies, which accommodate to, and underpin variable contexts of media participation as well as of surveillance and control.
Anne-Katrin Weber is a postdoctoral fellow supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and is a visiting scholar at MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing. Her research examines the history of television outside broadcasting institutions. Currently preparing her first monograph titled Television on Display: Visual Culture and Technopolitics in Europe and the USA, 1928-1939, she is the editor of La télévision du téléphonoscope à Youtube: pour une archéologie de l’audiovision (with Mireille Berton, Antipodes, 2009) and an issue of View: Journal of European Television History and Culture (“Archaeologies of Tele-Visions and –Realities,” with Andreas Fickers, 2015).

Bunk and the History of Hoaxes with Kevin Young
2018-04-26 18:00 - 20:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 270, 33 Massachusetts Ave (Rear), Cambridge, MA, 02319, United States
Kevin Young, poetry editor for The New Yorker and director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library
The author of 11 books and poetry collections, poetry editor for The New Yorker and director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Young has spent the past six years tracing the history of news-worthy fraudulence all the way back to the 18th century. Young’s latest book Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News chronicles the racially prejudiced path that brought fake news to where it is to today. Longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award, Bunk dives into hoaxes big and small that permeate American history and the cultural attitudes that drive them. Young joins Carole Bell, an assistant professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University whose research explores the connections between media and politics, for a broad-ranging discussion on the current state and political consequences of fake news. A book signing will follow.
Speakers:
Kevin Young is poetry editor for The New Yorker, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and the author of 11 books and poetry collections including The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and Jelly Roll: A Blues, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Carole Bell is an assistant professor of Communication Studies and affiliated faculty in Political Science at Northeastern University. Bell’s teaching and research focuses on the intersections of media, politics, public opinion and public policy, with a particular focus on issues of social identity. Her first book, The Politics of Interracial Romance in American Film, is forthcoming from Routledge.
This event is sponsored by Radius at MIT. All Communications Forum events are free and open to the general public.

Ordinary Violence and Network Form: On #blacklivesmatter
2018-05-03 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Scott C. Richmond, assistant professor of cinema and digital media, University of Toronto
This talk addresses the hashtag #blacklivesmatter as a network form: a network (counter)infrastructure for the circulation and visualization of the ordinary state and quasistate violence visited upon Black bodies and populations in the United States. The University of Toronto’s Scott C. Richmond argues that #blacklivesmatter as a hashtag–but specifically neither the videos of violence and death that have circulated under it, nor the penumbra of political movements grouped under the moniker Black Lives Matter–can be productively theorized as a Black, feminist, and queer infrastructure of mourning and care on the network. In Christina Sharpe’s terms, #blacklivesmatter is a form of wake work–a digital and networked form of Black annotation that makes visible Black lives and the violence to which they are subject. It does so outside of the logics of melodrama and white identification that have organized so much of the history of figurations of Black suffering in American life. Reading with Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Nicole Fleetwood, Shaka McGlotten, Eyal Weizman, and others, Richmond argues that what is at stake in #blacklivesmatter is a Black political form that is also an emphatically network form, operating below, beyond, and to the side of what can be practiced, grasped at the level of the individual, of intention, and of representation.
Scott C. Richmond is assistant professor of cinema and digital media at the University of Toronto, where his teaching and research focus on avant-garde cinema and experimental media, film theory and media theory, and phenomenology and critical theory. His work has appeared, among other places in World Picture, Discourse, and the Journal of Visual Culture. He is coeditor, with Elizabeth Reich, of a special issue of Film Criticism entitled “New Approaches to Cinematic Identification.” His first book, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating, is published by the University of Minnesota Press. He is currently completing a second book entitled Find Each Other: On Encountering Others in Media.

Imperial Arrangements: South African Apartheid and the Force of Photography
2018-05-10 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 56, Room 114, Access via 21 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Kimberly Juanita Brown, MLK Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Mount Holyoke College
This talk by Kimberly Juanita Brown will consider the prominence of graphic photographic images during the decades of apartheid in South Africa. Specifically, she is interested in an archive of indifference that permeates the era and orchestrates the viewer’s relationship to black subjectivity. For the talk she will focus on US news media coverage of apartheid in the last year of its existence, and the images that anchored viewers’ interpretation of the event.
Kimberly Juanita Brown is Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Assistant Professor for 2017-2018, hosted by MIT Literature and MIT Women’s & Gender Studies. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Mount Holyoke College and author of The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary.
