MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies

Meredith Schweig and Rebecca Dirksen: "Taiwanese Rap and Haitian Music and Reconstruction"
2014-02-27 17:00 - 19:00 (America/New_York) | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Meredith Schweig
In this presentation, Meredith Schweig explores the gender politics and practices of the Taiwan rap scene. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with the island’s hip-hop community and invoking emergent scholarly discourses on East Asian and global masculinities, she argues that rap’s identity as men’s music renders it a productive site for exploring, unsettling, and transforming prevailing models of Taiwanese manhood. In the context of shifting gender roles driven by dramatic social, political, and economic change over the course of the last three decades in Taiwan, Schweig considers how rap has created new spaces for male sociality, avenues for male self-empowerment, and opportunities for the articulation of multiple masculine identities not otherwise audible in the island’s popular music.
Schweig is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT. Her research explores twentieth- and twenty-first-century music of East Asia, with a particular emphasis on popular song, narrativity, and cultural politics in Taiwan and China. She has received fellowships and grants from the Asian Cultural Council, Whiting Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University.

Rebecca Dirksen
In Haiti from the colonial period to the present, music has been a critical means for public dialogue when other avenues have not been possible. Mizik angaje, literally, “engaged music,” a genre-crossing expressive form featuring pointed lyrical commentary on political and social issues, has accompanied key moments in Haitian history, from the Haitian Revolution to the downfall of the Duvalier regime and subsequent rise of Aristide to power. Increasingly in recent years, mizik angaje has been re-imagined to reflect current realities: any understanding of this musical phenomenon must now go beyondexamining how ordinary Haitian citizens use musical dialogue to critique infrastructural weaknesses and abuses of authority to demonstrating how a growing number of social groups employ music as an explicit and fundamental tool for strengthening their local communities. Independent of state or NGO support, these groups are tackling non-musical neighborhood concerns by promoting social programs that simultaneously entertain music-making and community service. This leads us to ask, what happens when Haitian musicians implicate themselves in the processes of development?
Rebecca Dirksen, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completed her PhD in ethnomusicology at UCLA in 2012. Her primary research concerns music and grassroots development in Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake. Concurrent projects revolve around creative responses to crisis and disaster, intangible cultural heritage protection, cultural policy, and Haitian classical music.
This event is co-sponsored with MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Cool Japan Project.

Jonathan Sterne, "Who Tunes Whom?: Auto-Tune, the Earth, and the Politics of Frequency"
2014-02-20 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Jonathan Sterne, McGill University
Auto-tune is a ubiquitous vocal effect in popular music and the best-selling software plug-in in the short history of commercial digital audio software. When used with subtlety, auto-tune fixes slight errors or variances in pitch (usually of singers); when used more drastically, it produces a very recognizable vocal effect, “locking” a voice to a scale, or drastically altering it.
Auto-tune was developed out of reflection seismology technology, which uses sound for locating natural resources underground and beneath the ocean floor. In this paper, 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. Auto-tune effects a resource management of the voice. The obvious artifice in its most extreme forms points us back to a centuries-long project to technologize human voices through standards and tuning. While journalists and music fans may argue over auto-tune’s relationship to the authenticity of the voice, Sterne shows that it is embedded in a much broader politics of frequency.
Jonathan Sterne is a Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, and for January-May 2014 a visiting researcher in social media at Microsoft Research New England. He is author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012), The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture. He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012). His new projects consider instruments and instrumentalities; histories of signal processing; and the intersections of disability, technology and perception. Visit his website at sterneworks.org.

Miguel Sicart: "Play in the Age of Computing Machinery"
2014-02-13 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Miguel Sicart
We live in the era of computation and play. Everywhere we look, there is a computer, translating the world around us into patterns for production of labor or consumption of entertainment. And now more than ever, we play everywhere: our work should be playful, as it should be our dieting, our love life, and even our leisure. We play as much as we can, in this world of computers.
In this talk Sicart will look at the culture, aesthetics, and technological implications of play in the age of computers. He will propose a theory of play that includes the materiality of computation in its definition of the activity, and will suggest that our forms of playing with machines are both forms of surrendering to the pleasures of computation, and forms of creative resistance to the reduction of our worlds to computable events.
Miguel Sicart is a games scholar based at the IT University of Copenhagen. For the last decade his research has focused on ethics and computer games, from a philosophical and design theory perspective. He has two books published: The Ethics of Computer Games; and Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay (MIT Press 2009, 2013). His current work focuses on playful design, and will be the subject of a new book called Play Matters (MIT Press, 2014). Miguel teaches game and play design, and his research is now focused on toys, materiality, and play.

Vicki Mayer: "Where 'Home' Is: Film Production Economies and the Privatization of Space"
2014-02-06 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Vicki Mayer
Vicki Mayer is Professor of Communication at Tulane University. She has published widely on media production and producers. She is Editor of the journal Television & New Media, and she directs the digital humanities projects MediaNOLA and New Orleans Historical.
This talk will give an overview of her current research into the impacts of regional policies for film production on ordinary people’s understandings of time, space and place. This is a talk less about the economic impacts of the policies than on the social and subjective experiences of people who live in cities driven by media production economies. In particular, she will highlight the impacts of location-based film production on the ways residents in New Orleans, Louisiana, move through public space. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the state has sponsored aggressive incentives policies that have transformed the region into the third largest film economy in the United States. Using GIS mapping software and personal photography, Mayer explores the ways this publicly financed economy privatizes public space by making the local into locations, by commodifying local culture, and by increasing the stratification of wealth in the post-Katrina landscape. These images provide a textured look at the way political economies can be visualized not only geographically but also as part of the ordinary experience of everyday life in a city still and always posited as “recovering.” At the end of this talk, she presents an alternative way of mediating spatial experiences and histories through a digital humanities project that she has directed since 2008.

Jason Mittell: “Strategies of Storytelling in Transmedia Television”
2014-02-04 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
As television series have become more complex in their narrative strategies, television itself has expanded its storytelling scope across screens and platforms, complicating notions of medium-specificity at the very same time that television seems to have a more distinct narrative form. This presentation explores how television narratives have expanded and been complicated through transmedia extensions, including video games, novelizations, websites, online video, and alternate reality games. Through specific analyses of transmedia strategies for Lost, Breaking Bad, and The Simpsons, the lecture considers how transmedia storytelling grapples with issues of canonicity and audience segmentation, how transmedia reframes viewer expectations for the core television serial, and what transmedia possibilities might look like going forward.
Jason Mittell is Professor of American Studies and Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. His books include Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004), Television and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2009), How to Watch Television (co-edited with Ethan Thompson, NYU Press, 2013), and Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (forthcoming from New York University Press, online at MediaCommons Press). He maintains the blog Just TV.

Michael Curtin: “The Burdens of Official Aspiration: National Policy in the Age of Global Media”
2014-01-30 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Michael Curtin
Since the 1990s, market liberalization and new technologies have accelerated the transnational flow of media imagery, much to the delight of Western conglomerates that have expanded their operations and exports around the globe. This has, of course, raised anxieties in countries that find themselves ever more vulnerable to a flood of foreign movies and television programming. Yet Hollywood is no longer the only major exporter of audiovisual media, having been joined by thriving competitors, such as Mumbai, Lagos, and Miami. Animated by the commercial logic of “media capital,” these cities are now challenging prior geographies of creativity and cultural influence, fostering tensions about the relative roles that cities and states play in local, regional, and global cultural economies.
As these transnational media capitals have prospered, some states have fought back with policies aimed at controlling imports and fostering the creative capacity of national media institutions. This remarkable turn in media policy over the past decade is largely premised on official suppositions that popular media have become elements of political and cultural leadership both at home and abroad. Yet the question remains: Can such policies produce truly popular cultural products or will they forever bear the burdens of official aspiration? This presentation explores the implications of national cultural policy within the broader context of media globalization, providing a framework for understanding the logics of media capital and the challenges confronting national governments. It furthermore compares media industries around the world, reflecting more generally on future prospects for creativity and cultural diversity in popular film and television.
Michael Curtin is the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is also Director and co-founder of the Media Industries Project at the Carsey-Wolf Center. His books include Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV and Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders. Curtin is currently at work on Media Capital: The Cultural Geography of Globalization and is co-editor of the Chinese Journal of Communication and the International Screen Industries book series of the British Film Institute.

Gregory Heyworth: "Textual Science and the Future of the Past"
2014-01-30 14:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building 3, Room 133, 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Gregory Heyworth
Over the past decade, a quiet technological revolution has been occurring in the humanities. Great texts – the Archimedes palimpsest, the Dead Sea Scrolls among others – once largely illegible and lost to history, have been returned to us through spectral imaging. We stand now at the threshold of a renaissance of the past, but only if we can integrate science with the humanities in a new, hybrid discipline. Textual Science, as Gregory Heyworth argues, is poised to change the established order of things: the notion that the humanities is about husbanding the past with scholarship that adds to human insight in ever slenderer increments; that the canon is a coffin, the past irrevocably the past, and that scholars and students must behave as humble curators rather than archaeologists of an undiscovered country; that the artistic mind cannot, in any profound way, share neurons with the scientific. With images of recovered works, many previously unseen, this talk will chart the way ahead in theory and praxis.
Gregory Heyworth is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi, and the Director of the Lazarus Project, an initiative to recover damaged manuscripts using spectral imaging. A medievalist and expert in textual studies, he has authored several books, the most recent an edition of the second longest poem in French, the 14th century Eschéz d’Amours, a unique manuscript damaged in the bombing of Dresden and long deemed illegible. He is currently recovering and editing the oldest translation of the Gospels into Latin and writing a book on Textual Science.

Aswin Punathambekar: “Media, Sociability, and Political Potentials in Contemporary India”
2014-01-28 17:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
To suggest that there is a strong relationship between participatory culture and civic/political engagement would not come as news to anyone in India. In fact, the past decade has been marked by a number of astonishing instances of participation surrounding entertainment media intersecting with and reshaping a wider political field. Academic discussions of these events have been focused on the question: what constitutes meaningful participation? Not surprisingly, these discussions have focused on the explicitly political dimensions of these moments of participation. Instead of this narrow emphasis on political effects, Aswin Punathambekar draws on a range of cases across India, China, and the Middle East to ask: what happens when such phases of participation fade away? What are the cultural and political implications of a zone of participation that lasts a few weeks or months at best? Tracing shifts in media industry logics as well as audience participation facilitated by mobile media technologies, this presentation foregrounds the sociable and everyday dimensions of media use. Punathambekar argues that it is only when we comprehend how participatory culture and everyday life are braided together that we can meaningfully pose questions about how media can be politically productive.
Aswin Punathambekar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. He is the author of From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry (NYU Press, 2013), and co-editor of Global Bollywood (NYU Press, 2008) and Television at Large in South Asia (Routledge, 2012). He has also published articles in various anthologies and journals including Media, Culture and Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, and Popular Communication: International Journal of Media and Culture. He is currently working on two books. The first is a historical account of the development of the Indian television industry. The second, provisionally titled Mobile Publics: Media, Participation and Political Culture in Digital South Asia, examines how convergence between television and mobile media technologies is reconfiguring the meanings and performance of citizenship.

Mary Flanagan, "Humanist Inquiry Through Critical Play: Designing and Enacting our Enduring Questions"
2014-01-27 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Mary Flanagan
In this talk, Dr. Mary Flanagan reveals how games can be sources of deep human inquiry and introspection. Flanagan presents the interesting things scholars might discover by looking at games and why games can be useful tools for inquiry through a variety of methodological lenses. She will also share recent research on creating games that improve biases and stereotypes.
As a scholar interested in how human values are in play across technologies and systems, Flanagan has written more than 20 critical essays and chapters on games, empathy, gender and digital representation, art and technology, and responsible design. Her three books in English include Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press. Flanagan founded the Tiltfactor game research laboratory in 2003, where researchers study and make social games, urban games, and software in a rigorous theory/practice environment. Flanagan’s work has been supported by grants and commissions including The British Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS, and the National Science Foundation. Flanagan is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.

Global Game Jam 2014 at MIT
2014-01-24 - 2014-01-26
View full tim and location information at:
http://gamelab.mit.edu/event/global-game-jam-2014-at-mit-in-cambridge-ma/

Enrollment: advance sign-up via http://mitgamelab-ggj2014.eventbrite.com
Limited to 50 participants
Attendance: Must attend entire event (not necessarily all hours)
Fee: $17.00 for non-MIT students, free for MIT

The Global Game Jam is the world’s largest game jam event taking place around the world at physical locations, a 48-hour a hackathon focused on game development. The weekend stirs a global creative buzz in games, while at the same time exploring the process of development, be it programming, iterative design, narrative exploration or artistic expression. People with all kinds of backgrounds are welcome to participate and contribute to this global spread of game development and creativity. Make games with us!

Push Button Game Jam
2014-01-11 10:00 - 2014-01-12 00:00 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 124, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Enrollment: advance sign-up via mitgamelab-iap2014.eventbrite.com.
Full info at http://gamelab.mit.edu/event/push-button-game-jam/

Long-form Journalism: Inside The Atlantic
2013-12-05 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 66, Room 110, 25 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
September 2013 cover of The Atlantic
Some have called long-form journalism an endangered species. But ground-breaking articles requiring months of research and writing continue to appear. Why is such work important? How is it created? James Fallows and Corby Kummer of The Atlantic will chart the journey of a major feature story from conception to publication and speculate about the future of long-form writing in the digital age.
Tom Levenson, Professor of Writing at MIT, will moderate.

MIT Alumni in the Game Industry
2013-11-25 17:00 - 18:30 | MIT Building 32 (Stata Center), Room 155, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
MIT Students: Are you curious about how to get a job in the game industry as an MIT graduate? What kind of jobs can MIT prepare you for? What should you expect from your first job?
The MIT Game Lab has invited a number of local MIT alumni in the game industry to talk about their experiences entering the industry.
These alumni have experience working at large game studios (Harmonix, Blizzard, Bungie Studios), educational game studios (Muzzy Lane, Learning Games Network), and independent game studios (Fire Hose Games, MoonShot Games). Their jobs have included programming, level design, game design, sound design, music composition, and writing.
Panelists include:
Ethan Fenn
Fire Hose Games

Ethan graduated in 2004 with a double major in Courses 18 and 21M. Soon after graduating he joined the team at Harmonix, where he worked as a programmer with an audio focus on several titles, including Karaoke Revolution Party, Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, and Rock Band. After a few years at Harmonix, he met Eitan Glinert, who had recently finished his graduate work at GAMBIT and was working on starting up a new game studio, Fire Hose Games. Ethan jumped right in at the start of the studio and has been with Fire Hose since. At Fire Hose he’s worn many hats, being responsible for the composition and sound design in Slam Bolt Scrappers and Go Home Dinosaurs, as well as plenty of programming and game design.

Naomi Hinchen
Flash Programmer, Learning Games Network

Naomi Hinchen graduated Course 6-3 in 2011 and finished her MEng in 2012. While at MIT, she was on the teams for Poikilia and The Snowfield at GAMBIT (now the MIT Game Lab). Until recently, she worked at Learning Games Network, primarily on the language learning game Xenos.

Damián Isla
President, co-founder, Moonshot Games

Damián has been working on and writing about game technology for over a decade. He is president and co-founder of Moonshot Games, purveyors of fun and innovative mobile gaming fare.
Before Moonshot, Damián was AI and Gameplay engineering lead at Bungie Studios, where he was responsible for the AI for the mega-hit first-person shooters Halo 2 and Halo 3.
A leading expert in the field of Artificial Intelligence for Games, Damián has spoken on games, AI and character technology at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), at the AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE), and at Siggraph, and is a frequent speaker at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).
Before joining the industry, Damián earned a Masters Degree with the Synthetic Characters group at the M.I.T. Media Lab. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science, also from M.I.T.

Rob Stokes
Senior Level Designer, Harmonix Music Systems

Rob grew up in Marshfield, MA, before heading off to MIT for undergrad. While there, Rob earned a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering, which has proven largely useless in his career, except when doing back-of-the-envelope terminal velocity calculations for space stations falling into the gravity wells of gas giants.
After MIT, Rob attended the American Film Institute in LA, while he earned his MFA in writing. He next worked at Bungie for five years, working as a mission designer on Halo 2 and one of the design leads on Halo 3. He also led up the story development process for Halo 3 and got to do most of the early writing for missions and cinema tics.
After Bungie, Rob co-founded a small startup called Moonshot Games, where he served as Creative Director. He currently works at Harmonix Music Systems in Cambridge, despite not being able to carry a tune, bust a move, or play chopsticks.

Patrick Rodriguez
Game Designer, Muzzy Lane Software

Patrick Rodriguez graduated from MIT in 2012 with a degree in Comparative Media Studies. He now works for Muzzy Lane Software in Newburyport, MA, making educational/serious games. His most recent project is a corporate training game for a retail chain in mexico that trains employees how to talk with customers to recommend the best product for them.

Mark Sullivan
Harmonix Music Systems

Mark Sullivan has been working in the games industry for just over two years, during which time he’s been working as a gameplay programmer at Harmonix Music Systems on the 2014 title Fantasia: Music Evolved. Prior to that, he completed his undergrad in course 6 at MIT in 2010, and then his MEng in 2011. He worked as a UROP and eventually a research assistant at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab for most of his time at MIT, from Summer 2007 to Summer 2011.

Presented by the MIT Game Lab and Comparative Media Studies/Writing.

Mary Flanagan
2013-11-21 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Mary Flanagan
Mary Flanagan pushes the boundaries of medium and genre across writing, visual arts, and design to innovate in these fields with a critical play centered approach. Her groundbreaking explorations across the arts and sciences represent a novel use of methods and tools that bind research with introspective cultural production. As an artist, her collection of over 20 major works range from game-inspired systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works are exhibited internationally. As a scholar interested in how human values are in play across technologies and systems, Flanagan has written more than 20 critical essays and chapters on games, empathy, gender and digital representation, art and technology, and responsible design. Her three books in English include Critical Play (2009) with MIT Press. Flanagan founded the Tiltfactor game research laboratory in 2003, where researchers study and make social games, urban games, and software in a rigorous theory/practice environment. Flanagan’s work has been supported by grants and commissions including The British Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS, and the National Science Foundation. Flanagan is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.

Visualizing Information: ChartGirl on an Alternate Route to Understanding and Explaining Complicated Information
2013-11-14 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hilary Sargent, founder of ChartGirl.com
Hilary Sargent is the founder of ChartGirl.com, where she makes charts to describe complicated news stories. Her site was recently called one of the 50 Best Websites of 2013 by TIME Magazine and her charts have been featured by Reuters, AtlanticWire, BoingBoing, Business Insider, and others. Sargent has worked as an investigator for law firms, corporations, non-profit organizations and political campaigns.
View the MIT Campus Map for Building 4’s exact location.

Nelly Rosario: "Noble Strains: Thoughts on a Hybridized Identity"
2013-11-13 16:30 - 17:30 | Boston College, Devlin Hall, Room 101, Boston College Campus, Chestnut Hill, MA, 02467, United States
Nelly Rosario’s hybrid talk presents a mash-up of genres to explore the benefits and pitfalls of hybridity as identity in these “post-racial” times. Also read Noble Strains, Rosario’s recent blog post for the PBS Latino Americans series.

Sonia Livingstone: "The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age"
2013-11-07 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Sonia Livingstone, Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science
Sonia Livingstone is a full professor in the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is seconded to Microsoft Social Research for fall 2013 as well as being a faculty fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her talk will be based on her current book project, “The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age”, based on her ethnographic research with the MacArthur Foundation-funded Connected Learning Research Network. With a focus on young teenagers, Sonia will examine how powerful forces of social reproduction result in missed opportunities for many youth in the risk society.

Todd Harper: "Fight Like Gentlemen: The Culture of Fighting Games"
2013-10-31 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Todd Harper, Postdoctoral Associate with the MIT Game Lab
The culture of fighting games — digital games of competitive martial arts-style combat—is one of the most interesting and contentious of gamer subcultures. This talk examines the influences and norms of that community, including its spiritual and physical roots in the arcade, common gameplay practices, and how issues of ethnicity and gender collide with gamer identity in the ‘FGC’.
Todd Harper is a researcher at the MIT Game Lab with a background in mass communication and cultural studies. His current research focuses on both competitive communities and their cultural norms, as well as queer and gender representation and issues in gaming culture.

Online Information Session
2013-10-31 14:00 - 16:00, 2013-10-03 08:00 - 10:00 | cms.mit.edu

Online Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2013-10-31 14:00 - 16:00 | http://irc.lc/freenode/cmsinfo
Join us at 2pm on the 31st! (What time is that where you live?)
JOIN NOW!
RSVP is not required for online information sessions.
It may help to prepare some questions ahead of time. It’s as simple as scanning through the basic info about the graduate program: cmsw.mit.edu/education/comparative-media-studies/masters.

Coco Fusco: "A Performance Approach to Primate Politics"
2013-10-24 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Coco Fusco
New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco will consider the critical responses to the original Planet of the Apes films, focusing in particular on the interpretation of the films as critiques of American race relations during the 1960’s and ’70’s.
She will also discuss her interest in exploring the strategies used in early sci-fi cinema, the ways that films such as Planet of the Apes employed speculative fiction to generate social critique.
Moderated by Professor of Writing Junot Díaz and Associate Professor Ian Condry.

On-campus Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2013-10-24 10:00 - 15:00, 2013-09-19 10:00 - 15:00 | MIT Building E51, Room 095, 70 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
If you would like to attend an on-campus information session, please RSVP to cms-admissions@mit.edu.

Zeynep Tufekci: "The Boom-Bust Cycle of Social Media-Fueled Protests"
2013-10-17 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Zeynep Tufekci
Social media-fueled protests in many countries have surprised observers with their seemingly spontaneous, combustible power. Yet, many have fizzled out without having a strong impact on policy at the electoral and legislative levels. In this talk, Tufekci will discuss some features of such protests that may be leading to this boom and bust cycle drawing upon primary research in Gezi protests in Turkey as well as “Arab Spring”, Occupy and M15 movements.
Zeynep Tufekci is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Moderated by Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Head of MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures Ian Condry and Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.

Born Digital
2013-10-10 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
How is the generation born in the digital age different from its analog ancestors? Are those born digital likely to have different notions of privacy, community, identity itself? How do educators approach this generation to help prepare them for scholarship and for citizenship?
Speakers: John Palfrey, Head of School at Phillips Academy and author of Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives; and Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media, a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies/Writing.

Online Information Session, CMS Graduate Program
2013-10-03 08:00 - 10:00 | http://irc.lc/freenode/cmsinfo
RSVP not required for online information sessions.

Ethan Zuckerman: "Digital Cosmopolitanism and Cognitive Diversity"
2013-09-26 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Building 4, Room 231, Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and author of Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection
New media technologies have sharply increased the number of people who are able to create and disseminate content. But they may not be leading to a more diverse media environment, as tools that allow us to tailor what content we see and what we ignore are becoming more powerful and more personal. The framework of cosmopolitanism suggests a way through this challenge – by examining perspectives we are exposed to and insulated from, we may be able to design tools and approaches that help readers increase their cognitive diversity and prepare themselves to tackle transnational challenges.
Ethan Zuckerman is the Director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.
Moderated by Associate Professor Ian Condry.

Hong Qu: "Keepr: Algorithm for Extracting Entities, Eyewitnesses and Amplifiers"
2013-09-19 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Hong Qu
When a big news story breaks, Twitter goes crazy. Keepr tries to make sense of these periodic bursts by implementing natural language processing and social network analysis algorithms to surface topics, eyewitnesses, and amplifiers. A live demo will be followed by a discussion of the capabilities and limitations of computational newsgathering, along with reports of how it is being used in newsrooms.
Hong Qu is a digital toolmaker. He has led teams at YouTube and Upworthy. He enjoys building social media tools that help us better understand ourselves and the world around us.

The Phoenix Burns Out: Remembering a Boston Institution
2013-09-12 17:00 - 19:00 | MIT Media Lab, Room 633, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA, 02139, United States
Featuring essayist Anita Diamant, former staff writing Charles Pierce, music critic Lloyd Schwartz, and Phoenix editor Carly Carioli.Moderated by Seth Mnookin.
A generation of great journalists cut their teeth at alt-weeklies, and The Boston Phoenix produced some of the best of them. When the Phoenix announced it was closing last March, the city lost a powerful cultural force and a vibrant source of information.
We’ll discuss the Phoenix‘s legacy and the ways in which its loss will affect Boston.
Panelists will be author and essayist Anita Diamant, who started out answering the editor’s phone in the mid-1970s; Charles Pierce of Esquire and NPR, and a staff writer with the Phoenix in the 1980s and ’90s; poet and classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz, who won a Pulitzer Prize with the Phoenix; and Carly Carioli, who started as an intern and rose to become the paper’s editor.
Seth Mnookin will moderate.
