MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing: Recent Episodes

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Featuring a wide assortment of interviews and event archives, the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing podcast features the best of our field's critical analysis, collaborative research, and design -- all across a variety of media arts, forms, and practices.

You can learn more about us, including info about our faculty and academic programs and how to join us in person for events, at cmsw.mit.edu.

How and why, in the latter half of the twentieth century, did informatic theories of “code” developed around cybernetics and information theory take root in research settings as varied as Palo Alto family therapy, Parisian semiotics, and new-fangled cultural theories ascendant at US liberal arts colleges? Drawing on his recently published book “Code: From Information Theory to French Theory,” and primary sources from the MIT archives, this talk explores how far-flung technocratic exercises in Asian colonies and MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) inspired these varied and diverse audiences in a common dream of “learning to code.” The result is a new history of the ambitions behind the rise of “theory” in the US humanities, and the obscure ties of that endeavor to Progressive Era technocracy, US foundations, and the growing prestige of technology and engineering in 20th century life.Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a Reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media at King’s College London. An overarching theme of his research is how “cultural” and “humanistic” sciences shape—and are shaped by—digital media. His attention to cultural factors in technical systems also figured in his work as a curator, notably for the Anthropocene and Technosphere projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Duke University Press recently published his book Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (2023), based partly on archival research he undertook as a visiting PhD student at MIT around 2008.

The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy peels back the layers of the right-wing media manipulation machine to reveal why its strategies are so effective and pervasive, while also humanizing the people whose worldviews and media practices conservatism embodies. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations of two Republican groups over the course of the 2018 Virginia gubernatorial race-including the author’s firsthand experience of the 2017 Unite the Right rally, the book considers how Google algorithms, YouTube playlists, pundits, and politicians can manipulate audiences, reaffirm beliefs, and expose audiences to more extremist ideas, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.Francesca Bolla Tripodi is an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a a research affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute.

An exploration into the underlying fundamental functions, structures, and principles of rap. Open to the public, the talk was hosted at MIT on November 30, 2022.Wasalu Jaco, professionally known as Lupe Fiasco, is a Chicago-born, Grammy award-winning American rapper, record producer, entrepreneur, and community advocate. Rising to fame in 2006, following the success of his debut album Food & Liquor, Lupe has released eight acclaimed studio albums, his latest being Drill Music In Zion, released in June 2022. His efforts to propagate conscious material garnered recognition as a Henry Crown Fellow, and he is a recipient of an MLK Visiting Professorship at MIT for the 2022/2023 academic year.

Professor Heather Hendershot's opening plenary from the "Bearing Witness, Seeking Justice" conference, with initial remarks by Dean Agustín Rayo and Tracie Jones, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.Hendershot is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She studies television news, conservative media, political movements, and American film and television history. Her 2022 book is "When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America", available from the University of Chicago Press: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo183630531.html

Full title: “Between freedom & oppression: The long & ambiguous (pre)history of audiovisual in the Black experience”Featuring Chakanetsa Mavhunga, Ekene Mekwunye, Jepchumba, and Russel Hlongwane.Chakanetsa Mavhunga is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mavhunga explores international history, theory, and practice of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship, with a focus on Africa.Ekene Mekwunye is adjunct faculty at the School of Media and Communication, Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos, Nigeria, and an award-winning filmmaker, television producer-director, and photographer.Jepchumba is Founder and Creative Director of African Digital Art, a collective and creative space where digital artists seek inspiration, showcase their work, and connect with emerging artists.Russel Hlongwane is a cultural producer, curator of the arts, and creative industries consultant based in Durban, South Africa. His work bridges themes of heritage, modernity, culture, and tradition across artistic disciplines.

William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, which brings together storytellers, technologists, and scholars to experiment with new documentary.

Sam Gregory is Director of Programs, Strategy & Innovation at WITNESS, which helps people use video and technology to protect human rights; studies relationship between emergent technologies, disinformation, media manipulation, & authoritarianism.

Kelli Moore is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University who examines how media and technology produce legal and political knowledge to inform public debates on visual literacy, race, and other issues.

Video also available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-seeing-silicon-valley-mary-beth-meehan-fred-turner.

Acclaimed photographer Mary Beth Meehan and Silicon Valley historian and media scholar Fred Turner discuss their recently published and award-winning book Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America, a collaborative exploration of the culture of Silicon Valley — not the culture of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg that we see in the press, but the lives of the men and women who inhabit the Valley and make it work. If Silicon Valley is building the world’s future, Meehan and Turner argue, then we must learn to see through the tech industry’s marketing campaigns. We need to see the kind of society the tech industry is actually creating, in its own back yard.

Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Harper’s.

Mary Beth Meehan is an independent photographer, writer, and educator, who has spent more than twenty years embedding herself in communities across the United States. Beginning in her native New England, and continuing in the Midwest, the American South and in Silicon Valley, her work, which combines image, text, and large-scale public installation, stems from her belief in a collaborative process that should function in and for the communities it reflects. Co-opting the scale of celebrity and advertising, Meehan’s portrait banners activate public spaces and spark conversations among and about the people who inhabit them.

Charles North has published twelve books  of poems, three books of critical prose, and collaborations with artists and other poets. With James Schuyler, he edited the poet/painter anthologies Broadway and Broadway 2. His New and Selected Poems What It Is Like (2011) headed NPR’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, and he has received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, four Fund for Poetry Awards, and a Poets Foundation Award. He lives with his wife, the painter Paula North, in New York City.

In her 2021 book Saving the News: Why the Constitution Calls for Government Action to Preserve Freedom of Speech, our guest Martha Minow “outlines an array of reforms, including a new fairness doctrine, regulating digital platforms as public utilities, using antitrust authority to regulate the media, policing fraud, and more robust funding of public media. As she stresses, such reforms are not merely plausible ideas; they are the kinds of initiatives needed if the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press continues to hold meaning in the twenty-first century.”

Martha Minow has taught at Harvard Law School, where she also served as Dean, since 1981. In addition to Saving the News, she is author of When Should Law Forgive? (2019), In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Constitutional Landmark (2010), among many other books and articles. She is an expert in human rights and advocacy for members of racial and religious minorities and for women, children, and persons with disabilities, she also writes and teaches about digital communications, democracy, privatization, military justice, and ethnic and religious conflict.

Heather Hendershot is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and studies TV news, conservative media, political movements, and American film and television history. She is author of the forthcoming book When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America, which follows her 2016 title Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line. She has held fellowships at Vassar College, New York University, Princeton, Harvard, Radcliffe, and Stanford, and she has also been a Guggenheim fellow. Her courses emphasize the interplay between creative, political, and regulatory concerns and how those concerns affect what we see on the screen.

This talk reconsiders the role of television entertainment in American political life in the 1970s and beyond. Focusing on the situation comedy All in the Family (CBS, 1971-1979), the talk looks at a turn to politics in entertainment and a turn to entertainment in politics. In the 1970s, fictive characters, including Archie Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor) and Edith Bunker (Jean Stapleton) of All in the Family but also Hawkeye Pierce (played by Alan Alda) of MAS*H and Mary Richards (played by Mary Tyler Moore) of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, became political icons. Produced by Norman Lear, All in the Family is recognized as a watershed moment in television history. And yet, Oscar Winberg argues, the show did not just change television, it transformed American politics. Recognizing the popularity of television, politicians learned how to use (and abuse) television entertainment to win votes, to fundraise, to promote their agenda, and to push for legislation. Television entertainment in the 1970s thereby remade political life in its image, paving the way for our current moment of mediated showbiz politics.

Oscar Winberg holds a Ph.D. in History from Åbo Akademi University. He is working on a political history of television entertainment in the 1970s United States. His work focuses on mass media in modern political history and has appeared in PS: Political Science & Politics, European Journal of American Studies, and Finsk Tidskrift. He is a columnist for Hufvudstadsbladet and has written for venues such as Made by History at the Washington Post, Vasabladet, and the public broadcasting corporation in Finland.

In this talk, Jens Pohlmann compares the discourse about the regulation of social media platforms and its effect on freedom of expression in Germany and the United States. Drawing on computational methods, he analyzes the discussion about a German anti-hate speech law called the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) and the debate about a reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the United States in different media environments (IT-blogs, newspapers, social media).

Ultimately, he considers the extent to which cultural, historical, and political differences between these two liberal democracies inform the present transatlantic debate about the restriction of content online and the regulation of social media platforms, as well as potential impacts on the evolving digital public sphere.

Jens Pohlmann is a Research Associate at the Centre for Media, Communication & Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2017 and focuses his research on the internet policy discourse in Germany and the United States. His first book, The Creation of an Avant-Garde Brand: Heiner Müller’s Self-Presentation in the German Public Sphere is to be published this fall.

These six poets met as undergrads at MIT, brought together by the many things they shared: the challenges of being women in STEM, their lifelong pursuits of becoming better Muslims, and the exhaustion of drinking from the academic firehose. Through sharing their poetry, they want to foster empathy and mutual reciprocity for those who don’t often see someone like them within literary spaces. The poems they share at this reading focus on family, identity, and homeland—where they come from and how that shaped who they are now.

The evening’s readers were introduced by Indran Amirthanayagam, who produced a “world record” in 2020 publishing three poetry collections written in three different languages. He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has published twenty two poetry books, including Isleño (R.I.L. Editores), Blue Window (translated by Jennifer Rathbun) (Diálogos Books), Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks.com), The Migrant States, Coconuts on Mars, The Elephants of Reckoning (winner 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize), Uncivil War, and The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems. He edits the Beltway Poetry Quarterly (www.beltwaypoetry.com).

** Readers:

Afeefah Khazi-Syed
Aleena Shabbir
Ayse Angela Guvenilir
Maisha M. Prome
Mariam Eman Dogar
Marwa Abdulhai

In this talk, Racquel Gates presents her experience working as consulting producer on the Criterion release of Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films.

A legendary filmmaker whose unique personality is just as well-known as his body of work, Van Peebles made an indelible impact on both Black film and independent cinema. How, then, to present new insights on Van Peebles in a way that built on viewers’ existing familiarity with the filmmaker and his work while avoiding cliches and hagiography? In “Reintroducing Melvin Melvin Van Peebles,” Gates considers the history of her own research on Van Peebles’s films, and details the pleasures — and challenges — of trying to create a bridge between the worlds of academic film studies and more public facing consumer film culture.

Racquel Gates is an Associate Professor of Film and Media at Columbia University. Her research focuses on blackness and popular culture, with special attention to discourses of taste and quality. She is the author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke, 2018), and is currently working on her second book, titled Hollywood Style and the Invention of Blackness. In 2020, she was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

College radio has long been known as the weird, wacky signals on the left of the FM dial offering music that would never be mainstream. But this wasn’t always the case—and moreover, even at stations exemplifying musical adventurousness and the community potential of college signals, institutional constraints loomed. In this talk, Katherine Jewell delves into the history of WMBR at MIT from the 1960s to the 1980s to explore how this station, with a license held by an independent non-profit corporation, built a meaningful community institution despite transformations within the university, its student body and organizations, as well as regulatory changes regarding noncommercial radio and the music industry’s shifting business model. DJs debated and embraced the democratic obligations of their signal, particularly their commitment to diversity of sound. But achieving these lofty goals often proved complicated given the need to construct a program that appealed to and served many audiences in a fluctuating radio market. Despite these limits, college radio’s history can offer much to consider in considering how to pursue democratic media and community connection in the twenty-first century.

Katherine Rye Jewell, Ph.D., is a historian writing about the history of college radio, including her forthcoming book, tentatively titled Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio from University of North Carolina Press. Her research on college radio is at the center of two additional book projects currently in progress. She is the author of Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century, published by Cambridge University Press (New York) in 2017. Her work has appeared in The American Historian, the Washington Post, among other scholarly publications. A graduate of Vanderbilt University (BA, 2001) and Boston University (MA, 2005; Ph.D., 2010), she studies the business and politics of culture. She is currently Associate Professor of History at Fitchburg State University, where she received the Fitchburg State University Faculty Research Award in 2018, and a year-long visiting fellowship from the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.

David Thorburn has been a teacher of literature for 57 years, 46 of them at MIT where he is Professor of Literature and Comparative Media and Director Emeritus of the MIT Communications Forum. Generations of MIT undergraduates have taken his lecture course, “The Film Experience,” which now reaches an international audience on YouTube. He was born in Manhattan and grew up in an old farmhouse in Randolph, New Jersey. He’s written a book on Joseph Conrad and many essays and reviews on literature and media. Knots is his first book of poetry.

Podcasts are in a golden age and are being used to effectively communicate new ideas, tell compelling stories, and build highly participative communities. This presentation will explore the power of audio storytelling to connect individuals in engaged networks of collaboration. Jorge Caraballo (’22 Harvard Nieman Fellow) will draw from experience as the former Growth Editor at Radio Ambulante –Latin America’s most popular documentary podcast– and will highlight different ways in which storytelling can be the starting point of new collective identities.

Jorge Caraballo is a journalist and a 2022 Harvard Nieman fellow. Before that, he worked for four years as the Growth Editor at Radio Ambulante –the most popular documentary podcast in Spanish, and the only one in that language distributed by NPR. There he led online and offline engagement initiatives to grow the community around the podcast. He holds a master’s degree in Media Innovation at Northeastern University. He’s a Fulbright Scholar and a Google News Initiative Fellow.

Video game engines have promoted a new cultural economy for software production and have provided a common architecture for digital content creation across what were once distinct media verticals—film, television, video games and other immersive and interactive media forms that can leverage real-time 3D visualization. Game engines are the building blocks for efficient real-time visualization, and they signal quite forcefully the colonizing influence of programming. Video game engines are powering our visual futures, and engine developers that include Unity Technologies and Epic Games are rapidly iterating their products to tackle new markets, where data and visuality continue to converge. This analysis, which draws from software studies and studies of visual culture, examines a tool that is fairly new to the Epic Games arsenal—the in-development MetaHuman Creator that is part of Epic’s proprietary Unreal Engine. The MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed application that draws from a library of real scans of people and allows 3D content developers to quickly create unique photorealistic fully-rigged digital humans. MetaHuman creation is a fluid of process, and the speedy transformation of character rigs and other non-binary attributes highlights the potential queerness or openness of data. Yet the ongoing push toward (hyper)realism in commercial media has birthed a visual economy which is supported by an industrial apparatus that privileges mastery over the tools of production, and where bodies and politics are often cleaved in the design process. Epic’s multiethnic, multiracial, transgender MetaHuman Creator is a design tool and not a narrative engine. Its transitions are simple and seamless, and the traces of non-binary and non-white identities are simply part of a larger color palette. These tools represent a way of seeing and knowing the world, and the representations they produce are part of hermetically-sealed and privately-held encoding processes that include a company’s original data, its application programming, its proprietary build environment and its interface. This analysis poses two interrelated questions. Are the MetaHuman Creator and similar simplified building tools democratizing the field of digital content creation? Are they fostering more diverse representations and narratives, and supporting the free play of identity in playable media?

Eric Freedman is Professor and Dean of the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author most recently of The Persistence of Code in Game Engine Culture (2020), as well as Transient Images: Personal Media in Public Frameworks (2011). He serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Creative Media Research and the advisory board of the Communication and Media Studies Research Network.

Lynn Nottage’s 2011 satirical play By the Way, Meet Vera Stark stages the life and legacy of the fictional Vera Stark, a Black maid and struggling actress during Hollywood’s golden age. Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer prize-winning playwright and screenwriter, was inspired in part by the career of African American actress, singer, and dancer Theresa Harris. A play about Black women’s cinematic representation and social erasure, Nottage’s fabrication of film history extends beyond the staged plot to also include a digital archive documenting Vera’s celebrity and career. In this talk, Samantha N. Sheppard examines how Nottage’s play and paratexts produce a speculative fiction and archive about Black women’s media histories, staging what she calls a phantom cinema—an amalgam of real and imagined film histories that haunt, trouble, and work with and against cinema histories to creatively illuminate archival gaps in visual culture and the public imagination.

Samantha N. Sheppard is an associate professor of cinema and media studies in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. She is the author of Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen (University of California Press, 2020) and co-editor of From Madea to Media Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) and Sporting Realities: Critical Readings on the Sports Documentary (University of Nebraska Press, 2020). She has published on film and media in academic and popular venues such as Film Quarterly, The Atlantic, Flash Art International, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She was named a 2021 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Transcript and video available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-alexandra-to-design-opportunities-centering-racialized-experiences-game.

People of color have always been present in games as designers, developers, players, and critics. As Kishonna Gray further expounds, gaming is a site for “resistance, activism, and mobilization among marginalized users.” In this talk Alexandra To describes some of the game design opportunities present in centering the experiences of people of color from the beginning through the lens of 1) a design process that focuses on the creation of joyful counterspaces, 2) game design choices that embed encountering and processing racial trauma, and 3) exploring the work that players of color are actively engaging in to create custom content that represents them where it may not exist. Through these projects we can begin to articulate an agenda for racially inclusive game design.

Alexandra To is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University jointly appointed in the Art + Design (Games) department in the College of Art, Media, and Design and the Khoury College of Computer Science. Her core research interests are in studying and designing social technologies to empower people in marginalized contexts. She uses qualitative methods to gather counterstories and participatory methods to design for the future. She additionally has extensive experience leading teams of educational game designers and has designed award-winning games. She has received multiple ACM Best Paper awards and published at CHI, UIST, CSCW, CHI Play, ToDiGRA, and DIS. Alexandra is a racial justice activist, a critical race scholar, game designer. She received her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University as well as a B.S. and M.S. in Symbolic Systems with a minor in Asian American Studies from Stanford University.

In this talk, Craig Robertson provides a brief overview of the some of the themes of his recent book, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (Minnesota, 2021). He argues the emergence of the filing cabinet illustrates an important moment in the genealogy of the ascendance of modern information. He highlights a moment when information became a label for an instrumental form of knowledge, as information is connected to gendered ideas of efficiency and labor. Storing loose sheets of paper on their long edge in tabbed manila folders grouped behind tabbed guide cards made visible and tangible a conception of information as a discrete unit. Compared to pages in a bound book, loose paper in a tabbed folder presented information as something that was discrete, easy to extract, and easy to circulate: it was now possible to have information at your fingertips.

Craig Robertson is an associate professor of media studies at Northeastern University. For the last decade he has been researching and writing on the history of information and paperwork beginning with The Passport in America: The History of a Document (Oxford, 2010) His most recent book is The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information (Minnesota, 2021).

Video and transcript available: https://cms.mit.edu/video-craig-robertson-filing-cabinet-gendering-of-information-work/

Graphic novel creator Leela Corman talk's and Q&A about her graphic novels and short comics on the topics of generational and personal trauma, New York City history, Polish-Jewish life, and amateur women’s wrestling.

Corman is a painter, educator, and graphic novel creator. Her books include Unterzakhn (Schocken/Pantheon, 2012) and the short comics collection We All Wish For Deadly Force (Retrofit/Big Planet, 2016). She is currently at work on the graphic novel Victory Parade, a story about WWII, women’s wrestling, and the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Her short comics have appeared in The Believer Magazine, Tablet Magazine, Nautilus, and The Nib.

This presentation defines the phrase “transgender exigency” as a situation marked by an urgent need; in this case, the need to address the political and definitional challenges evinced by the need for transgender rights. The presentation provides evidence for substantial prejudice against transgender people, as well as the dramatic increase in transgender visibility and rights in the 2010s. The collision of prejudice and visibility has led to a series of controversies that involve “regulatory definitions” imposed by institutions or legislatures, some of which are the subject of Schiappa’s forthcoming book, The Transgender Exigency: Defining Sex & Gender in the 21st Century.

Edward Schiappa is the John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work in rhetorical theory and media studies has been published in journals in Classics, Psychology, Philosophy, English, Law, and Communication Studies. He is author of a number of books, including Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaningand Beyond Representational Correctness: Rethinking Criticism of Popular Media.

Video and transcript available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-memorial-colloquium-in-honor-of-jing-wang

Professor Jing Wang — a beloved longtime colleague, vocal supporter of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, and mentor to countless students and fellow faculty — passed away at age 71 this past July. At this Colloquium, we publicly honor her life and work, featuring brief talks by some of those who knew her best. They include:

Emma J. Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations in MIT History and the Director of Global Languages. She teaches classes in Chinese culture, Chinese migration history, Asian American history, East Asian culture, and women’s and gender studies. Teng was Wang’s close colleague in Chinese studies for two decades.

T.L. Taylor, Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and co-founder of AnyKey, an organization dedicated to diversity and inclusion in gaming. She is a qualitative sociologist whose research explores the interrelations between culture and technology in online environments. She was a colleague to Wang, working with her on various department-related issues, but mostly counted her as a dear friend.

Han Su, S.M. CMS, ’20, is Founder & CEO of Privoce, which builds tools to help netizens take better control of their data. Jing Wang served as advisor on his thesis Theory and Practice Towards a Decentralized Internet.

Tani Barlow, George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities at Rice University, who met Wang in 1986 at Duke University, where Barlow came to her first academic conference. Over the next 45 years, Wang and Barlow were close friends, sisters, comrades. “We saw each other through joy, success, battles, losses, tragedies and the tedium and labor of writing,” Barlow writes. She is the author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism (2004) and In the Event of Women (2021), as well as many edited volumes. She is the founding senior academic editor of positions: asia critique. Jing Wang was a founding member of the journal.

This talk introduces arguments and examples from Nick Thurston’s current book project, Document Practices, which explores aesthetic and political frameworks for analyzing acts of re-publishing already public documents. With case studies that range from shadow libraries to experimental videos, and ideas about “the document” which haunt the sociology of literature as much as documentary arts practice, Nick sketches out the project’s starting points and some of its key debates.

Nick Thurston is a writer and editor who makes artworks. He is the author of two experimental books, Reading the Remove of Literature (2006) and Of the Subcontract (2013), the latter of which has been translated into Dutch (2016), Spanish (2019) and German (2020). He writes regularly for the literary and arts press as well as for independent and academic publications. His most recent book is the co-edited collection Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right (2018). His recent exhibitions include shows at Transmediale (Berlin, 2018), Q21 (Vienna, 2018), MuHKA (Antwerp, 2018) and HMKV (Dortmund, 2019). He is currently Associate Professor in Fine Art at the University of Leeds, where he co-founded the Artists’ Writings & Publications Research Centre and is a fellow of the Poetry Centre.

In this talk, Victoria Cain provides a brief overview of some of the themes of her new book, Schools and Screens: A Watchful History, and a deeper dive into a few defining experiments with educational media in twentieth century US schools. Her talk will focus on the struggle of successive generations of education reformers who attempted to meet massive social and economic crises through careful instruction in media viewing and collective discussion. Cain will consider how and why these reformers came to conclude that “civic spectatorship” was essential to modern education and democratic participation, and reflect on the significance of their experiments for schools today.

Victoria Cain teaches in the Department of History at Northeastern University. She is the author of Schools and Screens: A Watchful History (MIT, 2021), as well as numerous articles and chapters on media, technology and education, and the co-author, with Karen Rader, of Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History (Chicago, 2014). Her newest project explores the history and politics of adolescent privacy.

With the proliferation of social media, internet memes have become a ubiquitous part of everyday communication. However, the power of memes cannot be fully understood without considering their role in the complex relationship between technology, space, and politics. This talk will conceptualize memes as cultural mapping tools—tools that chart out the cultural hierarchies in relation to spatial and political relations for their makers and users. Focusing on memes made by Palestinians in mixed cities, new Comparative Media Studies/Writing faculty member Sulafa Zidani will explore how memes function both in navigating the contested cultural and spatial politics and carving out space in the cultural landscape for youths’ aspirations. She concludes by discussing what we can learn from the absences in the memes, and how using memes as mapping tools can help us understand the cultural and political landscape in which meme makers operate.

As a scholar of digital culture, Sulafa Zidani writes on global creative practices in online civic engagement across geopolitical contexts and languages such as Mandarin, English, Arabic, Hebrew, and French. She has published on online culture mixing, Arab and Chinese media politics, and critical transnational pedagogy in venues such as Social Media + Society; Asian Communication Research; Media, Culture & Society; International Journal of Communication, and others. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, The Intersectional Internet II: Power, Politics and Resistance Online. Outside of the academy, Zidani is an accomplished public educator. As a facilitator for the Seachange Collective, she has led workshops on antiracism and social justice for organizations such as NowThis, Gimlet Media, The Onion, and The Writers Guild of America. Her public writing on popular culture and politics has appeared in Arabic and Anglophone publications.

Video and transcript: https://cms.mit.edu/video-sandra-rodriguez-creating-interacting-virtual-entities-vr-ai-human-experiences/

Drawing from recent creative experiences Chomsky vs Chomsky (Sundance 2021) and Future Rites (Creative XR, UK-Can Immersive Exchange, Philharmonia, IDFA DocLab Forum), Director Sandra Rodriguez (Canada) explores how artificial intelligence (AI) and human creativity meet at a crucial junction, to create compelling virtual worlds and characters that invite interaction, discovery and play. Between technology and carefully crafted storytelling, it is the human imagination that remains at the core of any immersion.

Sandra Rodriguez, Ph.D., is a creative director (interactive, VR, XR, AI), producer and a sociologist of new media technology. For the last four years, she was founder and head of the Creative Reality Lab at EyeSteelFilm (Emmy-award company based in Montreal), where she explored futures of non-fiction storytelling in VR/AR/AI. Her work as creative director and producer (DoNotTrack, DeprogrammedVR, Big Picture, ManicVR, Chomsky vs. Chomsky: First Encounter) have garnered multiple awards, including a Peabody (DoNotTrack, 2016), best immersive experience (IDFA DocLab 2016; Leipzig DokNeuland 2018, Numix 2018), best storytelling (UNVR and World Economic Forum tour 2018), and the first Golden Nica award given to a VR project at Ars Electronica (2019).

Her most recent works span from immersive dance performance, multi-user XR theater and large scale installation, but always explore the sparks that fly at the crossroads of AI, VR, and human creativity. Rodriguez is also a lecturer at the MIT CMS/W since 2017, where she leads the course HackingXR, MIT’s first course on VR and immersive media production. Her experience combines immersive know-how, award-winning productions and human-centered design.

Video and transcript: https://cms.mit.edu/video-jonathan-sterne-diminished-vocalities-on-prostheses-and-abilities/

In this talk, Jonathan Sterne provides a brief overview of some of the themes of his new book, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke, December 2021) and a deeper dive into the approach to the voice he develops therein. Impairments are usually understood as the physical or biological substrates of culturally produced disabilities, but in the book, Sterne considers them as a political and theoretical problem in their own right. Impaired voices present a particularly interesting problem. Most discussions of the voice frame it as a human faculty that is connected to self and agency, as when we say that a political group “has a voice,” or when the tone of voice is taken as expressing a speaker’s inner meaning or selfhood. But how to understand voices that are produced prosthetically? In this talk Sterne will consider his own experiments with vocal prostheses alongside projects and practices that locate voice outside the human body, and that question its connection to agency. He concludes with some reflections on the capture of voices by corporations like Otter.ai in their contract with Zoom. Bonus for those who like their talks to be “meta”: this will be a talk on Zoom that will theorize the condition of talking on Zoom.

Jonathan Sterne (sterneworks.org) teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He is author of Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke, 2021); 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) and co-editor of The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age (Minnesota, 2016). With co-author Mara Mills, he is working on Tuning Time: Histories of Sound and Speed, and he has a new project cooking on artificial intelligence and culture.

Video and transcript: https://cms.mit.edu/video-james-wynn-promotional-narratives-mars-colonization.

Given the enormous impact that colonialism has had, and continues to have, in the United States, scholars frequently look to our colonial past to understand the American present. This focus on the past, though valuable, has discouraged attention to newly emerging colonial enterprises. Perhaps one of the more conspicuous neo-colonial projects has been the push towards planting human colonies on Mars. In James Wynn’s talk, he explores one of the many problems addressed by the rhetoric of this current colonial moment: How do you persuade people to leave their indigenous communities to start new ones in a foreign and sometimes hostile place? To explore the current rhetorical solutions to this problem, Wynn assesses the strategies used by science fiction writers to help audiences imagine life and human settlement on Mars. By comparing their efforts to lure people to the red planet with the “promotional literature” created by supporters of the English colonization of North America in the early modern period, he shows that though these colonial enterprises face similar rhetorical challenges, the material-historical contexts in which they occur significantly influence the available means for addressing them.

James Wynn is Associate Professor of English and Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University. His research and teaching explore science, mathematics, and public policy from a rhetorical perspective. His first book Evolution by the Numbers (2012) examines how mathematics was argued into the study of variation, evolution, and heredity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most recent monograph Citizen Science in the Digital Age explores how the Internet and Internet-connected devices are reshaping the landscapes of argument occupied by scientists, lay persons, and governments. Currently, he is awaiting the publication of Arguing with Numbers, a collection of essays co-edited with G. Mitchell Reyes whose contributors investigate the relationship between rhetoric and mathematics. He is also working on a new book project on the rhetoric of Mars colonization.

Professor Wynn teaches classes in Rhetoric of Science, Rhetoric and Public Policy, Climate Change, Argumentation, and Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing.

Digital simulations offer learning opportunities to engage and reflect on systemic issues of racism and structural violence against communities of color. This talk examines how natural language processing tools can be used to better understand participants’ experiences within simulated environments focused on anti-racist teaching and identify changes in participants’ behavior over time. As K-12 schools increasingly reckon with our country’s long history of racist teaching practices, digital simulations may provide ways to help teachers name, re-examine, and reflect on their own practice and move toward anti-racist teaching.

Dr. Joshua Littenberg-Tobias is a Research Scientist in the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. His research focuses on measuring and supporting learning within large-scale technology-mediated environments with a focus on civic engagement and anti-racist teaching practices. He received his Ph.D. from Boston College in 2015 in educational research, measurement, and evaluation.

What is your relationship with media technologies? When we say things like “I love television,” “I hate the internet,” or “I can’t live without music, ” we implicitly answer this question without explicitly asking it. In her new book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche: A Strange Love (Routledge 2021), Dr. Charisse L’Pree (MIT SB ’03 CMS, SB ’03 Course 9) addresses the strange love that we have with communication technology – specifically over the past 150 years – and how these relationships with past mediums inform our relationships with newer technologies.

In this talk, Charisse L’Pree discusses the role of interdisciplinary research and how she has maneuvered a wide variety of methodologies, including quantitative, qualitative, critical, and applied, in order to answer life’s questions.

At Syracuse University, L’Pree teaches classes on communication and diversity to professional media students, specifically how do media affect our understanding of different social categories and how do the social categories of media producers affect the media with which we all engage. She has mentored over 50 McNair Scholars across disciplines at the University of Southern California, Loyola Marymount University, and Syracuse University since 2008 and was awarded Teacher of the Year from the Newhouse graduating class of 2017.

Video and transcript:

What are some unexplored ways that online environments can help us rethink “the archive”? How might i-doc storytelling tools expand what an archive can be as well as public engagement with history itself? This presentation explores these questions through a demonstration of the online Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project. The project is based on a collaboration with the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum, a small volunteer-led museum in a diverse former steel mill region. The digital archive highlights objects saved and donated by community residents, what those items meant to donors, and the stories told around and through these objects. The website uses a variety of online storytelling techniques to help viewers connect with the objects and the histories from which they emerge. It also highlights how the historic conflicts found in this multi-racial working-class community – including those around labor, immigration, racial, and environmental struggles – continue to resonate in the contemporary moment. The website helps diverse working-class histories come alive for viewers through both objects and the spoken word in ways that are simultaneously striking and reflective of everyday life. Presenters include creative director and i-doc pioneer Jeff Soyk and the project directors, anthropologist Chris Walley and filmmaker Chris Boebel.

Jeff Soyk is an award-winning media artist with credits as creative director and UI/UX designer on PBS Frontline’s Inheritance (2016 News & Documentary EMMY winner and Peabody-Facebook Award winner) as well as art director, UI/UX designer and architect on Hollow (2013 Peabody Award winner and News & Documentary EMMY nominee).

Christine J. Walley is a Professor of Anthropology at MIT. She is the award-winning author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Post-Industrial Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and a co-creator of a documentary film Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story (2017).

Chris Boebel is Director of Media Development at MIT Open Learning, where he oversees media production for professional education and explores the uses of media in education, including VR and interactive media. A filmmaker by training, he has produced and directed feature films, documentaries, and television. His work has been shown on many networks around the world, including PBS and the BBC, and at more than 50 film festivals, including Sundance.

https://commforum.mit.edu/blackintheivory-academias-role-in-institutional-racism-96af14c37f5f

For many Black scientists and researchers, working in academia means weathering systemic bias, micro-aggressions, and isolation. Dr. Shardé M. Davis, a communications researcher at the University of Connecticut, created #BlackInTheIvory this past summer as a platform for discussing the experiences of Black academics. Dr. Davis joins Dr. Mareena Robinson Snowden, a nuclear engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, and Dr. James Mickens, a computer scientist at Harvard University, to examine academia’s role in perpetuating institutional racism and efforts to change those systems. Tanya Ballard Brown, an editor at National Public Radio (NPR), will moderate.

Dr. Shardé M. Davis is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Connecticut and the creator of #BlackInTheIvory. Dr. Davis’s research examines the way Black women leverage communication in the sistah circle to invoke collective identity, erect and fortify the boundaries around their homeplace, and backfill the necessary resources to return to white/male dominant spaces in American society. Dr. Davis also serves as the Immediate Past Chair of the African American Communication and Culture Division (AACCD) of the National Communication Association.

Dr. James Mickens is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, where his research focuses on the performance, security, and robustness of large-scale distributed web services. Prior to his work at Harvard, Dr. Mickens spent six years at Microsoft Research where he worked in the Distributed Systems Group. He is currently on the Board of Directors at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Dr. Mareena Robinson Snowden is a senior engineer in the National Security Analysis Department at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Prior to taking on her current role at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Snowden completed fellowships at the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Nuclear Policy Program. She is the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from MIT.

Moderator: Tanya Ballard Brown is an editor at National Public Radio (NPR), where she’s worked on stories about families of shooting victims in New Orleans, the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting, and sexual assault against people with disabilities. Ballard Brown was a 2019 Nieman Foundation for Journalism Fellow where she studied how comedic journalism — the intersection of humor, satire, and journalism — can help journalists connect with their audiences and build community. Projects she has edited while at NPR and The Washington Post have been awarded Peabody, Murrow, and Gracie awards, among others.

In 2018, the United States enacted a “zero tolerance” policy which criminalized the act of seeking asylum. In June 2019, the inhumane conditions in detention camps across the border were revealed, and several weeks later the BORDERx project was established.

BORDERx: A Crisis In Graphic Detail is a comic anthology that examines the border crisis from a variety of points of view and narrative formats, featuring 70 contributors from all over the world. Proceeds from the project go to South Texas Human Rights Center. Why address the issue with comics? How did we accomplish this enormous project in months instead of years? What were the financial considerations? What are the next steps for BORDERx? How can this platform serve other social issues?

This talk will walk us through the project from origin to completion. Mauricio Cordero, the project founder, will discuss the journey with Prof. James Paradis, offering insights and examples from the work.

= About Mauricio Cordero = Mauricio Cordero has worked in the arts and underground scene since the 1980’s. He established the fanzine, CAUTION! and served as the education coordinator and program director at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (ICA). In France, he opened his own art gallery in Tours. Returning to the U.S. he served as executive director at the Revolving Museum and was also a founding co-director of Mill No. 5, an indoor Victorian streetscape.

Cordero now teaches comics primarily and is a part-time lecturer at MIT. He is currently teaching Making Comics and Sequential Art and lecturing in The Visual Story-Graphic Novel.

His work has been published in Double Nickels Forever, Dollars and Sense, MIT’s GradX Comix series and Fashion Institute of Technology’s Black Stories Matter. BORDERx: A Crisis In Graphic Detail is available at all major online retailers and through the website www.border-x.com.

Video and transcript also available: https://cms.mit.edu/video-mauricio-cordero-borderx-crisis-graphic-detail

Warning: contains spoilers and strong language.

With his 1968 debut Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero helped to inaugurate a new era of both horror film and independent cinema, and introduced the world to the zombie as we know it today: re-animated corpses, stumbling towards the living in search of flesh, a ghoulish new kind of monster that has, in the subsequent half-century, become an essential part of the world’s cultural imaginary. From that moment on, Romero would become known as the maker of zombie movies, directing 5 more films set in the Living Dead universe, an artist completely identified with that initial monstrous creation.

Romero is a complex figure in American cinema. He worked outside the normal systems of financing and distribution for most of his career, choosing to live and work in Pittsburgh, where he built an industry and a community. But while being far from Hollywood ensured that access to funding for his projects would be severely limited, and often contingent on his branding as the director of the “Dead” movies. The immense, global impact of Night of the Living Dead ensured he could have a career, but it restricted the scope and range of that career.

However, Romero’s archives paint a different picture. The University of Pittsburgh has acquired the George A. Romero Archival Collection, a massive archive that includes materials from the full span of his career, from his earliest short films to his final projects. There are drafts of genre classics like Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead that show their evolution throughout the process of pre-production, supplemented by boxes and boxes of documents detailing their production and reception. But the largest and most revelatory component of the archive is the hundreds of projects that Romero never got to make. He only made 16 features in his lifetime, but he was a hugely prolific writer, with dozens and dozens of complete screenplays and many many more proposals, treatments, and partial works.

This talk will give a brief overview of the material in the archive, focusing on what the unfilmed and unpublished projects tell us about Romero’s larger themes, with pictures and clips of work from the archive that has rarely or never before been publicly viewed, and how that work recontextualizes his genre films. It will then focus on the specific case study of his early approaches to “found footage” mockumentary horror, which he tied to multiple projects about Bigfoot and other pre-human creatures and communities, before incorporating it into his 2006 zombie movie, Diary of the Dead.

== About Adam Charles Hart ==

Adam Charles Hart is the author of Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media (Oxford UP). He has taught at Harvard University, North Carolina State University, and the University of Pittsburgh, and is currently a Visiting Researcher at the University of Pittsburgh Library. His writings on horror films and video games and on the American avant-garde cinema have appeared in Discourse, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Imaginations, Studies in the Fantastic, The New Review of Film and Television Studies, and the edited collections Gothic Cinema (Edinburgh UP) and Companion to the Horror Film (Wiley-Blackwell UP). He is currently at work on two monographs: a critical study of the work of George A. Romero and a history and theory of handheld cinematography in film, television, and video called The Living Camera: The History, Politics, and Style of Handheld Cinematography from 16mm to GoPro.

Video and transcript available at: https://cms.mit.edu/video-adam-charles-hart-living-dead-george-romero-archive.

Two-eyed seeing has been a contemporary concept by two Indigenous Mikmaq Elders in Cape Breton Canada. Through the use of Indigenous Oral Tradition, Elders Dr. Albert Marshall and Dr. Murdena Marshall have participated in many recordings of their concept and teachings. Their appearances at conferences across Canada and the United States provided many venues to share their work. In this presentation, Patricia Saulis will feature clips of the Elders speaking and provide some perspective on how their work could be brought forward in discussions of Environmental Justice and Media.

About Patricia Saulis

Patricia Saulis is Executive Director of the Maliseet Nation Conservation Council and a member of the Maliseet tribe of Indigenous people, whose lands lie along the Saint John River watershed on both sides of the US and Canadian border in Northeast Maine and Southern New Brunswick. Ms. Saulis is an experienced tribal policy administrator, environmentalist, and educational planner, and has a very extensive background working in tribal organizations on matters of social well-being, education and environmental sustainability.

In the midst of a highly fluid environment of changing political, economic, partnership, and financial circumstances, Ms. Saulis keeps the mission of restoring Wolastoq/St John Watershed in accordance with Maliseet rights and cultural stewardship squarely in her sights.

Ms. Saulis also has an impressive background in public health issues and policy surrounding First Nations communities throughout Canada. These experiences cover the breadth of important and current issues that impact Indigenous communities and represent her strong background and commitment in ensuring the betterment of not just her own Indigenous community but those of the entirety of North America.

Transcript available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-patricia-saulis-two-eyed-seeing

Lana Swartz, ’09, is joined by Aswin Punathambekar, ’03, to discuss Swartz’s new book New Money: How Payment Became Social Media (Yale University Press). New Money frames money as a media technology, one in major transition, and interrogates the consequences of those changes.

Lana Swartz is an Assistant Professor in Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia and a 2009 graduate of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies master’s program. Prior to New Money, she published Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff (MIT Press). Aswin Punathambekar is Swartz’s colleague at UVa’s Department of Media Studies, where he is an Associate Professor. He graduated from the Comparative Media Studies program in 2003 and is co-author of the upcoming (provisionally-titled) The Digital Popular: Media, Culture, and Politics in Networked India.

Video and transcript also available: https://cms.mit.edu/video-lana-swartz-new-money-how-payment-became-social-media/

Media Distortions is about the power behind producing deviant media categories. It shows the politics behind categories we take for granted such as spam and noise, and what it means to our broader understanding of, and engagement with media. The book synthesizes media theory, sound studies, STS, feminist technoscience, and software studies into a new composition to explore media power. Media Distortions argues that using sound as a conceptual framework is more useful due to its ability to cross boundaries and strategically move between multiple spaces – which is essential for multi-layered mediated spaces. The book introduces two main concepts – Processed Listening and Rhythmedia – to analyze multiplicities of mediated spaces, people and objects.

Drawing on repositories of legal, technical and archival sources, the book amplifies three stories about the construction and negotiation of the ‘deviant’ in media. The book starts in the early 20th century with Bell Telephone’s production of noise in the training of their telephone operators and their involvement with the Noise Abatement Commission in New York City. The next story jumps several decades to the early 2000s focusing on web metric standardization in the European Union and shows how the digital advertising industry constructed what is legitimate communication while illegitimizing spam. The final story focuses on the recent decade and the way Facebook constructs unwanted behaviors to engineer a sociality that produces more value. These stories show how deviant categories re-draw boundaries between human and non-human, public and private spaces, and importantly – social and antisocial.

Elinor Carmi is a researcher, journalist and ex-radio broadcaster who has a passion for technology, digital rights, and feminism. In the past 8 years she has been examining internet standards, specifically the development of the digital advertising ecosystem such as advertising networks, real-time-bidding, and web-cookies/pixels. Currently Dr. Carmi is a Research Associate at Liverpool University, UK, working on several projects: 1) “Me and My Big Data – Developing Citizens’ Data Literacies” Nuffield Foundation funded project; 2) “Being Alone Together: Developing Fake News Immunity” UKRI funded project; 3) Digital inclusion with the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). On February 2020, Carmi was invited to give evidence on digital literacy for the House of Lords’ Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies, at the British Parliament in London, UK. In addition, she has been invited by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a scientific expert to be part of the closed discussions to establish the foundations of Infodemiology. Before academia, Elinor worked in the electronic dance music industry for various labels, was a radio broadcaster and a music television editor for almost a decade. In 2013, she published a book about the Israeli Psytrance culture titled “TranceMission: The Psytrance Culture in Israel 1989-1999” (Resling Publishing). She also tweets @Elinor_Carmi.

Video and transcript available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-elinor-carmi-media-distortions/

This talk will discuss contemporary US feelings towards Syrian and Palestinian refugee resettlement and expectations for “appropriate” refugee attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. Laura Partain’s findings come out of a generalizable experimental analysis conducted with native-born US citizens in December of 2019. Putting these views into an historical context, she explains that what might immediately be perceived as unexpected experimental results are actually the logical evolution of the 20th and 21st century US racial episteme: US participants are more likely to support the resettlement of darker phenotype refugees, but hold more amicable views of lighter phenotype refugees. Moreover, participants’ association with the Christian faith identity was the most reliable predictor of anti-immigrant views. During this discussion, Laura will tie her research into ongoing conversations about nationalism and national belonging, as well as the ways in which social-expectations placed on displaces peoples can limit their access to civic, medical, and everyday resources.

Laura Partain is a Visiting Lecturer in Civic and Global Media within MIT’s CMS/W. She researches complex news and social media effects on marginalized communities’ access to socio-political, material, and medical resources. Her scholarship is located at the interstices of citizenship status and national belonging. Laura’s work uses experimental analyses to develop media interventions for prejudice reduction and focuses on the media effects of racial, religious, and ethnic identity representations. Laura has worked with communities in Syria, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, and Iran, but also works with these communities who are forcibly displaced in diaspora (i.e. refugees, asylum seekers) as well as with Arab and Muslim Americans more broadly. Her published research includes articles in the Journal of Applied Communication Research and Communication Methods and Measures, among others.

Video and transcript also available: https://cms.mit.edu/video-laura-partain-race-representation-syrian-palestinian-norwegian-refugees

Mainstream “smart” city discourse offers a technocentric, efficiency-driven utopian fantasy that elides or exacerbates many urban problems of the past and present. Significant critical literature has emerged in recent years that highlights the importance of lived experience in smart cities, wherein values of equity, quality of life, and sustainability are prioritized. This literature has focused on models that center people in the design and implementation of smart city plans. Instead of maximizing efficiency, these models strategically produce what I call meaningful inefficiencies into process and outcomes, or the intentionally designed productive lag in a system wherein users are able to explore, connect, and invent in a non-prescribed fashion. In this talk, Visiting Professor Eric Gordon will discuss a recent project in Boston, MA in collaboration with the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, called Beta Blocks, that uses meaningful inefficiency as a structuring logic for sourcing, questioning and making decisions about public realm technologies.

Eric Gordon is a visiting professor in Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT and a professor of Media Art at Emerson College, where he directs the Engagement Lab. His research focuses on the transformation of public life and governance in digital culture, and the incorporation of play into collaborative design processes. He is the editor of Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (MIT Press, 2016) and the author of Meaningful Inefficiencies: Civic Design in an Age of Digital Expediency (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Video and transcript also available: https://cms.mit.edu/video-eric-gordon-meaningful-inefficiency-smart-city.

Is there digital activism in China? What is it like to be an activist running a grassroots NGO in a land of censors? Is the state-public relationship in China antagonistic by default as our mainstream media would like us to believe? Are citizens of illiberal societies brainwashed or complicit, either imprisoned for speaking out or paralyzed by fear? This talk challenges some of the binary assumptions we make about activism and China by bringing our attention to the gray zones in China where nonconfrontational activists are building an invisible and quiet coalition to bring incremental progress to their society. Wang will talk about NGO2.0, a grassroots organization she founded in China, provide examples of nonconfrontational activism staged on Weibo and WeChat, and introduce Future Village, a design4good project that calls for multi-sectoral collaboration that NGO2.0 is building.

Jing Wang is the founder and director of MIT New Media Action Lab and serves as the Chair of the International Advisory Board for Creative Commons China. She is also the founder and secretary-general of NGO2.0, a grassroots nonprofit organization based in Beijing and Shenzhen. Her current research interests include entertainment media in China and the US, advertising and marketing, civic media and communication, social media action research, and nonprofit technology.

Video and transcript available at https://cms.mit.edu/video-jing-wang-nonconfrontational-activists-in-gray-china

In the 2000s and 2010s, education technology evangelists promised that new learning media would transform schooling and education. Then, a pandemic shut down schools all over the world, and online learning face a pivotal moment, and left a global public mostly disappointed. Instead of adaptive tutors, artificial intelligence, MOOCs or other new technologies, most learners got digital worksheets on learning management systems and ZOOM lecturers. "Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education" explores the recent history of large scale learning technologies to explain why technology provides such uneven support—useful in some contexts but not others, to some people but not others—to learners. The book concludes by examining four as-yet intractable dilemmas that learning media researchers and designers can use to identify persistent challenges in using technology to accelerate human learning.

Justin Reich is the Mitsui Career Development Professor of Comparative Media at MIT, and the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. He is the host of the TeachLab podcast, the author of the forthcoming book Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education from Harvard University Press, and the instructor for six massive open online courses on EdX and available through the MIT Open Learning Library.

With this presentation, Dr. Kishonna Gray illustrates a framework for studying the intersectional development of technological artifacts and systems and their impact on Black cultural production and social processes. Using gaming as the glue that binds this project, she puts forth intersectional tech as a framework to make sense of the visual, textual, and oral engagements of marginalized users, exploring the complexities in which they create, produce, and sustain their practices. Gaming, as a medium often outside conversations on Blackness and digital praxis, is one that is becoming more visible, viable, and legible in making sense of Black technoculture. Intersectional tech implores us to make visible the force of discursive practices that position practices within (dis)orderly social hierarchies and arrangements. The explicit formulations of the normative order are sometimes in disagreement with the concrete human condition as well as inconsistent with the consumption and production practices that constitute Black digital labor. It is, in fact, these practices that inform the theoretical underpinnings of Black performances, cultural production, exploited labor, and resistance strategies inside oppressive technological structures that Black users reside.

Video and transcript also available: https://cms.mit.edu/video-kishonna-gray-intersectional-tech-black-cultural-production-gamers-transmediated-culture/

This talk discusses the history of the American comic book industry during the 20th century. This medium has dominated the film and television landscape in recent years, and has come to define contemporary corporate transmedia production. But before moving to the center of mainstream popular culture, comic books spent half a century wielding their influence from the margins and in-between spaces of the entertainment business. Dr. Kidman argues that the best way to understand the immense influence of this relatively small business is through a political economic analysis. Specifically, she discusses industrial infrastructure—the aspects of our media environment that often lack public visibility, including distribution, copyright and contract law, and financing. These systems channeled the industry’s growth and ultimately gave the medium its shape. Accordingly, a closer look at the everyday intricacies of the business yields a very different kind of narrative about what comic books are and how they came to be. It also helps explain why comic books and comic book strategies became so central to media production in the 21st century, and why these trends are likely to persist well into the future.

Shawna Kidman is an Assistant Professor of Communication at UC San Diego where she teaches courses in media studies. Her research on the media industries has been published in Velvet Light Trap, the International Journal of Learning and Media, and the International Journal of Communication. She is the author of Comic Books Incorporated: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of Hollywood (UC Press, 2019), a history of the U.S. comic book industry’s convergence with the film and television business. Before earning her PhD in Critical Media Studies at USC, Shawna worked in the media business, including as a creative executive at DC Comics.

Computer programming is an essential skill in the 21st century and new policies and frameworks are in place for preparing students for computer science. Today, the development of new interfaces and block-programming languages, facilitates the teaching of coding and computational thinking starting in kindergarten. However, as new programming languages that are developmentally appropriate emerge, it is not enough to copy models developed for older children, which mostly grew out of traditional STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) disciplines and instructional practices. In this talk, Prof. Marina Bers will describe current research on a pedagogical approach for early childhood computer science education called “Coding as Another Language” (CAL), grounded on the principle that learning to program involves learning how to use a new language (a symbolic system of representation) for communicative and expressive functions. Due to the critical foundational role of language and literacy in the early years, the teaching of computer science can be augmented by models of literacy instruction. Case studies of young children using either the KIBO robot or the ScratchJr app, designed by Prof Bers, to illustrate the instructional practices of CAL curriculum are presented, as well as novel approaches using fMRI to explore what regions of the brain activate when coding.

Marina Umaschi Bers (tufts.edu/~mbers01) is a professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development and an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She heads the interdisciplinary Developmental Technologies research group. Her research involves the design and study of innovative learning technologies to promote children’s positive development. She also developed and serves as director of the graduate certificate program on Early Childhood Technology at Tufts University.

Prof. Bers is passionate about using the power of technology to promote positive development and learning for young children. Bers’ philosophy and theoretical approach as well as the curriculum and assessment methods can be found in her books “Coding as Playground: Programming and Computational Thinking in the Early Childhood Classroom” (Routledge, 2018); “The Official ScratchJr Book” (2015; No Starch Press); “Designing Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: From Playpen to Playground” (2012, Oxford University Press); and “Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom” (2008; Teacher’s College Press).

Prof. Bers loves teaching and in 2016 she received the Outstanding Faculty Contribution to Graduate Student Studies award at Tufts University which recognizes her mentorship.

While natural language processing affords researchers an opportunity to automatically scan millions of social media posts, there is growing concern that automated computational tools lack the ability to understand context and nuance in human communication and language. Columbia University’s Desmond Upton Patton introduces a critical systematic approach for extracting culture, context and nuance in social media data. The Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) approach considers and critiques the gap between inadequacies in natural language processing tools and differences in geographic, cultural, and age-related variance of social media use and communication. CASM utilizes a team-based approach to analysis of social media data, explicitly informed by community expertise. The team uses CASM to analyze Twitter posts from gang-involved youth in Chicago. They designed a set of experiments to evaluate the performance of a support vector machine using CASM hand-labeled posts against a distant model. They found that the CASM-informed hand-labeled data outperforms the baseline distant labels, indicating that the CASM labels capture additional dimensions of information that content-only methods lack. They then question whether this is helpful or harmful for gun violence prevention.

People often learn complex computational content most easily and deeply when they have “creative agency” – the social network, ability, skills, resources, and support to collaboratively and playfully make creative computational content in feedback-rich environments. This talk will present a lens on how we can create environments where learners are supported in developing creative agency, and how we might assess or evaluate success. Matthew Berland covers his projects in museums, computer science classrooms, after-school clubs, and universities, showing how we can use design-based research, learning analytics, and games to enable creative agency towards more equitable outcomes and better understand how, why, and when people make and learn complex computational content together.

Matthew Berland is an Associate Professor of Design, Informal, and Creative Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, spending 2019-2020 as a visiting scholar in CMS/W at MIT. In addition, he is the director of the UW Games Program and the Complex Play Lab and Affiliate Faculty in Computer Sciences, Information Studies, STS, and the Learning Sciences. He uses design-based research and learning analytics to design, create, and study learning environments that support students’ creativity in learning computational literacies, systems literacies, and computer science & engineering content.

The Amazon is burning. Coral reefs are dying. Glaciers are melting, and as Earth gets pushed to its brink, journalists who can translate the impact of climate change and hold the powerful accountable are more needed than ever. Climate reporters Kendra Pierre-Louis (New York Times) and Lisa Song (ProPublica) head to the MIT Communications Forum to discuss the media’s role in illuminating environmental issues, promoting environmental justice and ethics, and the future of climate journalism. Beth Daley, Editor and General Manager for The Conversation, will moderate.

An important part of the work done at the The Education Arcade is based on a process of Design Based Research (DBR). In DBR, we design products that are meant to fill real classroom needs and then iteratively test and refine them. Eric Klopfer and The Education Arcade are currently working on a set of “Participatory Simulations”: mobile collaborative systems-based games.

During this talk, attendees got a chance to play a couple of these games and participate in a design discussion with one of the games that is currently in progress.

Professor Klopfer, currently Head of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, is Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at MIT. He is also a co-faculty director for MIT’s J-WEL World Education Lab.

In June of 2018, following a campaign initiated by activist employees within the company, Google announced its intention not to renew a US Defense Department contract for Project Maven, an initiative to automate the identification of military targets based on drone video footage. Defendants of the program argued that that it would increase the efficiency and effectiveness of US drone operations, not least by enabling more accurate recognition of those who are the program’s legitimate targets and, by implication, sparing the lives of noncombatants. But this promise begs a more fundamental question: What relations of reciprocal familiarity does recognition presuppose? And in the absence of those relations, what schemas of categorization inform our readings of the Other? The focus of a growing body of scholarship, this question haunts not only US military operations but an expanding array of technologies of social sorting. Understood as apparatuses of recognition (Barad 2007: 171), Project Maven and the US program of targeted killing are implicated in perpetuating the very architectures of enmity that they take as their necessitating conditions. Taking any apparatus for the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force as problematic, this talk joins a growing body of scholarship on the technopolitical logics that underpin an increasingly violent landscape of institutions, infrastructures and actions, promising protection to some but arguably contributing to our collective insecurity. Lucy Suchman’s concern is with the asymmetric distributions of sociotechnologies of (in)security, their deadly and injurious effects, and the legal, ethical, and moral questions that haunt their operations. She closes with some thoughts on how we might interrupt the workings of these apparatuses, in the service of wider movements for social justice.

Lucy Suchman is a Professor of Anthropology of Science and Technology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, in the United Kingdom.

Co-Creation is picking up steam as a claim, aspiration, and buzz-word du jour. But what is and why does it matter? Drawing on a just-released field study, Collective Wisdom, this session addresses those questions and explore the method’s implications for just and equitable creation. It considers co-creation in the arts with communities, across disciplines and organizations, and with non-humans (both biological and AI systems), calling out precedents and best practices in a broad array of communities, including historically marginalized groups. What are the trends, opportunities, and challenges bound up in co-creation and its various deployments, and why it is increasingly urgent in our time?

William Uricchio is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he is also founder and Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio. He, together with Katerina Cizek, authored Collective Wisdom — a field study on co-creation. His current research considers co-creation, documentary, and the epistemological crisis that characterizes our time.

Vivek Bald, Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media, reads from a new essay that uses a teenage encounter with police and the justice system to explore questions of immigrant acceptability, racialization, and the South Asians American embrace of model minority status. He also provides an update on his documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem, recently funded by the PBS-affiliated Center for Asian American Media, and currently being edited by Comparative Media Studies master’s alum, Beyza Boyacioglu. Between the essay and film, Bald reflects on South Asian American experiences of multi-racial identity and histories of cross-racial community-making.

Bald is a scholar, writer, and documentary filmmaker whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013), and co-editor, with Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery of The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power (NYU Press, 2013).

Around the world, citizens are saying the system is broken. If it’s education and schools one day, it’s healthcare the next. Our trust in politics and public institutions is falling globally, and our confidence in the ability to solve problems around us is teetering.

Can entertainment and pop culture be a way out? Can films, television shows, and digital content become spaces to teach us how to fix our systems? Can we create influential media that changes how we talk about identity, social justice, public institutions, and citizen power?

In this talk, Anushka Shah, founder of the production house Civic Studios and the Civic Entertainment project at the MIT Media Lab, explores how entertainment can provide alternate narratives of citizen participation.

Shah’s Civic Entertainment project explores the intersection of civic participation with film, television, radio, theatre and digital entertainment. The project focuses on researching the media effects of fiction towards thought and behavior change, explores how methods of social change available to citizens can be best represented in entertainment media, and investigates the representation of protest and activism in current popular culture.

Her production firm Civic Studios focuses on creating such civic entertainment content for Indian audiences. The aim of the content is to empower audiences by addressing the lack of trust in public institutions, knowledge of government and democratic systems, and increasing self-efficacy to participate in change as a citizen.

Originally from Mumbai, India, Anushka divides her time between Mumbai, Boston, and Chicago. She has a background in applied statistics and digital text analysis, and has also previously worked with non-profits and political parties in India.

At this week’s colloquium, Helen Elaine Lee reads from the manuscript of her novel, Pomegranate, about a recovering addict who is getting out of prison and trying to stay clean, regain custody of her children, and choose life. Professor Lee, who teaches writing in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, is also Director of MIT’s Program in Women’s & Gender Studies. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. Her first novel, The Serpent’s Gift, was published by Atheneum and her second novel, Water Marked, was published by Scribner. Her short story “Blood Knot” appeared in the spring 2017 issue of Ploughshares and the story “Lesser Crimes” appeared in the Winter 2016 issue of Callaloo. She recently finished The Unlocked Room, a novel about a group of people who are incarcerated in two neighboring U.S. prisons and the woman who comes to teach them poetry as she searches for her lost brother.

Computer programming is a general-purpose way of using computation. It can be instrumental (oriented toward a predefined end, as with the development of well-specified apps and Web services) or exploratory (used for artistic work and intellectual inquiry). Professor Nick Monfort’s emphasis in this talk, as in his own work, is on exploratory programming, that type of programming which can be used as part of a creative or scholarly methodology. He says a bit about his own work but uses much of the discussion to survey how many other poet/programmers, artist/programmers, and scholar/programmers are creating radical new work and uncovering new insights.

Nick Montfort is Professor of Digital Media at Comparative Media Studies/Writing. He develops computational poetry and art and has participated in dozens of literary and academic collaborations. Recent books include The Future and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities (MIT Press) and several books of computational poetry: Hard West Turn, The Truelist, #!, the collaboration 2×6, and Autopia. He has worked to contribute to platform studies, critical code studies, and electronic literature.

While the appeal of games may be universal and satisfy our innate desire to play, the powerful dynamics that govern our behavior within games is even more interesting than the play itself. Can we broaden our understanding of play mechanisms by applying the subliminal mechanics of play beyond games? In this episode, Christopher Weaver, Founder of Bethesda Softworks and who teaches engineering and computational media respectively at MIT and Wesleyan, explores these important issues in a lecture entitled “Amplius Ludo, Beyond the Horizon”. Prof. Weaver discusses how games work and why they are such potent tools in areas as disparate as military simulation, childhood education, and medicine.

Christopher Weaver is Research Scientist and Lecturer, MIT Comparative Media Studies, Visiting Scientist and Lecturer, MIT Microphotonics Center and Distinguished Professor of Computational Media at Wesleyan University.

Weaver received his SM from MIT and was the initial Daltry Scholar at Wesleyan University, where he earned dual Masters Degrees in Japanese and Computer Science and a CAS Doctoral Degree in Japanese and Physics. The former Director of Technology Forecasting for ABC and Chief Engineer to the Subcommittee on Communications for the US Congress, Weaver founded Bethesda Softworks, and developed a physics-based, realtime sports engine used to create the original John Madden Football for Electronic Arts. Bethesda is well known for The Elder Scrolls role-playing series of which Skyrim was the latest major installment. An adviser to both government and industry, Weaver holds patents in interactive media, security, and telecommunications engineering.

In 1998, MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program held the first Media in Transition (MiT) conference and inaugurated a related book series. Research from that first MiT conference appeared in Democracy and New Media, Jenkins & Thorburn, eds., (MIT Press, 2003). Now, twenty years later, we are organizing the 10th iteration of the event. Much has changed over these two decades, but the theme “democracy and digital media” is as urgent as ever. Twenty years ago there was no Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix. iPhones and Samsung Galaxies had not yet hit the shelves. And Siri and Alexa were still in development. Since 1998, media have undergone major transition. We have witnessed a shift from Napster to Spotify, from Web 1.0 to 2.0, from CU-SeeMe to Twitch TV, and beyond. We have experienced the rise of social media, civic media, algorithmic cultures, and have seen ever greater concentration of media ownership. The events of 9/11 catalyzed intensified state surveillance and privatized security using various media technologies. Undergirding these shifts have been major transformations in global media infrastructure, the platformization of the Internet, and the ubiquity of the mobile phone.

In the US, we also have seen changes in the news ecosystem with the likes of ProPublica and community engagement journalism. At the same time, public trust in media has dropped from 55% in 1998 to 32% in 2016, according to a Pew report. For better and worse, a growth of interest in media ritual and a decline in the more familiar transmission paradigm is underway. Given such changes, concepts of participation, trust, and democracy are increasingly fraught and have been powerfully repositioned. How will our news media look and sound in the next decade? What can we learn from news media of the past? What can international perspectives reveal about the variability and plasticity of media landscapes? How are non-traditional sources of learning, knowledge production, and participation reshaping civic spheres?

We are interested in how these issues play out across media, whether as represented in television series and films, or enacted in rule set and player interactions in games, or enabled in community media, music, social media, and talk radio. We welcome research that considers these issues in public media and commercial media, with individual users and collective stakeholders, across media infrastructures and media texts, and embedded in various historical eras or cultural settings.

In 1998, MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program held the first Media in Transition (MiT) conference and inaugurated a related book series. Research from that first MiT conference appeared in Democracy and New Media, Jenkins & Thorburn, eds., (MIT Press, 2003). Now, twenty years later, we are organizing the 10th iteration of the event. Much has changed over these two decades, but the theme “democracy and digital media” is as urgent as ever. Twenty years ago there was no Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix. iPhones and Samsung Galaxies had not yet hit the shelves. And Siri and Alexa were still in development. Since 1998, media have undergone major transition. We have witnessed a shift from Napster to Spotify, from Web 1.0 to 2.0, from CU-SeeMe to Twitch TV, and beyond. We have experienced the rise of social media, civic media, algorithmic cultures, and have seen ever greater concentration of media ownership. The events of 9/11 catalyzed intensified state surveillance and privatized security using various media technologies. Undergirding these shifts have been major transformations in global media infrastructure, the platformization of the Internet, and the ubiquity of the mobile phone.

In the US, we also have seen changes in the news ecosystem with the likes of ProPublica and community engagement journalism. At the same time, public trust in media has dropped from 55% in 1998 to 32% in 2016, according to a Pew report. For better and worse, a growth of interest in media ritual and a decline in the more familiar transmission paradigm is underway. Given such changes, concepts of participation, trust, and democracy are increasingly fraught and have been powerfully repositioned. How will our news media look and sound in the next decade? What can we learn from news media of the past? What can international perspectives reveal about the variability and plasticity of media landscapes? How are non-traditional sources of learning, knowledge production, and participation reshaping civic spheres?

We are interested in how these issues play out across media, whether as represented in television series and films, or enacted in rule set and player interactions in games, or enabled in community media, music, social media, and talk radio. We welcome research that considers these issues in public media and commercial media, with individual users and collective stakeholders, across media infrastructures and media texts, and embedded in various historical eras or cultural settings.

Plenary 1: Culture Industries by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hosted with MIT Arts, Culture, and Technology and The Boston Cinema/Media Seminar.

Introduction by Lisa Parks, Professor, CMS/W

Haidee Wasson’s talk will explore the long and vibrant place of portable film devices in the history of small media, repositioning the ‘movie theatre’ as the singular or even central figuration of film presentation and viewing. From its earliest days, film was – in a sense – born portable. Yet, our attention to and affection for the movie theater has obscured our view to the parallel and paradigmatic development of a far more numerous and arguably more significant development: the international, post-war proliferation of portable projectors. These small devices were used widely and for a sizable range of purposes: political, industrial, artistic, cultural. They fundamentally changed the conditions in which films could be seen — and ultimately imagined — as complex projected, often interactive and highly applied, forms. Drawn from a book-length study, this paper will highlight the productivity of “portability” as a concept and practice for opening up our understanding of film history as media history, identifying key insights that expand our understanding of what cinema has long been, a highly iterative media form.

Haidee Wasson is Professor of Film and Media in the School of Cinema, Concordia University, Montreal. She is author or editor of four books, including the award-winning Museum Movies, Inventing Film Studies (with Lee Grieveson) Useful Cinema (with Charles Acland) and Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex (with Lee Grieveson). She is the founder of Fieldnotes, an oral history project on the history of film and media studies, and the recent recipient of the Distinguished Service Award, Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her current research investigates the design and expansive use of film projectors by industrial, military and government sectors, exploring the transformation of cinema from an entertainment machine into a highly diversified display and performance device.

Introduction by Amy Rosenblum Martín, Independent Curator and Educator, Guggenheim

DIS (est. 2010) is a New York-based collective composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro. Its cultural interventions are manifest across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific museum and gallery exhibitions to ongoing online projects.

In 2018 the collective transitioned platforms from an online magazine, dismagazine.com, to a video streaming edutainment platform, dis.art, narrowing in on the future of education and entertainment.

DIS Magazine (2010-2017); DISimages (2013), DISown (2014), Curators of the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, The Present in Drag (2016); DIS.art (2018–); Exhibited and organized shows at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg; Baltimore Museum of Art; and Project Native Informant, London. DIS has also been included in group exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Museum of Modern Art, and the New Museum all in New York; and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; ICA Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, among others.

The material presented by DIS today is the result of a change in attitude towards the present and aims to meet the demands of contemporary social, political, and economic complexity at eye level.

Introducer Amy Rosenblum Martín is a bilingual (English/Spanish) curator of contemporary art, committed to equity and community engagement. Formerly a staff curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (when it was MAM) and The Bronx Museum, she has also organized exhibitions, written and/or lectured independently for la Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, MoMA, The Metropolitan, MACBA in Barcelona, the Reina Sofía, and Kunsthaus Bregenz as well as the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum. Her 20 years of interdepartmental museum work include 10 years at the Guggenheim. Rosenblum Martín’s expertise is in Latin America, focusing on transhistorical connections among Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Caracas, Havana, Miami, and New York.

She has worked with Janine Antoni, Lothar Baumgarten, Guy Ben-Ner, Janet Cardiff, Eloísa Cartonera, Consuelo Castañeda, Lygia Clark, Willie Cole, Jeannette Ehlers, Teresita Fernández, Naomi Fisher, Marlon Griffith, Lucio Fontana, Dara Friedman, Luis Gispert, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Adler Guerrier, Ann Hamilton, Quisqueya Henríquez, Leslie Hewitt, Nadia Huggins, Deborah Jack, Seydou Keita, Gyula Kosice, Matthieu Laurette, Miguel Luciano, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ana Mendieta, Antoni Miralda, Marisa Morán Jahn, Glexis Novoa, Hélio Oiticica, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Manuel Piña, Miguel Angel Ríos, Bert Rodriguez, Marco Roso, Nancy Rubins, George Sánchez-Calderón, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Tomás Saraceno, Karin Schneider, Regina Silveira, Lorna Simpson, Valeska Soares, Javier Tellez, Joaquín Torres García, and Fred Wilson, among many other remarkable artists.

The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 film that poetically captures Algerian resistance to French colonial occupation, is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time, having influenced leftist and anti-colonial struggles from the Palestine Liberation Organization, to the Black Panther Party and the Irish Republican Army amongst others. But the film is more relevant and urgent than ever in the current “War on Terror” – having been screened by the Pentagon in 2003 and taught in Army war colleges as a blueprint for U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine. This talk will examine the film as a “ghost archive” of competing narratives, a battleground over the meaning and memory of decolonization and Western power, and a site for challenging the current imperial consensus. As the “War on Terror” expands and the threat of the Muslim looms, the films’ afterlives reveal it to be more than an artifact of the past but rather a prophetic testament to the present and a cautionary tale of an imperial future, as perpetual war has been declared on permanent unrest.

Co-Sponsored by Global Studies & Languages’ French Program.

=About Sohail Daulatzai=

Sohail Daulatzai’s is the founder of Razor Step, an L.A. based media lab. His work includes scholarship, essay, short film/video/installation and the curatorial. He is the author and co/editor of several books, including of Fifty Years of “The Battle of Algiers”: Past as Prologue; Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America; With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism and Empire; Return of the Mecca: The Art of Islam and Hip-Hop; and Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic. He is the curator of the celebrated exhibit Return of the Mecca: The Art of Islam and Hip-Hop and Histories Absolved: Revolutionary Cuban Poster Art and the Muslim International. His video/installation work includes short film essay pieces with Yasiin Bey, a ciné-geography with Zack de la Rocha, as well as an installation piece entitled cas·bah /ˈkazˌbä/noun, 1. A place of confinement for the natives, yet reclaimed. He wrote liner notes for the Sony Legacy Recordings Release of the 20th Anniversary Deluxe Box Set of Rage Against the Machine’s self titled debut album, the liner notes for the DVD release of Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme, the centerpiece in the museum catalog Movement: Hip-Hop in L.A., 1980’s – Now, as well as an essay in iconic photographer Jamel Shabazz’s retrospective Pieces of a Man. His other writings have appeared in Artbound, The Nation, Counterpunch, Al Jazeera, Souls, and Wax Poetics, amongst others. He teaches in Film and Media Studies, African American Studies, and Global Middle East Studies at the University of California, Irvine. More of his work can be found at openedveins.com.

Comedienne Cameron Esposito delights audiences with a short comedy set followed by Q&A about Rape Jokes, her standup comedy special about sexual assault from a survivor’s perspective.

Cameron Esposito is a nationally headlining comic who has garnered glowing praise from The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Variety, and The Guardian. She’s also a sexual assault survivor. In 2018, Esposito released Rape Jokes, a standup comedy special about sexual assault from a survivor’s perspective. Esposito joined the MIT Communications Forum for a short standup performance followed by Q&A with the audience.

Co-sponsored/supported by the de Florez Fund for Humor, Women & Gender Studies at MIT, and The MindHandHeart Innovation Fund.

Based on the recent book Gaming the Iron Curtain, this lecture will outline the idiosyncratic and surprising ways in which computer hobbyists in Cold War era Czechoslovakia challenged the power of the oppressive political regime and harnessed early microcomputer technology for both entertainment and activism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Czechoslovak authorities treated computer and information technologies as an industrial resource rather than a social or cultural phenomenon. While dismissing the importance of home computing and digital entertainment, they sponsored paramilitary computer clubs whose ostensible goal was to train expert cadres for the army and the centrally planned economy. But these clubs soon became a largely apolitical, interconnected enthusiast network, where two forms of tactical resistance could be identified. First, the clubs offered an alternative spaces of communal hobby activity, partially independent of the oppression experienced at work or at school. The club members’ ambitious DIY projects often substituted for the deficiencies of the state-controlled computer industry. Hobbyists not only built joysticks and programmed games, but also introduced new standards for data storage and ran large-scale bottom-up education programs. Second, especially in the late 1980s, local authors started making games that were openly subversive. Several anti-regime text adventure games were made in 1988 and 1989, including The Adventures of Indiana Jones on Wenceslas Square, January 16, 1989, which pitted the iconic Western hero against riot police during an anti-regime demonstration. These games rank among the world’s earliest examples of activist computer games.

About Jaroslav Švelch Jaroslav Švelch is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bergen and assistant professor at Charles University, Prague. He is the author of the monograph Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2018). He has published research on history and theory of computer games, on humor in games and social media, and on the Grammar Nazi phenomenon. His work has been published in journals including New Media & Society, International Journal of Communication, or Game Studies, and in anthologies published by Oxford University Press, Bloomsbury and others. He is currently researching history, theory, and reception of monsters in games.

In a little over a decade, competing social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, and their Chinese counterparts, have formed the base for the emergence of a new creative industry: social media entertainment. Social media entertainment creators have harnessed these platforms to generate significantly different content, separate from the century-long model of intellectual property control in the entertainment industries. This new screen ecology is driven by intrinsically interactive viewer- and audience-centricity. Combined, these factors inform a qualitatively different globalization dynamic that has scaled with great velocity, posing new challenges for established screen industries, screen regulatory regimes, as well as media scholars. Social Media Entertainment: The New Industry at the Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley maps the platforms and affordances, content innovation and creative labor, monetization and management, new forms of media globalization, and critical cultural concerns raised by this nascent media industry. Media scholars Stuart Cunningham and David Craig propose challenging, revisionist accounts of the political economy of digital media, the precarious status of creative labor and of media management, and the possibilities of progressive cultural politics in commercializing environments, while offering a new take on media globalization debates.

== About Stuart Cunningham and David Craig Stuart Cunningham is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications, Queensland University of Technology. He has authored over a dozen academic titles including Media Economics (Terry Flew, Adam Swift), Screen Distribution and the New King Kongs of the Online World (Jon Silver), Hidden innovation: Policy, industry and the creative sector.

David Craig is a Clinical Associate Professor at USC Annenberg’s School for Communication and Journalism and a Fellow at the Peabody Media Center. Craig is also a veteran media producer and executive nominated for multiple Emmy Awards and responsible for over 30 critically-acclaimed films, TV programs, and stage productions.

Podcasting has given rise to new voices and new, highly personal ways to tell stories. But as the medium expands, it struggles to create gold standards for building shows that will be popular and financially sustainable. Cynthia Graber, co-host and co-creator of Gastropod, about the science and history of food, joins Al Letson, host of the investigative reporting show Reveal and creator of Errthang, his own personal “mixtape of delight,” to dive into the secrets of successful podcasting and what the future might hold for this intimate form of media.

Speakers:

Cynthia Graber is an award-winning radio producer and print reporter who’s covered science, technology, food, agriculture, and any other stories that catch her fancy for more than 15 years. Her work has been featured in magazines and radio shows including Fast Company, BBC Future, Slate, the Boston Globe, Studio 360, PRI’s The World, Living on Earth, and many others. She’s a regular contributor to the podcast Scientific American’s 60-Second Science and in 2014, she co-founded the Gastropod food science podcast alongside author Nicola Twilley. Cynthia’s radio and print awards include those from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the international Institute of Physics.

Al Letson has received national recognition and built a devoted fan base with soul-stirring, interdisciplinary work. He established himself early in his career as a heavyweight in the Poetry Slam Movement, which garnered artistic credibility and renown. Performing on a number of national, regional and local stages including HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, CBS’s Final Four PreGame Show and commercial projects for Sony, the Florida Times Union, Adobe Software, and the Doorpost Film Project, Al has honed his professional voice and artistic sensibilities into a unique brand that is all his own. After winning the Public Radio Talent Quest, Al received a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to create three episodes of his public radio show concept State of the Re:Union. His company finished their first grant in August of 2009 and has just been awarded one of the largest public radio grants every given to a single project to produce a full season of shows.

Although the Pokémon GO phenomenon of 2016 has waned, the economies of internet fame and content production remains robust. Drawing from their dissertation, Nick-Brie will discuss the forms of relational work and bonding that occur on YouTube and Twitter as well as Tumblr and Patreon, the latter two will be the focus of the talk. Drawing from two years of Internet ethnographic and participant observational work, Nick-Brie will be discussing the political economies and labor demands of micro-celebrity and Influencer culture across social media platforms regarding the Pokémon GO community. This talk suggests that the unpaid, affective labor done on Tumblr serves as a stepping stone to build relationships with one’s audience and fans before garnering support for additional, sustained income. From there, this talk argues that relational bonding work on Patreon is sustained through the various creator-patron interactions and rewards-based system to foster a system of compensation through crowdfunding, yet precarious work under global neoliberal gig economies.

Nicholas-Brie (Nick-Brie) Guarriello joins CMS/W from the University of Minnesota where they are a 4th year Ph.D. Candidate. Their work focuses on audience and fans, Internet celebrity, and digital economies across social media platforms. Currently, their dissertation, titled “A Heart So True?: Relational Labor and Gig Economies in the Pokémon GO Fandom”, specifically focuses on the growth of creative workers within various forms of gig economies on social media platforms. They look at the inter-relations between YouTube and Twitter as well as Tumblr and Patreon to theorize what forms of work and labor are now the norm on specific platforms. Since the Pokémon fandom is understudied, they are trying to also think about the potential access gaps or colonial hauntings where some folks are sponsored by industries and partnered with social media platforms whereas others are continually exploited for their labor. Nick-Brie is also a competitive Pokémon Trading Card Game player and you can usually catch them at your local league or a regionals!

At the close of the First Gulf War, feminist architectural historian Beatriz Colomina wrote that “war today speaks about the difficulty of establishing the limits of domestic space.” That conflict of 1990-91 is most often cited as the first to pull the waging of war fully into the digital age and therefore into a blurring of boundaries of all kinds. Yet, most modern wars have introduced technological innovations that transform social relations and modes of communication and representation. In this paper Caren Kaplan focuses on a period that includes the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and extends into the “War on Terror” through a consideration of Martha Rosler’s photo collage series “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home” (1967-2004). The technique of collage reinforces the artist’s emphatic effort to bring together seemingly incommensurable elements—images of exquisite domestic interiors, glamorous consumer commodities, and landscapes and bodies damaged by warfare. Literally bringing wars waged by the United States throughout this long durée into the hyper commodified environment of fashion layouts and magazine advertisement, Rosler demonstrates the impossibility of limiting domestic space, an impossibility that challenges representation across genres and practices—televisual, photographic, cinematic, social media, analogue, digital, etc. Such disturbances of “here” and “there,” “now” and “then,” resonate as powerful “aftermaths” of wars visible and invisible, always already underway.

Caren Kaplan is Professor of American Studies at the UC Davis. Her research draws on cultural geography, landscape art, and military history to explore the ways in which undeclared as well as declared wars produce representational practices of atmospheric politics. Recent publications include Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Duke 2018) and Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke 2017).

When everyday citizens interact about politics today, they often do so (1) anonymously and (2) in digital space, which results in a kind of aggressive chaos. But what happens when people identify themselves to one another in place-based communities as they do, for example, when writing letters to the editor of their local newspaper? How does that change public discussion?

This talk by Roderick Hart operationalizes the concept of “civic hope” and reports the results of a long-term study of 10,000 letters to the editor written between 1948 and the present in twelve small American cities. Hart’s argument is that the vitality of a democracy lies not in its strengths but in its weaknesses and in the willingness of its people to address those weaknesses without surcease. If democracies were not shot-through with unstable premises and unsteady compacts, its citizens would remain quiet, removed from one another. Disagreements – endless, raucous disagreements – draw them in, or at least enough of them to sustain civic hope.

Roderick Hart is the Allan Shivers Centennial Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and the founding director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life. He is the author of twelve books, the most recent of which is Political Tone: How Leaders Talk and Why. He is also the author of DICTION 7.0, a computer program designed to analyze language patterns. Dr. Hart has been inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teachers at the University of Texas and has also been designated Professor of the Year for the State of Texas from the Carnegie/C.A.S.E. Foundation.

Myron Dewey is an indigenous journalist, educator, documentary filmmaker and the developer of Digital Smoke Signals, a social networking and filmmaking initiative, emerging out of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline project of 2016-17. Using a full range of contemporary media, including drone technologies, Dewey has pioneered the blending of citizen monitoring, documentary filmmaking, and social networking in the cause of environment, social justice and indigenous people’s rights; he co-directed the 2017 award-winning documentary, Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock.

Introduction by Lisa Parks, Professor, Comparative Media Studies; Director, Global Media Technologies & Cultures Lab and recently awarded MacArthur Fellow.

In the 20th century, America led the world in scientific and technological innovation, with federally funded basic research leading to breakthroughs ranging from the Internet to the Human Genome Project, with many positive impacts on society.

More recently, possibilities ranging from autonomous weapons to eugenic application of genetic editing tools have made it clear that the rate of discoveries has outpaced our ability to predict their moral and ethical consequences. How the scientific community addresses these essential questions could mean the difference between societal benefit and dystopia.

Eric Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a principal leader of the Human Genome Project, and Maria Zuber, MIT Vice President for Research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics, will be joined by Communications Forum director Seth Mnookin for a wide-ranging discussion on the ethical issues entangled in innovation and the real, and sometimes devastating, effects of invention without culpability.

Speakers:

Dr. Eric Lander is the president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. A geneticist, molecular biologist, and mathematician, he has played a pioneering role in the reading, understanding, and biomedical application of the human genome and was a principal leader of the Human Genome Project.

Dr. Maria Zuber is the MIT Vice President for Research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. Dr. Zuber was principal investigator for the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL), the first woman to lead a NASA spacecraft mission, and the first woman to lead a science department at MIT. In her role as Vice President for Research, Dr. Zuber oversees research administration and policy for more than a dozen interdisciplinary research laboratories and centers.

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.

All Communications Forum events are free and open to the general public. Seating is given on a first come, first served basis. There are no tickets. This event is co-sponsored by Radius at MIT.

[Video and photos available at https://cmswm.it/bendis-mit]

MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing is thrilled to welcome award-winning comics creator Brian Michael Bendis, a New York Times bestseller and one of the most successful writers working in mainstream comics, for the 2018 Julius Schwartz lecture, in conversation with fellow comics writer Marjorie Liu.

For the last eighteen years, Brian’s books have consistently sat on the top of the nationwide comic and graphic novel sales charts. Now with DC Comics, he is the co-creator and consulting producer of the Peabody Award-winning Jessica Jones on Netflix from Marvel TV. For Marvel entertainment, Bendis was the monthly writer of the bestselling Defenders, Jessica Jones, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy series.

The introduction of the multiracial Spider-Man, Miles Morales, made the front page of USA Today and went on to become an international hotbed political topic featured on Fox News, CNN, The Daily Show, Conan O’Brien, Howard Stern and many others.

The news of a new ‘Iron man’ character in the form of 15-year-old Riri Williams made massive international headlines when the story broke in Time magazine. Her solo debut as Invincible Iron man debuted in the top five nationwide.

Before that, Brian completed a 100 issue run on the X-Men franchise with the debut of ALL NEW X-MEN and UNCANNY X-MEN and 9 years helming Marvel’s popular AVENGERS franchise by writing every issue of the NEW AVENGERS plus debuting the hit books AVENGERS, MIGHTY AVENGERS and DARK AVENGERS along with the wildly successful ‘event’ projects AVENGERS VERSUS X-MEN, HOUSE OF M, SECRET WAR, SPIDER-MEN, SECRET INVASION, AGE OF ULTRON, SIEGE and CIVIL WAR 2.

In delivering the 2018 Julius Schwartz Lecture, Brian follows comics and science fiction legends Neil Gaiman (https://youtu.be/KU-tncC7qIw) and J. Michael Straczynski (https://youtu.be/OMNtVURpLzM?t=2m55s).

The Julius Schwartz Lecture, produced with generous support by the Gaiman Foundation (http://www.gaimanfoundation.org/), is hosted by the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program (https://cmsw.mit.edu) at MIT and was founded to honor the memory of longtime DC Comics editor Julius “Julie” Schwartz, whose contributions to our culture include co-founding the first science fiction fanzine in 1932, the first science fiction literary agency in 1934, and the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. Schwartz went on to launch a career in comics that would last for 42 years, during which time he helped launch the Silver Age of Comics, introduced the idea of parallel universes, and had a hand in the reinvention of such characters as Batman, Superman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom.

On the heels of the day’s graduate program information session, join us for our annual colloquium featuring alumni of CMS, discussing their lives from MIT to their careers today.

Nick Seaver, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and a 2010 graduate of Comparative Media Studies, is an anthropologist of technology, whose research focuses on the circulation, reproduction, and interpretation of sound. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine. His dissertation research examined the development of algorithmic music recommendation, and at CMS, he wrote a thesis on the history of the player piano.

Colleen Kaman is a user experience strategist at IBM Interactive Experience, skilled in storytelling, user research, learning design, and persuasive technologies. Her expertise is in developing products, services, and campaigns that help users make better decisions and accomplish tasks more effectively and efficiently.

Sean Flynn is the Program Director for the Points North Institute, a Maine-based organization supporting nonfiction storytellers through artist development initiatives and, most prominently, the Camden International Film Festival and Points North Forum. He received his master’s degree in Comparative Media Studies in 2015 and worked as a researcher at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Sean began his filmmaking career as a producer and cinematographer working on two feature-length documentaries, both of which had their premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival and aired on national television.

Our society is in the midst of an extremely urgent conversation about the benefits and harms of digital technology, across all spheres of life. Unfortunately, this conversation too often fails to include the voices of technology practitioners whose work is already focused on social justice, the common good, and/or the public interest. This talk by Sasha Costanza-Chock explores key findings and recommendations from #MoreThanCode (morethancode.cc), a recently-released field scan based on more than 100 practitioner interviews.

The report was produced by the Tech for Social Justice Project (t4sj.co), co-led by Research Action Design (RAD) and the Open Technology Institute at New America (OTI), together with research partners Upturn, Media Mobilizing Project, Coworker.org, Hack the Hood, May First/People Link, Palante Technology Cooperative, Vulpine Blue, and The Engine Room. NetGain, the Ford Foundation, Mozilla, Code For America, and OTI funded and advised the project.

Sasha Costanza-Chock (pronouns: they/them or she/her) is a scholar, activist, and media-maker, and currently Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT. Their work focuses on social movements, transformative media organizing, and design justice. Sasha’s first book, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement was published by the MIT Press in 2014. More info: schock.cc.

Marisa Morán Jahn is a multi-media artist, writer, educator and activist, whose colorful, often humorous uses of personae and media create imaginative pathways to civic awareness of urgent public issues. Working collaboratively, her projects include a classic American road trip, CareForce One, in a 50-year-old station wagon, advocating issues concerning care workers that became a PBS film series; and Bibliobandido, a story-telling initiative for Honduran children featuring a masked bandit who devours stories. Jahn, winner of numerous awards, is co-founder of Studio REV-, a non-profit organization of artists, technologists, media makers, low-wage workers, immigrants and teens who producing creative media and public art about the issues they face.

She will be sharing Snatch-ural History of Copper (working title), an art project, book, and feature-length film initiated by artist Marisa Morán Jahn that investigates copper, an element found in electrical wires, computers, lightning rods, and the IUD (intrauterine device) implanted in Jahn’s own ‘snatch’ (womb). Jahn interviews a range of experts in search of otherworldly answers that trammel the boundaries of myth, literary studies, science, alchemy and political controversy. Interviewing scientists in Saint Petersburg Florida who use rockets outfitted with a copper nose to trigger (and capture) lightning, Jahn asks, “Do you think that when the lightning goes off I’ll feel it in my cooch?” She visits a shrine on the island of Cyprus, home of the earliest copper mines dating to 8700 BCE as well as the pre-Christian god, Venus of Aphrodite who share the same symbol (♀) most familiar to us today as the symbol for women, females, and a movement for women’s liberation. Throughout these real-world investigations, Jahn seeks access to the top of a building and solder her copper IUD on top of a copper lightning rod, raising its height by an imperceptible inch. “I can’t wait for the moment when a bolt of lightning hits this thing — just imagine my little IUD radiating. It might even be sizzled into a thousand little parts distributed and distended into the atmosphere.” Poetically and playfully weaving the issues into a new cosmology, the film touches upon timely issues such as planetary sustainability, labor, and reproductive self-determination during a moment when both sides of the spectrum mount all-offensive campaigns.

Also featuring…Sasha Costanza-Chock, Jane M. Sak, and Steve Seidel.

== An MIT Communications Forum ==

As a senior producer on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah, Sara Taksler has spent her career taking comedic pot shots at politicians. When she met Dr. Bassem Youssef, an Egyptian satirist who uses comedy to criticize Middle Eastern politics, Taksler witnessed first-hand how laughter thrives, even in terrifying circumstances. Tickling Giants, Taksler’s documentary about Youssef, is a hilarious story about finding comedy in unexpected places. Taksler joins Dr. Amber Day, author of Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate, to discuss the power of free speech and what’s so funny about oppressive regimes.

An MIT Communications Forum

Christian Picciolini was 14 when he became a Neo-Nazi skinhead. He denounced eight years later and dedicated himself to helping others disengage from extremist groups. Picciolini has done peace advocacy work for more than a decade and in 2018, he founded the Free Radicals Project, a nonprofit dedicated to transitioning former extremists. He has conducted more than 200 interventions with white supremacists, as well as with ISIS members and other types of violent extremists. Now an internationally-renowned speaker, author, and MSNBC contributor, Picciolini discussed the state of extremism in America and how to combat it alongside Lee-Or Ankori-Karlinsky, senior program officer at Beyond Conflict, a nonprofit research and consulting group that uses the behavioral and neuroscience of social conflict to create peace-building initiatives in dozens of countries around the world. Christina Couch, a science journalist who has written extensively about deradicalization and dehumanization research, moderated.

Speakers:

Christian Picciolini is a peace advocate and the author of White American Youth: My Descent Into America’s Most Violent Hate Movement — and How I Got Out. In 2009, he co-founded Life After Hate, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping communities and organizations implement long-term solutions that counter racism and violent extremism. Christian currently leads the Free Radicals Project, a global network of extremism preventionists who help people disengage from hate movements and other violent ideologies around the world.

Lee-Or Ankori-Karlinsky is the senior program officer for Beyond Conflict, a nonprofit research and consulting group that applies lessons from brain and behavioral sciences to address a range of racial justice and inclusion, conflict resolution and reconciliation, and other challenges.

Moderator: Christina Couch is a science journalist and coordinator for the MIT Communications Forum. Her work explores psychology, technology and the intersections of the two. Her bylines can be found in Nova Next, MIT Technology Review, Fast Company Co.Exist, Science Friday, and Wired Magazine.

Daniel Bacchieri is an award-winning Brazilian journalist, documentary film maker and collaborative web developer/curator, whose visually inspiring StreetMusicMap platform has been widely praised for its curation of street performers from across the globe. Combining a documentarian vision with a trans-cultural appreciation of the public art of vernacular musicians, the StreetMusicMap collaborators are exploring the creative possibilities of collective story-telling through performance. The StreetMusicMap Instagram channel has more than 41,000 followers and 1,300 artists documented on videos in 97 countries, all filmed by more than 700 collaborators.

The Civic Arts Series, which is part of the CMS graduate program Colloquium, features talks by four artists and activists who are making innovative uses of media to reshape the possibilities of art as a source of civic imagination, experience and advocacy. Using a variety of contemporary media technologies–film, web platforms, game engines, drones–the series presenters have opened up new pathways to artistic expression that broaden public awareness around compelling civic issues and aspirations of our time.

CAST Visiting Artist Agnieszka Kurant joins Stefan Helmreich, professor of Anthropology; Caroline Jones, professor of History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art; and Adam Haar Horowitz, master’s student and research assistant in the Fluid Interfaces Group, to discuss the idea of collective intelligence in relation to emerging technology, artistic inquiry, and social and cultural movements.

Kurant will reflect on outsourcing her artworks to human and non-human collective intelligence and the system of profit-sharing she has created, artworks as complex systems or collective tamagotchis emulating life, and the observable evolution of individual authorship, culture, nature, labor and society. Haar Horowitz will touch on the collective in relationship to experience research in the neurosciences and experience production in the arts. Helmreich will discuss metaphors of collective human action derived from physics, computer science, animal worlds, and fluid dynamics, and will reflect on the politics of these framings. Jones will address the curious invocation of “intelligence” in discussions of aggregated agency, with specific reference to the so-named “mobile brain” or “immune brain” of the distributed system (mostly outside the cranium) that learns, remembers, and teaches, negotiating between tolerance and threat in relation to xeno-bacteria.

The panel will be moderated by Nick Montfort, professor of Comparative Media Studies/Writing.

Thomas Allen Harris is a critically acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist who explores conceptions of family, identity, environmentalism, and spirituality in a participatory practice. Graduate of Harvard College with a degree in Biology and the Whitney Independent Study Program, member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and published writer/curator, Harris lectures widely on the use of media as a tool for social change with a keen recognition for its potential to organize social movements and impact the biological body. He currently holds a position at Yale University as a Senior Lecturer in African American and Film & Media Studies, where he is teaching courses titled “Family Narratives/Cultural Shifts” and “Archive Aesthetics and Community Storytelling”. He is also working on a new television show, Family Pictures USA, which takes a radical look at neighborhoods and cities of the United States through the lens of family photographs, collaborative performances, and personal testimony sourced from their communities.

Family Pictures USA uses methodologies Harris and his team developed with Digital Diaspora Family Reunion, LLC (DDFR), a socially engaged transmedia project that has incorporated community organizing, performance, virtual gathering spaces, and storytelling into over 60 unique audio-visual events in over 50 cities. Harris will talk about his trajectory as a media artist that led to DDFR and his documentary film work, including Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, his 2015 film that was developed in tandem with DDFR. Through A Lens Darkly features leading Black cultural figures, scholars, and photographers sharing their archives with Harris in an exploration of the ways photography has been used as a tool of representation and self-representation in history, garnering an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Documentary film, the Fund for Santa Barbara Social Justice Award, and an Africa Movie Academy Award, among others.

In conversation with MIT Professor Vivek Bald, Harris will reveal his process, experiences, and unexpected outcomes working with communities in online and offline shared spaces and places. Immediately following a Q&A, participants will be invited to share images that represent their conceptions of family and engage in a collaborative workshop highlighting the impact of new technologies in community archiving practices.

== Co-hosted with the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology ==

Erik Loyer‘s award-winning work explores new blends of game dynamics, poetic expression and interactive visual storytelling. From his best-selling Strange Rain story-playing iPad/iPhone app, to his visually stunning digital fiction The Lair of the Marrow Monkey (powered by Shockwave software animation), and his interactive explorations of post-Katrina racial politics in Blue Velvet, Loyer’s interactive artistic hybridizations of music, new narratives and algorithmic play have won numerous awards, been exhibited widely, and found their way into permanent museum collections.

The Civic Arts Series, which is part of the CMS graduate program Colloquium, features talks by four artists and activists who are making innovative uses of media to reshape the possibilities of art as a source of civic imagination, experience and advocacy. Using a variety of contemporary media technologies–film, web platforms, game engines, drones–the series presenters have opened up new pathways to artistic expression that broaden public awareness around compelling civic issues and aspirations of our time.

This talk by Kimberly Juanita Brown considers 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 focuses 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.

Before fake news dominated headlines, Kevin Young was tracking down its roots.

The author of 13 books of poetry and prose, 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 13 books of poetry and prose 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.

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).

Stuart Stevens believes Republicans are in a “GOP apocalypse,” and he’s urging Republicans to resist. 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. Jennifer Nassour, founder of Conservative Women for a Better Future, and Dr. Daniel Barkhuff, president of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, a group promoting “integrity, sobriety, and civility” in government, joined Stevens 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.

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, shares 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 also looks 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.

== 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.

== Mariel García 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.

== 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.

== 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 Rodríguez Arce: "Seizing the Memes of Production: Political Memes in Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican Diaspora" ==

== Mariel García 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.

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.

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.

An MIT Communications Forum: https://commforum.mit.edu/neurodiversity-at-mit-and-design-for-everyone-march-1-2018-f7886ba92b61

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.

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 explains 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.

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.

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 draws upon work in location-based augmented reality games, as well as work in virtual reality. In the realm of augmented reality, he discusses 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 provides 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.

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. Has this resulted in historically marginalized groups being left behind once again? Noam Cohen, a former New York Times technology columnist and author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, argues that the disruption touted by Silicon Valley occurs at the expense of empathy, civility, and even democracy itself. The result? Everything from fake news to the growing divide between the haves and have-nots. Cohen joins technology critic Sara M. Watson and Northeastern University journalism professor Jeff Howe, who coined the term “crowdsourcing” in a 2006 Wired article, to discuss 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.

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.

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 Business and co-author of Whiplash, How to Survive Our Faster Future.

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

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.

Panelists include:

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, ’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, ’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, ’17, 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.

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.

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. This talk explores 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, Koslov focuses 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.

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.

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

Nick Couldry outlined 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 outlined 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 argued, 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 argued 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).

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.

If you’ve heard of BuzzFeed, you probably think about our famous articles and quizzes, such as The Dress and Which State Are You Actually From?, as well as our video escapades, such as The Try Guys Try Sexy Halloween Costumes and our famous Watermelon Explosion experiment on Facebook Live. The success of our content might seem accidental, but as a result of BuzzFeed’s experimental approach to producing content, the virality of these posts is actually a very scientific and calculated effort. This talk details how BuzzFeed thinks about and creates content, highlighting our paradigms for the function and role of our content. Menendez also discusses the software stack that supports this experimental loop, as BuzzFeed also employs a variety of technologies to build an analytics layer. Included in that tech discussion is also an overview of the metrics and signals BuzzFeed is interested in once content is live. Along the way, Walter highlights some of the Comparative Media Studies learnings he employs on a daily basis to thrive in the BuzzFeed content ecosystem.

Walter Menendez is a Senior Data Infrastructure Engineer at BuzzFeed, based in New York. He is an MIT alum of the class of 2015, having majored in Computer Science and Engineering (Course 6-3). While at MIT, he concentrated in Comparative Media Studies, as well as having done undergraduate research in various Media Lab groups (Fluid Interfaces, Laboratory for Social Machines). At BuzzFeed, he is responsible for the development and maintanence of all of BuzzFeed’s data collection, from on-site impression collection to data warehousing solutions, empowering the analytical approach that BuzzFeed uses for the content creation cycle.

All across the world, educational systems are exploring new ways to encourage more ambitious teaching and learning in classrooms: shifting away from recitation and rote learning to more engaging forms of collaborative, active, problem-centered learning. For this shift in classrooms to occur, we need to dramatically increase the quantity and quality of learning opportunities available to educators in these systems, and new forms of blended and online learning experiences will be central to this growth. One crucial element in teacher learning is practice. For most teachers, opportunities for low-stakes, deliberate practice is quite limited–teachers either learn theory in graduate school of education seminar rooms or test ideas in real classrooms, with real students, with real and immediate learning needs. At the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, we are developing new forms of teacher practice spaces, technology platforms inspired by games and simulations that provide the opportunity for teachers to rehearse for and reflect on important decisions in teaching.

Justin Reich is the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing department, and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society. As a learning scientist, he investigates the complex, technology-rich classrooms of the future and the systems we need to prepare educators to thrive in those environments.

As Donald Trump built his lead in the Republican primaries, the editors of National Review came out with an entire “Against Trump” issue, a full-throated — and ultimately ineffective — denunciation of the GOP nominee. Soon conservative media personalities were taking sides, culminating in the hiring of Breitbart’s Steve Bannon to run the Trump campaign.

But the centrality of conservative media to presidential politics is not a new development. As early as the 1950s, conservative media activists were organizing third-party tickets, promoting presidential candidates, and encouraging their audiences to cast votes based on ideology rather than party. In this talk, Nicole Hemmer explains how conservative media activists won the GOP for the right — and how in the era of Trump, they lost it.

Nicole Hemmer is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and a research associate at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Her book, Messengers of the Right, a history of conservative media in the United States, was published in Penn Press in September 2016. She is a columnist for Vox, US News & World Report, and The Age in Melbourne, Australia. Her writing has also appeared in a number of national and international publications, including the New York Times, Atlantic, New Republic, Politico, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. She co-hosts and produces Past Present, a history podcast that launched in October 2015.

Brian Larkin and Stefan Andriopoulos draw on the concept of comparison to examine how the same technologies work in radically different ways across the globe, juxtaposing media practices in Africa, Latin America, and Asia as well as in Western centers. There is an assumption that media, whether print, cinema, or digital media, were developed in the West and later exported to other places which were then in the place of ‘catching up’ with a media history that had already been established. But we know that cinema arrived in Shanghai and Calcutta at the same time as it did in London and evolved in those locations to produce different institutional and aesthetic forms. We also know that currently Seoul is far more ‘wired’ than New York and that Lagos is developing a film industry that is rapidly becoming dominant in all of Africa. It is clear that future media centers will emerge in places far outside their traditional Western centers.

Media emerge from a reciprocal exchange between technical forms and cultural religious, political, and economic domains. When these formations shift, features we have seen as core to media, sometimes part of their very ontology, turn out to be contingent rather than necessary. Exploring the concept of comparison opens up new questions for media studies by highlighting the contingencies of media and the specificity of historical and geographical formations.

Brian Larkin is Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of Signal and Noise: Media Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria and writes on issues of media, religion, infrastructure and urban studies in Nigeria.

Stefan Andriopoulos is Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. He is the author of Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (Zone Books, 2013), which was named “book of the year” in Times Literary Supplement. His previous book Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema won the SLSA Michelle Kendrick award for best academic book on literature, science, and the arts.

Michael J. Lee charts the vital role of canonical post–World War II (1945–1964) books in generating, guiding, and sustaining conservatism as a political force in the United States. Dedicated conservatives have argued for decades that the conservative movement was a product of print, rather than a march, a protest, or a pivotal moment of persecution. The Road to Serfdom, Ideas Have Consequences, Witness, The Conservative Mind, God and Man at Yale, The Conscience of a Conservative, and other mid-century texts became influential not only among conservative office-holders, office-seekers, and well-heeled donors but also at dinner tables, school board meetings, and neighborhood reading groups. Taking an expansive approach, he shows the wide influence of the conservative canon on traditionalist, libertarian, and other types of conservatives. By exploring the varied uses to which each founding text has been put from the Cold War to the culture wars, he aims to highlight the struggle over what it means to think and speak conservatively in America.

Lee teaches and researches political communication and rhetoric at the College of Charleston. His book, Creating Conservatism, won five national book awards in his field. He is also the co-founder of With Purpose, a non-profit organization that raises money and awareness to fight childhood cancer.

"MIT’s Jeopardy champ talks strategy, memes -- and becoming strangers’ media object."

In early 2017, Lilly Chin won the Jeopardy College Championship. The MIT senior and Comparative Media Studies minor took home a check for $100,000, but with her Final Jeopardy response “Who is the spiciest memelord?”, she also earned a spot in the same internet lore she studied.

We talked to Lilly about that Jeopardy experience and discovered that sudden fame, in a digital world where anyone can reach you on forums or Facebook, isn’t always pretty. But Lilly showed us that the right education, whether the enlightening kind you get as a CMS student or the self-guided (or self-inflicted) type you get through years of trawling the darker corners of the internet, can help anyone prepare for their 15 minutes of uninvited fame: or as she put it, for the surreality of becoming other people’s media object.

Image credit: Jeopardy Productions

Named one of Variety’s Ten Comics to Watch for 2016, Aparna Nancherla has racked up appearances on Conan, Last Comic Standing, Inside Amy Schumer, and The Jim Gaffigan Show. A former writer on Late Night with Seth Meyers and Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, Nancherla headed to MIT to discuss her career and tackling tough topics with humor. MIT philosophy professor Kieran Setiya moderated.

In Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat, the third edited volume in the series that includes From Barbie to Mortal Kombat and Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat, the authors and contributors expand the discussions on gender, race, and sexuality in gaming. They include intersectional perspectives on the experiences of diverse players, non-players and designers and promote inclusive designs for broadening access and participation in gaming, design and development. Contributors from media studies, gender studies, game studies, educational design, learning sciences, computer science, and game development examine who plays, how they play, where and what they play, why they play (or choose not to play), and with whom they play. This volume further explores how the culture can diversify access, participation and design for more inclusive play and learning.

Yasmin Kafai is Professor of Learning Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a researcher and developer of tools, communities, and materials to promote computational participation, crafting, and creativity across K-16. Her recent books include “Connected Gaming: What Making Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy,” and “Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming,” and edited volumes such as “Textile Messages: Dispatches from the World of Electronic Textiles and Education” and “Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs for Gaming.” She coauthored the 2010 National Educational Technology Plan for the US Department of Education. Kafai earned a doctorate in education from Harvard University while working with Seymour Papert at the MIT Media Lab. She is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and past President of the International Society for the Learning Sciences. Justice Walker and Emma Anderson are doctoral students at the University of Pennsylvania.

Gabriela Richard is an Assistant Professor of Learning, Design and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on understanding the intersections between culture, experience, media, and learning, particularly in the areas of online and emerging technologies, including gaming. Her work has focused on understanding the ways that gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality are defined and experienced in game culture and online gaming in order to inform inclusive and equitable designs for learning with serious games, as well as play and participation with gaming and emerging technology more broadly. She has written extensively about games and learning, as well as youth learning, engagement, and computational thinking with electronic textiles, game design, and online communities. She was an NSF graduate research fellow, an AAUW dissertation fellow, and a Postdoctoral Fellow for Academic Diversity at the University of Pennsylvania.

At its heart, documentary cinema has always been an experimental medium. Its evolution has been driven on the one hand by the creativity and interests of the media maker and on the other by technological invention and the evolution of particular sensing, imaging and display technologies.

Some insight into the experimental trajectory of the documentary approach can be found in definitions and naming conventions that emerged. Where as John Grierson’s famous definition, the “creative treatment of actuality”, speaks to the object, Richard Leacock’s, “the feeling of being there”, emphasizes the audience’ experience, which strongly parallels the filmmaker’s in the task of making. The difference lies not only in the sensibility of the maker but also in the technological breakthrough that allowed Leacock to marry the motion image to synchronous sound, thus vastly expanding the horizon of what stories could be told.

For the past two decades, the story experience was expanded as media makers incorporated computational “interactive” interfaces into their work, inviting the audience to re-order the presentation on the fly as they explored an archive of short segments. In this phase, however, the documentary impulse continued to be defined by the primary sensors of the past: motion images and (synchronous) sound.

Today, the arrival of expanded sensing technologies is reshaping the documentary opportunity. In a new work-in-progress, DoppelMarsh, developed in the Responsive Environment Group at the Media Lab, data from a dense network of diverse environmental sensors are mapped to deliver “a sense of being there” in a re-synthesized, ever-changing landscape.

Glorianna Davenport is a co-founder of the Media Lab where she directed the Interactive Cinema Group (1987-2004) and the Media Fabrics Group (2004-2008). In 2008, she turned her attention to transitioning a 600 acre cranberry farm in Plymouth Massachusetts into restored wetlands and conservation property. In 2011 she founded Living Observatory, a collaborative of research partners including the Responsive Environments Group at the Media Lab to develop a long-term study of this property and create experiences that invite the public to witness ecological change across this landscape in transition. Davenport is a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab.

Contrary to our received notions on the newness of new media, the presidential campaigns of the late nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of media forms as advisers and technicians exploited a variety of forms promote their candidates and platforms, including the stereopticon (a modernized magic lantern), the phonograph, and the telephone. In the process, they set in motion not only a new way of imagining how to market national campaigns and candidates; they also helped to usher in novel forms of mass spectatorship. Analogies to presidential campaigns in the 21st century are inevitable—and will not be avoided. The presentation comes out of Charlie Musser’s new book, Politicking and Emergent Media: US Presidential Elections of the 1890s (University of California Press).

Charles Musser is professor of Film & Media Studies, American Studies and Theater Studies at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books, including the now-classic The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. His most recent documentary is Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch (2014).

In October, 2015, BuzzFeed News reporter Azeen Ghorayshi broke an investigative story detailing astronomer Geoffrey Marcy’s long history of sexual harassment. Since then, more female scientists have come forward about their experiences with harassment. Ghorayshi, MIT astronomer Sarah Ballard, and Harvard history of science professor Evelynn M. Hammonds join science journalist and MIT Communications Forum coordinator Christina Couch to discuss barriers to gender equality in the sciences and steps to over come them.

Speakers:

Azeen Ghorayshi is a science reporter for BuzzFeed News and recipient of the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award and the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for young science journalists. She frequently covers gender and equality issues in the sciences.

Sarah Ballard is an astronomer and a Torres Fellow for Exoplanetary Research at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. She frequently writes about the culture of science and equity issues therein.

Evelynn M. Hammonds is a professor of the history of science and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the former dean of Harvard College and the first woman and first African-American to hold that position.

Moderator: Christina Couch is a science journalist and coordinator for the MIT Communications Forum. Her work explores the intersections of technology and psychology.

This event was sponsored by Radius at MIT (https://radius.mit.edu).

[Videos mentioned in this podcast are available for viewing at http://cmsw.mit.edu/podcast-paul-roquet-japanese-artist-animation]

Independent animators often pride themselves on an intimate, hand-drawn aesthetic. But they increasingly rely on computer software not only to accelerate their workflow, but to manipulate the look and feel of their drawings. Compositing software enables subtle but decisive shifts in the spaces portrayed, through manipulations of color, texture, line, and movement. Seeking to unravel the analytical split between the “drawn” and the “digital” in animation and media studies more broadly, Roquet’s project moves back and forth between two desktops: the hard surface of the drawing table and the pixelated surface of the screen. This talk focuses on how the physical and perceptual affordances of both interfaces appear reimagined in the textures, movements, and tactility present in the animations themselves. Through a phenomenology of the contemporary desktop, Roquet seeks to ground the contemporary audiovisual imagination in the materiality of the tools and techniques at hand.

Paul Roquet is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies in the Global Studies and Languages Section at MIT. He is the author of Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minnesota 2016) as well as numerous essays on Japanese audiovisual and literary aesthetics.

The 2016 Presidential election brought issues of race and racism to the forefront of American politics and forced journalists to confront how to cover these topics without providing a platform for hate groups. Slate chief political correspondent and CBS News political analyst Jamelle Bouie joins MIT Communications Forum director Seth Mnookin to explore how race and ethnicity framed the election and how journalists and content creators can improve coverage of these issues moving forward.

Speakers:

Jamelle Bouie’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and The Nation. He is a former a staff writer at The Daily Beast and currently serves as a political analyst for CBS News and chief political correspondent for Slate.

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 was sponsored by Radius at MIT.

How will the role of data science in democracy be transformed as software expands the public’s ability to conduct our own experiments at scale? In the 1940s-70s, debates over authoritarian uses of statistics led to new paradigms in social psychology, management theory, and policy evaluation. Today, large-scale social experiments and predictive modeling are reviving these debates. Technology platforms now conduct hundreds of undisclosed experiments per day on pricing and advertising, and the algorithms that shape our social lives remain opaque to to the public. Democratic methods for data science may offer an alternative to this corporate libertarian paternalism.

In this talk, hear about the history and future of democratic social experimentation, from Kurt Lewin and Karl Popper to Donald Campbell. You’ll also hear about CivilServant, software that supports communities to conduct their own experiments on algorithms and social behavior online.

J. Nathan Matias is a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media, an affiliate at the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard, and founder of CivilServant. He conducts independent, public interest research on flourishing, fair, and safe participation online. These include research on harassment reporting, volunteer moderation online (PDF), behavior change toward equality (PDF), social movements (PDF), and networks of gratitude.

Nathan has extensive experience in tech startups, nonprofits, and corporate research, including SwiftKey, Microsoft Research, and the Ministry of Stories. Nathan’s creative work and research have been covered extensively by international press, and he has published data journalism and intellectual history in the Atlantic, Guardian, PBS, and Boston Magazine.

Slides: http://cmswm.it/cmsw-matias-slides

MIT professor Nick Montfort talks about his new book and how learning to explore code isn't just for the tech-inclined -- programming can be a way for arts and humanities scholars to discover answers...and questions...they've never seen before.

Music: Algorithmically generated with WolframTones: http://tones.wolfram.com/generate

Women of color have a variety of responses when employing digital technologies for empowerment. New communication technologies have expanded the opportunities and potential for marginalized communities to mobilize in this context counter to the dominant, mainstream media. This growth reflects the mobilization of marginalized communities within virtual and real spaces reflecting a systematic change in who controls the narrative. No longer are mainstream media the only disseminators of messages or producers of content. Women, in particular, are employing social media to highlight issues that are often ignored in dominant discourse. However, access itself neither ensures power nor guarantees a shift in the dominant ideology (as the use of #Misogynoir by Katy Perry reveals among other examples). Operating under the oppressive structures of masculinity, heterosexuality, and Whiteness that are sustained in digital spaces, marginalized women persevere and resist such hegemonic realities. Yet the conceptual frameworks intended to capture the digital lives of women cannot deconstruct the structural inequalities of these spaces.

Kishonna L. Gray (Ph.D., Arizona State University) is currently a MLK Visiting Scholar in Women & Gender Studies and Comparative Media Studies/Writing. She is also the Founder of the Critical Gaming Lab at Eastern Kentucky University. She is expanding on the work created here to develop new initiatives surrounding Equity in Gaming (www.equityingaming.com). Her work broadly intersects identity and new media although she has a particular focus on gaming. Her most recent book, Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014), provides a much-needed theoretical framework for examining deviant behavior and deviant bodies within that virtual gaming community.

Chris Sacca, activist investor, recently argued that Black Twitter IS Twitter. For example, African American usage of the service often dominates user metrics in the United States, despite their minority demographic numbers as computer users. This talk by André Brock unpacks Black Twitter use from two perspectives: analysis of the interface and associated practice alongside discourse analysis of Twitter’s utility and audience. Using examples of Black Twitter practice, Brock offers that Twitter’s feature set and ubiquity map closely onto Black discursive identity. Thus, Twitter’s outsized function as mechanism for cultural critique and political activism can be understood as the awakening of Black digital practice and an abridging of a digital divide.

André Brock is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. Brock is one of the preeminent scholars of Black cyberculture. His work bridges Science and Technology Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, showing how the communicative affordances of online media align with those of Black communication practices. Through December 2016, he is a Visiting Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England.

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.

Panelists include:

Andres Lombana-Bermudez, ’08, a researcher and designer working at the intersection of digital technology, youth, and learning. Andres holds a Ph.D. in Media Studies from UT-Austin, an M.Sc. in Comparative Media Studies, and bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Literature from Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. He is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a Research Associate with the Connected Learning Research Network.

Colleen Kaman, ’10, is a user experience/experience design strategist and designer working at the intersection of digital technology, persuasive design, and content. Colleen holds an M.Sc. in Comparative Media Studies, and bachelor’s degrees in Anthropology from Bates College. She is a senior managing consultant at IBMiX, where she focuses on user-centric healthcare solutions and designing for aging users and helps lead the IBMiX department’s Accessibility practice area.

Abe Stein, ’13, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Kill Screen Media

Lily Bui, ’16, is currently a PhD student at MIT’s School of Architecture & Planning in the Department of Urban Studies & Planning. Her masters research focused on using sensors to support environmental monitoring, and communicating sensor-based data to different stakeholders.

In 2005, a little-known author was invited on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote his book, an almanac chronicling fake histories ranging from the story behind Theodore Roosevelt’s fictional lobster canal to the disappearing 51st US state Hohoq. Since then, humorist John Hodgman has parlayed his wit into New York Times best-selling books, a Daily Show correspondent position, a Netflix stand-up special, and his own podcast. Hodgman brings his razor-sharp wit to MIT for a moderated discussion on his career and the state of comedy today.

John Hodgman is host of the Judge John Hodgman podcast and a former resident expert for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Moderator: Seth Mnookin is associate director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and author of The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.

The 2016 presidential election has been historic for the ways that social media has been used to drive the news agenda and rally supporters to the cause. Jennifer Stromer-Galley describes the large scale collection and machine learning techniques she and her team have used for the Illuminating 2016 project to study the ways the presidential candidates and the public have used social media. She provides some of the major trends they’ve seen this election cycle and talk about why this matters for journalism and for social media practitioners more broadly.

Stromer-Galley is a professor in Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and Director for the Center for Computational and Data Sciences, and she is President of the Association of Internet Researchers. She has been studying “social media” since before it was called social media, studying online interaction and influence in a variety of contexts, including political forums and online games. Her award-winning book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age provides a history of presidential campaigns as they have adopted and adapted to digital communication technologies.

Even though people age nine through twelve have always been with us, the same cannot be said for the category “tween.” When did this category emerge and why? How are “tweens” represented in popular culture, including music, television, and YA literature? And how does this relatively new age category intersect with–or elide–issues pertaining to race, class, and gender identity?

Speakers:

Tyler Bickford is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is completing two book projects on music and childhood.

Meryl Alper worked at Nickelodeon and Disney before becoming an Assistant Professor of Communication at Northeastern University and publishing Digital Youth with Disabilities.

Moderator: Marah Gubar is an Associate Professor of Literature at MIT and author of Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (2009).

International best-selling author and science historian James Gleick discusses his career, the state of science journalism, and his newest book Time Travel: A History, which delves into the evolution of time travel in literature and science and the thin line between pulp fiction and modern physics. This Communications Forum event was moderated by author and physicist Alan Lightman, the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities.

Speakers

James Gleick, author of seven books, including Chaos, Genius, and Isaac Newton, all of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize

Moderator: Alan Lightman, Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT and author of 15 books

How has mobile media changed the ways that nomadic communities receive and send information, engage state actors, and participate in international deliberations? Allison Hahn examines the ways that two pastoral-nomadic communities, Maasai of Kenya and Tanzania and Mongolians of Mongolia and China, are utilizing new media and social media platforms to challenge power hierarchies and deliberative norms. Many governmental policy makers presume that this technological adaptation indicates a determination amongst nomadic communities to integrate and settle. This presentation asks if nomadic communities might instead be incorporating new media technologies as a method to preserve their traditional lifestyles while engaging in national and international deliberations about land policy. Hahn draws from evidence of this engagement found in Maasai and Mongolian use of YouTube, RenRen, Twitter and Facebook as well as in-person protests and her decade of fieldwork amongst pastoral-nomadic communities. In this talk, Hahn focuses on specific examples from Maasai and Mongolian communities, as well as addresses the broader questions of how academics might engage once-distant communities and better understand the complexity of mobile media and nomadic deliberation.

Allison Hahn (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the City University of New York – Baruch College. Her current book project, Nomads, New Media, and the State (in progress) explores the ways pastoral-nomadic communities in Central Asia, East Africa, and the Middle East are utilizing new and mobile technologies to participate in conservation policy and negotiate land rights.

As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at MIT, Douglas O’Reagan will study how the digital humanities can best aid the specific strengths, mission, and broader community around MIT. In this talk, O’Reagan updates the audience on his efforts and invite suggestions and ideas concerning the future of digital humanities at MIT.

O’Reagan completed his Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2014. His dissertation was a comparative history of the Allied powers’ attempts to study and copy German science and technology during and after the Second World War. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fung Institute of Engineering Leadership in UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering from 2014-2015, where he worked with an interdisciplinary team on applying data science, econometric analysis, and historical research in studying the origins and impacts of specific breakthrough technologies. In 2015 he became a visiting assistant professor at Washington State University’s Tri-Cities campus, where he taught history and served as Lead Archivist and Director of the Oral History Program for the Hanford History Project, which manages the US Department of Energy’s collections related to the Hanford site of the Manhattan Project.

The Exit Zero Project (www.exitzeroproject.org) is a transmedia exploration of the traumatic effects of the loss of the steel industry in Southeast Chicago, the impact that deindustrialization has had on expanding class inequalities in the United States more broadly, and how Americans talk – and fail to talk – about social class. The project includes an award-winning book, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Post-Industrial Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2013) authored by Christine Walley, as well as a documentary film, entitled Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story (2016) made in conjunction with director and filmmaker Chris Boebel. The book and film use first person narration to trace the stories of multiple generations of writer/producer Walley’s family in this once-thriving steel mill community. From the turn-of-the-century experience of immigrants who worked in Chicago’s mammoth industries to the labor struggles of the 1930s to the seemingly unfathomable closure of the steel mills in the 1980s and 90s, these family stories convey a history that serves as a microcosm of the broader national experience of deindustrialization and its economic and environmental aftermath. The project also includes an interactive documentary website with both a storytelling and archival component that is being made in collaboration with the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum. In this talk, Professor Walley will talk about her research into this topic and how it found expression in a book, website, and documentary film.

Walley received a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University in 1999. Her first book, Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park (Princeton University Press, 2004), was based on field research exploring environmental conflict in rural Tanzania. Chris Walley and Chris Boebel are also the co-creators and co-instructors of the documentary film production and theory class DV Lab: Documenting Science Through Video and New Media.

The present age is one of growing faith in machinic knowledge. From state surveillance to self-tracking technologies, we find lofty promises about the power of “raw” data, sensing machines and algorithmic decision-making. But new claims to knowledge invariably entail a redistribution of uncertainty, of those in the know and those left ignorant, of proofs “good enough” and “negligible” risks. Today, the U.S. government struggles to “prove” the efficacy of its own surveillance programs. The calculability of terrorist threat becomes profoundly indeterminable, exemplified by the figure of the “lone wolf”. Meanwhile, the self-tracking industry promises unerringly objective self-knowledge through machines that know you better than you know yourself. The present struggles with “big” data and surveillance are not just a question of privacy and security, but how promises of knowledge and its bounty enact a redistribution of authority, credibility and responsibility. In short, it is a question of how human individuals become the ingredient for the production of truths and judgments about them by things other than themselves.

Sun-ha Hong is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at CMS/W @ MIT, and has a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His writing examines the collective fantasies invested in technology, media and communication.

CMS/W alum Sam Ford (S.M., CMS, ’07) has spent most of the last decade exploring points of connection and contention between the media and marketing industries and media studies. Starting last year, that work has taken him to Univision’s Fusion Media Group (a portfolio of media companies which includes Fusion, Univision Digital, Univision Music, The Root, Flama, The Onion, A.V. Club, Clickhole, Starwipe, and El Rey), leading a team that has been building the conglomerate’s approach to experimentation outside of the company’s core day-to-day operations.

In this colloquium, Sam is joined by his colleague Federico Rodriguez Tarditi to discuss what they have learned thus far from Fusion Media Group’s experiments with exploring new ways of telling stories, new approaches to building relationships with key publics important to our portfolio, new ways of working internally, and new types of roles/positions in the company. They also talk about what they have learned while working with internal teams, academic groups, non-profits, other companies, startups, foundations, and other groups and the challenges of measuring success for experimentation that often exist outside day-to-day media company operations…and some of which may speak more to the company’s larger mission than direct paths to profitability.

Sam Ford is a Vice President at Fusion and Head of Fusion Media Group’s Center for Innovation and Engagement. Federico Rodriguez Tarditi serves as Project Manager for the Center for Innovation and Engagement.

(This is obviously better enjoyed as a video! Watch this talk and the accompanying visuals at http://cmsw.mit.edu/video-virtual-reality-meets-documentary)

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The goal of this panel is to talk with some of the leading creators in the VR space and better understand VR’s potentials and implications for documentary and journalism. This will help us to disambiguate some of the major strands of VR and in so doing consider the inherent tensions in VR between documentation and simulation, the challenges of spatial storytelling and new narrative structures, the ethics and cognitive neuroscience of immersion, interaction, and affect; and VR’s past and future.

Speakers: Raney Aronson-Rath, FRONTLINE

Katy Morrison, Virtual Reality studio VRTOV

Nonny de la Peña, "The Godmother of Virtual Reality”

Caspar Sonnen, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam

Nearly everyone these days imaginatively uses virtual identities such as social media profiles, e-commerce accounts, and/or videogame characters. Yet, virtual identities can reproduce discrimination and stereotypes with devastating impacts on users ranging from worse performance and engagement for students to bullying and threats of violence. If such forms of oppression persist, e.g., female virtual identity users being threatened online, surely we must go advance our understanding of the roles these technologies play in society and how to design them to better suit diverse social needs. In this talk, Harrell presents some of the outcomes from his 5-year National Science Foundation-supported research initiative called the Advanced Identity Representation project. Namely, applying approaches from artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and sociology to technologies such as videogames and social media, his research both reveals social biases in existing systems and implements systems to respond to those biases with greater nuance and expressive power.

D. Fox Harrell is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT in the Comparative Media Studies Program and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He founded and directs the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab). He was a 2014-15 recipient of the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication and fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

The algorithmic infrastructures of the internet are made by a weird cast of characters: rock stars, gurus, ninjas, wizards, alchemists, park rangers, gardeners, plumbers, and janitors can all be found sitting at computers in otherwise unremarkable offices, typing. These job titles, sometimes official, sometimes informal, are a striking feature of internet industries. They mark jobs as novel or hip, contrasting starkly with the sedentary screenwork of programming. But is that all they do? In this talk, drawing on several years of fieldwork with the developers of algorithmic music recommenders, Seaver describes how these terms help people make sense of new kinds of jobs and their positions within new infrastructures. They draw analogies that fit into existing prestige hierarchies (rockstars and janitors) or relationships to craft and technique (gardeners and alchemists). They aspire to particular imaginations of mastery (gurus and ninjas). Critics of big data have drawn attention to the importance of metaphors in framing public and commercial understandings of data, its biases and origins. The metaphorical borrowings of role terms serve a similar function, highlighting some features at the expense of others and shaping emerging professions in their image. If we want to make sense of new algorithmic industries, we’ll need to understand how they make sense of themselves.

Nick Seaver is assistant professor of anthropology at Tufts University. His current research examines the cultural life of algorithms for understanding and recommending music. He received a masters from MIT's Comparative Media Studies program in 2010 for research on the history of the player piano.

“Mooning Texas” – an adventure story involving social energy + art + Emile Durkheim’s “take” on Mauss + Hubert’s “take” on mana + the creativity of gossip.

Michael Taussig, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, was dubbed by the New York Times as “Anthropology’s Alternative Radical.” Taussig has been doing fieldwork since 1969. He has written on the commercialization of peasant agriculture; slavery; hunger; the working of commodity fetishism; colonialism on “shamanism” and folk healing; the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual; the making, talking, and writing of terror; and mimesis. He has also written “a study of exciting substance loaded with seduction and evil, gold and cocaine, in a montage-ethnography of the Pacific Coast of Colombia.”

Introduced by Prof. Ian Condry, Global Studies and Languages, MIT.

Presented by the Dissolve Inequality series and the Latin American Studies Forum of MIT Global Studies and Languages.

Last December, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. In March, he added that “I think Islam hates us.” MIT alumna and Wise Systems co-founder Layla Shaikley join engineering masters student Abubakar Abid to explore how this type of hateful, discriminatory rhetoric influences public opinion, discuss its impact on the daily lives of Muslim-Americans, and examine strategies for combating it.

Layle Shaikley is an MIT alum, co-founder of Wise Systems and co-founder of TEDxBaghdad. With her viral video sensation “Muslim Hipsters: #mipsterz,” she helped launch a national conversation about how Muslim women are represented.

Abubakar Abid is a engineering masters student at MIT and a member of the Muslim Student Association.

Hisham Bedri is an MIT graduate who studied new imaging technologies and their implications on privacy.

Moderator: Seth Mnookin, associate director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and director of the MIT Communications Forum.

Although the popular press primarily uses the negatively connoted phrase “binge-watching,” Lisa Glebatis Perks employs the label “media marathoning” to describe viewers’ rapid engagement with a story world. Rather than positioning these media experiences as mindless indulgences, the phrase media marathoning intimates engrossment, effort, and purpose. These media engagement efforts can be rewarded with pleasurable experiences, but they can also lead to feelings of disappointment. Perks draws from discourse gathered from over 100 marathoners to describe some of marathoners’ most common emotional experiences, including anger, empathy, parasocial mourning, nostalgia, and regret. The theme of the talk is that characters become the marathoners’ pseudo-avatars, gaining shape, texture, and life through viewers’ affective investments.

Lisa Glebatis Perks (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Merrimack College. She recently published Media Marathoning: Immersions in Morality, which explores the ways readers and viewers become absorbed in a fictive text and dedicate many hours to exploring its narrative contours.

Guy Maddin and his partners are communing with the spirits of long-lost movies. In a conversation with William Uricchio, Maddin discusses why we should bother digging up filmic and narrative memories from oblivion, how we can take advantage of the Internet to involve new publics, and how the act of doing so might help to create a new web-based art form.

Maddin is an installation artist, writer and filmmaker, the director of eleven feature-length movies, including The Forbidden Room (2015) and My Winnipeg (2007).

In the winter of 2015/16 he and Evan Johnson will launch their major internet interactive work, Seances, which will enable anyone online to “hold séances with” movies fashioned out of fragments of long-lost films.

What separates a good teacher from a great one? How are digital technologies challenging traditional teaching methods? And are there distinctions between top-notch science instructors and their counterparts in humanities or social science? Former poet laureate Robert Pinsky, Weisskopf Professor of Physics Alan Guth and MIT biology professor Hazel Sive–all honored teachers–will explore these issues with Literature professor and Communications Forum director emeritus David Thorburn.

David Thorburn is an MIT Literature professor, director emeritus of the Communications Forum, and a past winner of MIT’s MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching.

Robert Pinsky is a three-term US Poet Laureate. He is a recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center.

Alan Guth is MIT’s Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, pioneer of the inflationary model of the universe and recipient of the MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching.

Hazel Sive is a biology professor at MIT, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a recipient of the MacVicar award for exemplary contributions to undergraduate teaching.

Multimedia scholarship invites reconsideration of how history has been, could be, and should be represented. By wrestling creatively and collectively with the difficult archival problems presented by social history of slavery, Harvard’s Vincent Brown hopes to chart new pathways for pondering history’s most painful and vexing subjects. This presentation considers three graphic histories of slavery — a web-based animation of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, a cartographic narrative of the Jamaican slave revolt of 1760-61, and a web-based archive of enslaved family lineages in Jamaica and Virginia — that illustrate how the archive of slavery is more than the records bequeathed to us by the past; the archive also includes the tools we use to explore it, the vision that allows us to see its traces, and the design decisions that communicate our sense of history’s possibilities.

Multi-media historian Vincent Brown is Charles Warren Professor of History, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University. His research, writing, teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on the political dimensions of cultural practice.

Economic literacy has long been touted as a potential solution to national economic crisis and individual financial precarity. But what does it mean to be economically literate? In a field full of contestation, how do some perspectives get disqualified or excluded, and others held up as facts? Between 1976 and 1978, the nonprofit, quasi-governmental public service advertising organization The Advertising Council saturated the American media environment with messages about American citizens’ responsibility to become economically knowledgeable, and distributed over ten million copies of a glossy brochure designed to teach citizens the least they needed to know about the American economic system. Activist groups criticized the Ad Council campaign as propagandistic–but when these groups responded with their own information campaigns, they found themselves excluded from access to public funds and airwaves. Where was the line between objective information and propaganda? Who had the power to decide? How has this dynamic changed over time, as new media technologies have emerged and neoliberal policies and philosophies have moved from the margins to the center of American political culture? In this talk, Jack calls attention to corporate managers and executives as consequential social and ontological actors with distinctive vernacular theories of media and politics.

Caroline Jack is an Exchange Scholar in CMS/W and a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her article “Fun and Facts about American Business: Economic Education and Business Propaganda in an Early Cold War Cartoon Series” was recently published in Enterprise and Society.

Traditional media outlets have been facing budget cuts and layoffs for years, with specialized reporters often among the first to go. And yet last year, Boston Globe Media Partners made a significant investment in launching STAT, a new publication that focuses on health, medicine and scientific discovery. STAT's leadership and reporting team will discuss the publication’s progress and how the field of science journalism is changing.

Speakers

Rick Berke is the executive editor of STAT and former executive editor of POLITICO. Berke joined The New York Times in 1986 and served as a political correspondent and senior editor for nearly three decades.

Carl Zimmer is a national correspondent for STAT and hosts the site's “Science Happens" video series. Zimmer also writes the "Matter" column at The New York Times and has written 12 books including Soul Made Flesh, which was named as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Rebecca Robbins is a reporter for STAT covering money in life sciences.

Moderator: Seth Mnookin, associate director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and author of The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.

Beginning in the late 1990s, the technology and even mainstream press opined extensively on the coming death of television. A decade later—and a time that found television still very much alive—that theme evolved to instead pronounce the coming death of cable. Rather than demise, the emergence of broadband-distributed television has both reinvented the medium and revealed how extensively our expectations and understandings of television are based not on the medium of television but on logics developed for its broadcast distribution. Amanda D. Lotz’s talk presents key arguments of her current book project, Being Wired: How Cable Transformed Television and the Internet Revolutionized It All with a focus on what transpired when the long anticipated face off between “new media” and television finally took place in 2010. Lotz is professor in the Departments of Communication Studies and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan where she studies contemporary media industries, television, and gender and media. She is the author of The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York University Press, 2007; Rev. 2nd ed. 2014), Cable Guys: Television and American Masculinities in the 21st Century(2014), and Redesigning Women: Television After the Network Era (University of Illinois Press, 2006), and editor of Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era (Routledge, 2009). She is co-author, with Timothy Havens, of Understanding Media Industries (Oxford University Press, 2011; 2nd ed. 2016) and, with Jonathan Gray, of Television Studies (Polity, 2011).Her current work examines how cable changed television and became the dominant supplier of internet access in the early twenty-first century.

John Jennings is an Associate Professor of Art and Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo-State University of New York. He is the co-author of the graphic novel The Hole: Consumer Culture, Vol. 1 and the art collection Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art and Culture (both with Damian Duffy). Jennings is also the co-editor of The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem, MLK NorCal’s Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco, and the AstroBlackness colloquium in Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. Jennings’ current comics projects include the Hiphop adventure comic Kid Code: Channel Zero, the supernatural crime noir story Blue Hand Mojo, and the upcoming graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic dark fantasy novel Kindred.

Vivek Bald, an Associate Professor in CMS/W and member of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, discusses his transmedia project documenting the lives of Bengali Muslim ship workers and silk peddlers who entered the United States at the height of the Asian Exclusion Era, between the 1890s and 1940s, and quietly settled and intermarried within African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods from Harlem to Tremé in New Orleans and Black Bottom, Detroit.

The project consists of a book, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013), a linear documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem (currently in production), and a community-sourced, web-based documentary and oral history project, “The Lost Histories Project” (in development). Bald’s talk and demo presented a new iteration of the online project and newly edited material from the documentary.

"Each spring, the CMS side of CMSW catapults ten more master’s program graduates into the world. And each fall, we invite a bunch back to talk with prospectives.

Of the five grads we feature in this podcast, four stayed close. In fact two helped start research groups in our department. And another two skipped to other parts of campus. One joined a Ph.D. program a few buildings down, and another kicked off the Media Lab’s new digital currency initiative.

Margaret Weigel, '02 and one of our earliest graduates, works in digital education. 2007’s Dan Roy, the only panelist you didn’t hear, develops games for learning. Ilya Vedrashko, ‘06, works in data-driven consumer research. Erik Stayton, 2015, is a Ph.D. candidate in MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society. And Chelsea Barabas, also 2015, is the newly minted advisor to the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative."

On the heels of the day’s graduate program information session, we hosted five alums of our master's degree program in Comparative Media Studies. They discussed their lives from MIT to their careers today.

Here's who we featured:

Margaret Weigel, ’02, who works in digital education: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3427777 Dan Roy, ’07, widely known for his games for learning projects: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=2512953 Ilya Vedrashko, ’06, who does big data-driven consumer research: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3838774 Erik Stayton, ’15, now a Ph.D. student at MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society: http://web.mit.edu/hasts/graduate/stayton.html Chelsea Barabas, ’15, the newly minted advisor to the Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=75805502

Our information sessions bring prospective master's students to campus to meet our faculty and students, who discuss the program, its research, what it's like to apply, and the experience of studying at MIT for two years. The 2015 infosession was led by graduate program director Prof. Heather Hendershot and program administrator Shannon Larkin, and it featured research group directors like Ethan Zuckerman of the Center for Civic Media and Sarah Wolozin of the Open Documentary Lab; several current graduate students; and questions from attendees on-campus and online.

If there was anything we didn't cover, don't hesitate to contact us at cmsw@mit.edu!

Women are chronically underrepresented in U.S. politics. Yet TV shows, fictions, and films have leapt ahead of the electoral curve to give us our first female president(s). What messages about women and power do these fictional representations of female politicians send? What connections (if any) can we draw between representation and reality? What challenges do real-life women politicians face as they represent themselves to voters and to the press?

Mary Anne Marsh is a Boston-based political consultant who has worked on many local and national campaigns. She also serves as a Democratic political analyst on the FOX News Channel and on other national and local media.

Ellen Emerson White is the author of many books for children and teens, including the critically acclaimed President’s Daughter series, which chronicles the experiences of a Massachusetts girl whose mother becomes the first female president of the United States.

Moderator: Marah Gubar, Associate Professor of Literature at MIT, is the author of Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature (2009).

MIT professor of science writing Tom Levenson discusses his new book, The Hunt for Vulcan…And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe. For decades, scientists discovered, dismissed, and rediscovered a hidden planet — Vulcan — thought to be responsible for the wobble in Mercury’s orbit. But in war-torn Berlin, in 1915, Albert Einstein proposed that gravity wasn’t as Newton saw it but was space itself, warped: what became his general theory of relativity. The discovery actually takes us back to 19th century astronomer Urbain Jean-Joseph Le Verrier, who originally identified Mercury’s wobble, and causes Levenson to ask: why did it take more than 50 years for science to change its mind about the existence of Vulcan?

Levenson is director of our Graduate Program in Science Writing. He is the winner of Walter P. Kistler Science Documentary Film Award, Peabody Award (shared), New York Chapter Emmy, and the AAAS/Westinghouse award. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, the Boston Globe, Discover, and The Sciences. He is winner of the 2005 National Academies Communications Award for Origins.

On sale at http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/254788/the-hunt-for-vulcan-by-thomas-levenson/

Net Vitality is a new analytic approach to examine ways to sustain long-term Internet vibrancy, both in the United States and around the world, and helps inform future government policies that impact the deployment and adoption of broadband technologies. Unlike other comparative studies that rank countries quantitatively based on a simplistic assessment of broadband speeds, Stuart N. Brotman’s Net Vitality Index, released earlier this year, also measures countries qualitatively to determine how well they are performing in a global competitive environment, gauging the true vitality of a country’s Internet ecosystem.

Based on five years of research, the Net Vitality Index is the first holistic analysis of the global broadband Internet ecosystem, identifying the United States, South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, and France as the top-tier leaders. Unlike the one-dimensional rankings that serve as the basis of most broadband comparative studies, Brotman’s composite metric takes into account 52 factors developed independently to evaluate countries on an apples-to-apples basis. Overarching categories assessed encompass applications, devices, networks, and macroeconomic factors.

Brotman is a faculty member at Harvard Law School and a Nonresident Senior Fellow in the Center for Technology Innovation at The Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.

William F. Buckley’s public affairs program Firing Line (PBS, 1966–1999) offered a space for no-holds-barred, honest intellectual combat at its finest. The conservative Buckley hoped to convert viewers, but there was more to it than that. You could actually learn about other points of view, and thereby become a better liberal or a better conservative from watching the show. There is simply no equivalent on TV today. Conservatives have Fox News, liberals have MSNBC, and in more neutral territory we find C-SPAN. Overall, politically oriented broadcasting has become a vast echo chamber (especially on talk radio), with many tuning in largely to have their views confirmed—and to hear the other side vilified. What happened? How did we get from Firing Line to The O’Reilly Factor? And how can we possibly fix things? Hendershot’s talk will provide the historical, regulatory, and political context we need in order to begin to address these very difficult questions.

Heather Hendershot is a professor of film and media in CMS/W. Her book on Firing Line is forthcoming in the summer of 2016.

The importance of female superheroes in Western culture cannot be ignored. From Wonder Woman in the 1940s to Captain Marvel in the 2010s, the inspiration and cultural impact these representations of heroism provide fans regardless of gender are undeniable. While there is a wealth of research examining the representation of the female superhero and how this speaks to perceptions of femininity across the past eighty years, its focus is often the prevalence of stereotypical over authentic depictions, and the harmful effects of this on society.

Sarah Zaidan‘s research combines the platforms of video games with the artistic styles and narrative themes of comics and historical fact, culminating in an original game that celebrates the power of the female superhero, and her cultural importance. The game tells the story of Ms. Meta, a contemporary superhero created by the player. As she journeys through time to stop her nemesis’ plans, she will encounter characters drawn from the stories of women and fans from each era, opportunities to challenge preconceived notions of female superheroes, and the ability to change the course of history. The gameplay will be grounded in problem-solving and collaboration, and will incorporate player choices to create ownership and personal relevance.

Dr. Sarah Zaidan is a game designer, artist and researcher whose work explores how video games and comic books can engage in a dialogue with identity, gender and civic awareness. She is Kingston University London’s first recipient of a Ph.D. by practice in superhero art and history with research findings presented in the form of an award winning video game, The Adventures of MetaMan: The Male Superhero as a Representation of Modern Western Masculinity (1940-2010). She is one of the creators and illustrators of the feminist superhero comic series My So-Called Secret Identity, in collaboration with Batman scholar Dr. Will Brooker and animation artist Susan Shore. Dr. Zaidan teaches video game design at Emerson College and is a research fellow with the Engagement Lab. Her work is characterized by rapid prototyping, iterative design processes and by discovering game systems in everyday life.

For thousands of years, humans have experienced cycles of empire building and retreat, from the neolithic settlers of Levant and the Indus Valley to the ancient Cahokia and Maya civilizations. What can new discoveries teach us about how to plan our next thousand years as a global civilization? Authors Charles C. Mann and Annalee Newitz talk about how ancient civilizations shed light on current problems with urbanization, food security, and environmental change.

Charles C. Mann is the author, most recently, of 1493, a New York Times best-seller, and 1491, winner of the National Academies of Science’s Keck award for best book of the year. His next project, The Wizard and the Prophet, is a book about the future that makes no predictions. An early version of the introductory chapter was a finalist for a National Magazine Award.

Annalee Newitz writes science nonfiction and science fiction. She’s editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and founding editor of io9.com. She’s the author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her work has appeared in publications from The New Yorker and Technology Review to 2600 and Lightspeed Magazine. Her next book is a novel about robots, pirates, and the future of property laws.

Police shootings and the Black Lives Matter campaign have shone a spotlight on how different the everyday experiences are of white Americans and Americans of color. While much attention has been paid to these seemingly daily occurrences, the historical forces that led to our current situation have been less discussed: Is the de facto segregation that exists in many Northern cities a result of the lack of forced integration of the type that took place in the South? And is the mass incarceration of and police brutality inflicted on black Americans a result of these same forces?

Melissa Nobles is the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at MIT. She is also a collaborator and advisory board member of Northeastern Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice clinic. Her current research is focused on constructing a database of racial murders in the American South between 1930 and 1954. She is the author of two books: Shades of Citizenship: Race and Census in Modern Politics (2000) and The Politics of Official Apologies (2008), and related book chapters and articles.

Tracey Meares is the Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law at Yale Law School. Before coming to Yale, she was the Max Pam Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago; she was the first African-American woman granted tenure at both institutions’ law schools. She’s worked extensively with the federal government, and since December 2014 she has a been a member of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

Moderator: Seth Mnookin is the director of the Communications Forum and the associate director of the Graduate Program of Science Writing at MIT. His most recent book is The Panic Virus: The True Story of the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.

Modern Japan experienced what could be described as its first wave of “mass media revolution” in the period stretching from the mid-1920s into the 1930s, when new forms of media industry as well as technology vastly expanded the number of potential consumers of media products. This talk, with Hiromu Nagahara, explores the political implications of this development, especially as it relates to how the rise of mass media reshaped existing social and cultural hierarchies in Japan (and how, in some cases, it didn’t). Based on his current book project, Japan’s Pop Era: Music in the Making of Middle-Class Society, this talk will focus on the life and career of Horiuchi Keizō (M.S. 1923), an MIT grad who found himself in the center of all of this as a prominent composer, critic, radio broadcaster, and publisher.

Jane McGonigal is the internationally acclaimed game designer and author, most recently of "SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient–Powered by the Science of Games".

In a wide-ranging conversation, she spoke at MIT with Scot Osterweil, creative director of the MIT Education Arcade (education.mit.edu).

The event was hosted by Harvard Book Store.

Danielle Keats Citron is Lois K. Macht Research Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

Brianna Wu is Head of Development at Giant Spacekat and a well-known public speaker on issues affecting women in tech.

Most Internet users are familiar with trolling—aggressive, foul-mouthed posts designed to elicit angry responses in a site’s comments. Less familiar but far more serious is the way some use networked technologies to target real people, subjecting them, by name and address, to vicious, often terrifying, online abuse. In an in-depth investigation of a problem that is too often trivialized by lawmakers and the media, Danielle Keats Citron exposes the startling extent of personal cyber-attacks and proposes practical, lawful ways to prevent and punish online harassment. A refutation of those who claim that these attacks are legal, or at least impossible to stop, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace reveals the serious emotional, professional, and financial harms incurred by victims.

Persistent online attacks disproportionately target women and frequently include detailed fantasies of rape as well as reputation-ruining lies and sexually explicit photographs. And if dealing with a single attacker’s “revenge porn” were not enough, harassing posts that make their way onto social media sites often feed on one another, turning lone instigators into cyber-mobs.

Hate Crimes in Cyberspace rejects the view of the Internet as an anarchic Wild West, where those who venture online must be thick-skinned enough to endure all manner of verbal assault in the name of free speech protection, no matter how distasteful or abusive. Cyber-harassment is a matter of civil rights law, Danielle Keats Citron contends, and legal precedents as well as social norms of decency and civility must be leveraged to stop it.

Ryan Cordell, co-director of the Viral Texts project, speaks about his work uncovering pieces that “went viral” in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines.

The Viral Texts project seeks to develop theoretical models that will help scholars better understand what qualities—both textual and thematic—helped particular news stories, short fiction, and poetry “go viral” in nineteenth-century newspapers and magazines. What texts were reprinted and why? How did ideas—literary, political, scientific, economic, religious—circulate in the public sphere and achieve critical force among audiences? How might computational methods reveal Melville’s popular reception and reputation or expose the shaping influence of the popular press on his writing? And how can these popular (perhaps even ephemeral) texts thicken our understanding of literary authors like Herman Melville?

Cordell is Assistant Professor of English and Core Founding Faculty Member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University. His scholarship focuses on convergences among literary, periodical, and religious culture in antebellum American mass media. Prof. Cordell collaborates with colleagues in English, History, and Computer Science on the NEH-funded Viral Texts project, which uses robust data mining tools to discover reprinted content across large-scale archives of antebellum texts. These “viral texts” help us to trace lines of influence among antebellum writers and editors, and to construct a model of viral textuality in the period. Cordell is currently a Mellon Fellow of Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also serves as vice president of the Digital Americanists scholarly society; is Co-Editor-in-Chief of centerNet’s forthcoming new journal, DHCommons; and writes about technology in higher education for the group blog ProfHacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

(Co-sponsored with both MIT Global Studies and Languages and Women’s and Gender Studies.)

21st century popular culture, circulated by media, enables unusual affiliations of bodies in motion. When black social dances are practiced by American political leaders, as when First Lady Michelle Obama demonstrates “the Dougie” in her “Let’s Move” anti-obesity campaign, or when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton dances alongside others during her 2012 tour of Africa, black social dance moves toward a center of considerations of embodied knowledge. This talk wonders at the intertwining of African American social dances and political leadership, conceived as the bodies of elected officials. In addition we will consider the commercial and socially-inscribed leaders of popular cultural, including Beyonce and Brittany Spears, as arbiters of African American social dance. Ultimately, the talk suggests a haunting presence of queers-of-color aesthetic imperatives within political mobilizations of black social dance, continually – and ironically – conceived as part and parcel of rhetorics of liberation and freedom of movement. As queer dances emerge in marginalized relationship to mainstream concerns of identity and gesture, and then migrate toward shifting centers of popular culture, they shimmer and switch, bringing to light – perhaps – possibilities of creative aesthetic social dissent.

Thomas F. DeFrantz is Chair of African and African American Studies at Duke University, and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. His books include the edited volume Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (de la Torre Bueno Prize, Oxford University Press, 2004), and Black Performance Theory, co-edited with Anita Gonzalez (Duke University Press, 2014). In 2013, working with Takiyah Nur Amin and an outstanding group of artists and researchers, he founded the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. A director and writer, he is the outgoing President of the Society of Dance History Scholars. He taught at MIT for many years, in Music and Theater Arts and Comparative Media Studies.

Jeff VanderMeer, author of the New York Times bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), joins G. Eric Schaller, Professor of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth, for a broad-ranging discussion about the scientific and philosophical ideas that inspired the series. The two friends and occasional collaborators will discuss conservation science, VanderMeer’s relationship with the natural world, and the theme of extinction in “slow apocalypse” fiction, as well as the role of real-world science in science fiction. Moderator: Seth Mnookin.

For fifteen years before the graphical Web, thousands of personal computer owners encountered the pleasures, promises, and challenges of online community through networks of dial-up bulletin-board systems (BBS). While prevailing histories of the early internet tend to focus on state-sponsored experiments such as ARPANET, the history of bulletin-board systems reveals the popular origins of computer-mediated social life. From chatting and flirting to shopping and multiplayer games, it was on these locally-run systems that early modem users grappled with questions of trust, identity, anonymity, and sexuality. In this talk, Kevin Driscoll will map out the generative conditions that gave rise to amateur computer networking at the end of the 1970s and trace the diffusion of BBSing across diverse cultural and geographic terrain during the 1980s. This history provides lived examples of systems operated under vastly different social, technical, and political-economic conditions than the centralized platforms we inhabit today. Indeed, remembering the grassroots past of today’s internet creates new opportunities to imagine a more just, democratic tomorrow.

Kevin Driscoll (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. His research concerns the popular and political cultures of networked personal computing with special attention to myths about internet history. Previously, he earned an M.S. in Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught mathematics and computer science at Prospect Hill Academy.

George Yúdice‘s The Expediency of Culture (2003) repositioned culture in connection with governmentality and biopower. The full force of social media, Internet platforms and megadata was not yet evident at the time. The argument that culture empties out as it becomes ever more pivotal in the creative economy has, Yúdice thinks, been borne out. Culture understood as the “terrain of struggle for interpretive power” needs to take into consideration its relocation and reconfiguration in the new media and technologies. In that relocation key concepts of Cultural Studies need to be updated. This talk seeks to maps the requisite changes.

George Yúdice is Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Miami.

This event was co-sponsored with MIT Global Studies and Languages.

Why are brutal dystopias, devastating apocalyptic visions, and tales of personal trauma such a staple of young adult literature? Kristin Cashore, author of the award-winning Graceling Realm trilogy, and the University of Florida’s Kenneth Kidd will explore the history and current preoccupations of one of the most popular forms of fiction today. Marah Gubar, an associate professor in MIT’s Literature department, will moderate.

Coco Fusco‘s Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba is a study of the role of corporeal expressivity in development of social criticism in Cuban art. Fusco explores the work of performance artists from the 1980s to the present and examines how the Cuban state has wielded influence over performance through a combination of politics and practices that enable cultural production on the one hand and discipline public behavior on the other.

The book will be published by Tate Publishing in the fall of 2015.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer and a MLK Visiting Scholar at MIT. She is a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in numerous international biennials and festivals, as well as the Tate Liverpool, The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York. Fusco is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) and The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is also the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003).

The Vidéothèque de Paris, a moving image archive of the French capital, opened in 1988, during a period when French technological advances led the world in revolutionizing the circulation of people and information. Accordingly, the Vidéothèque would be no mere dusty archive but rather a high-tech institution of robots, computers, VCRs, and Minitels. Its organizers deployed the very latest technologies to place nearly a century of fiction films, documentaries, television programs, and advertising with Paris as their subject or setting at visitors’ disposal. Organizers promised that within a year or two the whole archive would be available in Parisian living rooms, as its collections became the basis of a Parisian on-demand cable channel.

Contemporaries imagined that these cutting-edge technologies would transform users’ very relationship to the past. They hoped to turn institutionalized history into memory, a flexible, customizable, and ultimately personal, experience of the past. The dream of an archive that replaced all others by providing constant access to cultural and social memory through cutting-edge technologies did not last more than a decade. But the utopian rhetoric that accompanied the Vidéothèque’s creation helps illuminate and call into question the utopian promises of the much more recent revolution in digital history.

MIT Global Studies and Languages assistant professor Catherine E. Clark is a cultural historian who specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and visual culture.

Her current book project, Paris and the Cliché of History, explores the intersection of the history of Paris and the history of photography. It tells the story of the various uses of photos as documents of the capital’s past from the establishment of Paris’s municipal historical institutions (the Musée Carnavalet and the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris) to the amateur photo contest “C’était Paris en 1970,” which created an archive of 100,000 pictures of the city. The project combines the history of collecting photographs with a consideration of the theoretical assumptions that underpinned their use, alongside prints and paintings, in illustrated books, historical exhibitions, and commemorations.

Computational geneticist Pardis Sabeti and energy studies expert Jessika Trancik will discuss their careers and the outlook for women in science in the 21st century. Sabeti, an associate professor at Harvard and a senior associate member of the Broad Institute, and Trancik, an assistant professor in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division, are both rising stars in the research world. They will be in discussion with Rosalind Williams, the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology at MIT.

Bobbie Chase, Editorial Director of DC Comics, and comic book writer Marjorie Liu (Monstress, Astonishing X-Men, Black Widow) discuss the current and future state of the comic book medium, including DC and Marvel’s place in the industry, and how creator owned projects are helping to evolve the face of publishing.

Lev Manovich, the author of the seminal The Language of New Media, MIT’s Fox Harrell, who recently published Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, and MIT’s Nick Montfort will examine the ways in which computational models can be used in cultural contexts for everything from analyzing media to imagining new ways to represent ourselves.

Paul Levitz is a comic fan (The Comic Reader), editor (Batman, among many titles), writer (Legion of Super-Heroes, including two NY Times Best Sellers), executive (30 years at DC, ending as President & Publisher), historian (75 Years of DC Comics: The Art Of Modern Myth-Making (Taschen, 2010)) and educator (including the American Graphic Novel at Columbia). He won two consecutive annual Comic Art Fan Awards for Best Fanzine, received Comic-con International’s Inkpot Award, the prestigious Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award, and the Comics Industry Appreciation Award from ComicsPro. His Taschen book won the Eisner Award, the Eagle Award and Munich’s Peng Pris, and is being released in revised form as five volumes in 2013. He is currently working on a book on Will Eisner and the birth of the graphic novel for Abrams Comic Arts. Levitz also serves on the board of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

His visit was a conversation with CMS/W faculty member and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz.

A presentation by Sasha Costanza-Chock, Assistant Professor of Civic Media in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing Department at MIT, on his new book "Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets!". The book — about media, community organizing, and immigrant rights — reveals that the revolution will be tweeted, but tweets alone will not the revolution make.

The talk was followed by book signing and reception.

In the book, Costanza-Chock traces a broader social movement media ecology, and finds that social media enhances, rather than replaces, face-to-face organizing. He argues that social movements engage in transmedia organizing: despite the current spotlight on digital media, social movement media work is often cross-platform, participatory, and linked to action. Immigrant rights organizers leverage social media creatively, alongside a range of tools from posters and street theater to Spanish-language radio, print, and television.

In his talk, Costanza-Chock draws on extensive interviews, workshops, and media organizing projects to describe the evolution of transmedia organizing in the immigrant rights movement between 2006 and 2012. Key threads include the mass protests against the anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner Bill; coverage of police brutality against peaceful protesters; and the implications of professionalized transmedia organizing for community accountability.

The book is published by the MIT Press, with a full-text preprint available online under a Creative Commons license: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/out-shadows-streets

This event is presented in collaboration with the MIT Center for Civic Media.

This Communications Forum special event will explore the differences and similarities in the kinds of knowledge available through inquiry in the sciences and humanities, and the ways that knowledge is obtained. The panelists will be historian, novelist, and columnist James Carroll; philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein; author and physicist Alan Lightman; and biologist Robert Weinberg. Seth Mnookin, Associate Director of the Forum, will moderate.

Speakers

James Carroll is a historian, novelist, and journalist. His works of nonfiction include An American Requiem, which won the National Book Award, and Constantine's Sword, now an acclaimed documentary. Writing frequently about Catholicism in the modern world, Carroll has a prize-winning column in The Boston Globe. He is Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist and the author of ten books, including, most recently, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away. Goldstein is on the World Economic Forum's Global Council of Values and was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association in 2011. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her scholarship and fiction, including a MacArthur Fellowship.

Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and essayist. In astrophysics, he has made fundamental contributions to gravitation theory, the behavior of black holes, and radiation processes in extreme environments. His 1993 novel Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller, and in 2000, his book The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. He is currently Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT and teaches in the Graduate Program in Science Writing.

Robert A. Weinberg is one of the world’s leading molecular biologists and the discoverer of the first gene known to cause cancer. His work focuses on the molecular and genetic mechanisms that lead to the formation of human tumors, and his recent work has examined how human cancer cells metastasize. In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor. Weinberg is Professor of Biology at MIT and a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Seth Mnookin is Associate Director of the MIT Communications Forum and Acting Director of MIT's Gradute Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, was published in 2011.

Three Comparative Media Studies alums -- Sam Ford, Rekha Murthy, and Parmesh Shahani -- return to discuss their post-graduate lives.

Sam Ford is Director of Audience Engagement at strategic communication and marketing firm Peppercomm. He is co-author of the 2013 book Spreadable Media and co-editor of the 2011 book The Survival of Soap Opera. Sam is a contributing author to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Inc.; a research affiliate with MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing; and an instructor with Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program. Sam currently serves as Co-Chair of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Ethics Committee. He has recently published work with The Journal of Fandom Studies, Panorama Social, Cinema Journal, The Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, Advertising Age, PRWeek, PR News, O’Dwyer PR, IABC Communication World, The Public Relations Strategist, PropertyCasualty360, Oxford University Press Bibliographies, and the NYU Press book, Making Media Work, among other outlets. He’s based in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Rekha Murthy is Director of Projects + Partnerships at PRX, where she finds innovative ways for public media stations and producers to reach audiences and earn revenue. Rekha runs PRX’s digital distribution program, where she forges new, non-broadcast pathways for audio works. These range from established channels like iTunes and Amazon, to aggregators like TuneIn and Stitcher, to entertainment and education services large and small.

As part of PRX’s award-winning Apps team, Rekha has set new standards for public media’s mobile strategy and adoption with apps including the Public Radio Player, This American Life, and for major stations. She launched PRX’s iTunes distribution service, making independent productions and major national programs available for sale in the iTunes Store.

Rekha advises various transmedia initiatives for public media and served on the board of the Integrated Media Association (now part of Greater Public).

Before PRX, Rekha was a producer for NPR’s All Things Considered and an editor of NPR.org. She’s been a project manager and user experience designer for web and mobile clients.

Parmesh Shahani, listed in 2012 as one of 25 Indians to watch out for by Financial Times, is the head of the Godrej India Culture Lab — an experimental idea-space that cross-pollinates the best ideas and people working on India from across the academic, creative and corporate worlds to explore what it means to be modern and Indian. In addition, Parmesh also serves as the Editor-at-large for Verve magazine, India. He is a Yale World Fellow, currently spending a semester in New Haven. He is also a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, TED Fellow, and a Utrecht University-Impakt Fellow. Parmesh’s masters’ thesis at CMS was released as a book “Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India” by Sage Publications in 2008. You can follow Parmesh on Twitter at @parmeshs.

Doris Sommer’s new book, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities, revives the collaboration between aesthetic philosophy and democratic development. From the top and from below, creative projects and their interpretation fuel positive change and renew humanists’ opportunities to make civic contributions.

Sommer is Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative.

Documentary and journalism have a complicated relationship. They share commitments to reality-based storytelling, yet have distinctive legacies and institutional histories. They share technologies, vocabularies and modes of address, yet have different notions of time, from the ‘now’ of breaking news to the ‘timeless’ status of classic documentaries. At a moment when the Internet has emerged as a platform common to print and broadcast journalism as well as new forms of interactive and participatory documentary, complication seems more like confusion. One might try to clarify the situation by disambiguating these genres, solidifying their boundaries. We seek instead to make productive use of the situation by taking advantage of their commonalities, finding ways to re-invent and re-invigorate both documentary and journalism, in the process expanding their audiences and enhancing their relevance. Documentaries have demonstrated the advantages of synergistic thinking, finding a new place and new publics through digital journalism portals. But what can new forms of documentary contribute back to journalism? To answer that question, we have to think critically and creatively about the affordances of these different traditions in light of their new ecosystem.

Raney Aronson, deputy executive producer, FRONTLINE
Katerina Cizek, documentary director, National Film Board of Canada
Jason Spingarn-Koff, New York Times Op-Docs editor
Francesca Panetta, Guardian multimedia special projects editor
Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT

How does an object set the limits for human experiences of will and subjecthood? How does an interface temper our desires for interactivity or intervention? A remote control appears to exert its user’s will over distant objects, yet the design and function of the device itself instill in its subject a vexed relationship to his or her own agency. Analyzing the technical and design evolution of these devices reveals how the seemingly most inconsequential of media devices have shaped the way users cohabit with mass media, consumer electronics, and each other.

Caetlin Benson-Allott is Associate Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) and Remote Control (New York: Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming 2015). Her articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, Jump Cut, Film Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Film Criticism, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video as well as multiple anthologies.

Co-sponsored with MIT Literature.

In recent years, a variety of funders have begun to invest substantially in efforts to assess the impact of media initiatives such as documentary films and journalism ventures. These efforts reflect a fundamental shift in how media performance is assessed (and whose assessments matter) in an environment of extreme audience fragmentation and increased challenges to monetizing media content. This presentation focuses on ongoing research that seeks to define and assess the field of media impact assessment. In addressing these issues, this analysis seeks to:

Identify important points of distinction between contemporary notions of media impact and more traditional notions of media effects;

Assess the methods and metrics being employed to assess media impact;

Identify the key challenges and tensions inherent in such efforts.

This presentation also illustrates that impact represents only one of a number of aspects of journalistic performance that are being converted to quantitative performance metrics. Related areas of ongoing research include efforts to assess the health of local media ecosystems and the quality of journalistic content. The broader implications of this wide-ranging transformation in how journalistic performance may be assessed will be considered.

Philip M. Napoli (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is Professor of Journalism & Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University, where he leads the Media and the Public Interest Initiative. His current research projects include an analysis of the functioning of the New York City information ecosystem during and after Hurricane Sandy (funded by Internews) and the News Measures Research Project (funded by the Democracy Fund and the Dodge Foundation).

Identity and reputation drive some of the most important decisions we make online: Who to follow or link to, whose information to trust, whose opinion to rely on when choosing a product or service, whose content to consume and share. Yet, we know very little about the dynamics of online reputation and how it affects our decision making.

The MIT Sloan School of Management’s Sinan Aral describes a series of randomized experiments that explore the population level behavioral dynamics catalyzed by identity and reputation online. He explores some of the implications for bias in online ratings, the foundations of social advertising and the ability to generate cascades of behavior through peer to peer social influence in networks. The coming decades will likely see an emphasis on verified identities online. Aral argues that a new science of online identity could help guide our business, platform design and social policy decisions in light of the rising importance of online reputation and social influence.

Transcript: http://cmsw.mit.edu/eduardo-marisca-peru-creative-industries-prototyping-lab/

Discussion of "Gaming in Color", a full length documentary of the story of the queer gaming community, gaymer culture and events, and the rise of LGBTQ themes in video games. A lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise queer gamer has a higher chance of being mistreated in an online social game. Diverse queer themes in storylines and characters are still mostly an anomaly in the mainstream video game industry. Gaming In Color explores how the community culture is shifting and the industry is diversifying, helping with queer visibility and acceptance of an LGBTQ presence.

Philip Jones is a queer youth and activist, who began in the games industry with journalism and podcasting. He is now best known for his work in directing the video games documentary Gaming in Color which focuses on queer gamers. He also has a hand in other MidBoss projects, currently head of the expo hall and vendor relations for the second GaymerX convention, as well as assistant writer for upcoming adventure game Read Only Memories. When not working on these projects, he studies and wears too much flannel at his home in Texas.

Algorithms may now be our most important knowledge technologies, “the scientific instruments of a society at large,” (Gitelman) and they are increasingly vital to how we organize human social interaction, produce authoritative knowledge, and choreograph our participation in public life. Search engines, recommendation systems, edge algorithms on social networking sites, and “trend” identification algorithms: these not only help us find information, they provide a means to know what there is to know and to participate in social and political discourse. In this talk Tarleton Gillespie will highlight one particular dimension of these algorithms, their production of calculated publics: algorithmically produced snapshots of the “public” around us and what most concerns it. Understanding the calculations and motivations behind the production of these calculated publics helps highlight how these algorithms are relevant to our collective efforts to know and be known.

Tarleton Gillespie is an associate professor at Cornell University, in the Department of Communication and the Department of Information Science. This semester he is a visiting researcher with Microsoft Research, New England. He is the co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (2014), and the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (2007), and the co-founder of the scholarly blog at culturedigitally.org.

Using the tools of online textual annotation -- the platform Rap Genius, its spinoff site Poetry Genius, or MIT's own Annotation Studio -- readers can collaborate on annotating or interpreting a work, make their annotations public, and respond to interpretations by others. We will be joined by creators, facilitators, and users of these sites to discuss how online annotation is changing practices of reading, enriching practices of teaching and learning, and making newly public a previously private encounter with the written word.

Speakers:

Wyn Kelley is a senior lecturer in Literature. She has worked for many years with the MIT's digital humanities lab, HyperStudio, and is the author of Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996) among other works.

Kurt Fendt is Director of HyperStudio, MIT's Center for Digital Humanities. HyperStudio explores the potential of new media technologies for the enhancement of research and education.

Jeremy Dean, AKA Lucky_Desperado, is the "Education Czar" at Rap Genius, an online database of song lyrics (and poetry on the spinoff site Poetry Genius) that users can annotate freely.

Moderator: Noel Jackson is a Professor of Literature at MIT and author of Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (2008).

The standardization of color television in the US during the postwar era was, in large part, discussed and determined in relation to historical developments in color theory (philosophical, psychological, and physical), colorimetry, color design and industry, psychophysics, psychology and, of course, what had already been established industrially, culturally, and technically for monochrome television. In this presentation, Susan Murray explores how these various threads of scientific, aesthetic, philosophical, and industrial knowledge were built into the standards, processes, and procedures for and around the technology and use of color television from the late 1940s and into the early 1950s. This presentation will be less about color programming itself, and more about the discourses that framed and managed color use and reception not only in the standardization period, but also during RCA and NBC’s early attempts to sell color to consumers, sponsors, and critics.

Susan Murray is associate professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. She is the author of Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars! Early Television and Broadcast Stardom (2005) and the coeditor (with Laurie Ouellette) of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture (2004, 2009). She has received fellowships from the ACLS and NYU’s Humanities Initiative for 2013-14 and is currently writing a history of color television from 1929-1970, which is under contract with Duke University Press.

Hanya Yanagihara’s first book, the widely celebrated The People In The Trees, is loosely based on the life and work of Nobel Prize-winner physician and researcher D. Carleton Gajdusek. She joins author and physicist Alan Lightman, who was the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities, to discuss the unique challenges of respecting the exacting standards of science in fictional texts. Forum Co-Director Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus, moderates.

Hanya Yanagihara is an Editor-At-Large at Conde Nast Traveler and author of The People In The Trees, a novel the New York Times called "suspenseful" and "exhaustingly inventive."

Alan Lightman is currently Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT and author of the international bestseller Einstein’s Dreams. His most recent novel, Mr g, was published in January 2012.

Seth Mnookin is Co-Director of the Communications Forum and Associate Director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book is The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.

Journalist and author Barry Werth has been writing about the business and practice of the pharmaceutical industry for more than two decades. The Billion Dollar Molecule, his 1995 book on Vertex Pharmaceuticals, was named one the “75 Smartest Books We Know” by Fortune. His sixth and most recent book, The Antidote: Inside the World of Big Pharma, revisits Vertex, offering unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to a company that that went from cash-starved startup to a triumph of American bio-tech innovation. Werth has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Technology Review, among many others publications.

Against inexorable machinations of data surveillance, analysis, and profiling, data obfuscation holds promise of relief. Whether it can withstand countervailing analytics is an intriguing question; whether it is unethical, illegitimate, or, at best, ungenerous cuts close to the bone. Yet, as NYU’s Helen Nissenbaum will argue in this talk, obfuscation is a compelling “weapon-of-the-weak,” which deserves to be developed and strengthened, its moral challenges countered and mitigated.

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science, at New York University, where she is also Director of the Information Law Institute. Her work spans social, ethical, and political dimensions of information technology and digital media. She has written and edited five books, including Values at Play in Digital Games, with Mary Flanagan (forthcoming from MIT Press, 2014) and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford University Press, 2010) and her research publications have appeared in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science. The National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Ford Foundation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator have supported her work on privacy, trust online, and security, as well as several studies of values embodied in computer system design, search engines, digital games, facial recognition technology, and health information systems.

Nissenbaum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand. Before joining the faculty at NYU, she served as Associate Director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Legendary former MIT professor and housemaster Henry Jenkins, now the Provost’s Professor of Communications, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California, returns to the Forum for a conversation about his time at the Institute and the founding of CMS as well as his path-breaking scholarship on contemporary media. Forum Director David Thorburn, Jenkins’ longtime friend and colleague, will moderate the discussion.

Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He taught at MIT from 1990-2009 and was the founding director of the Comparative Media Studies program at the Institute. He has written many books on film, popular culture and media, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008).

David Thorburn is a professor of Literature and Director of the MIT Communications Forum. He is the author of a critical study of the novelist Joseph Conrad and many essays on literature and media. Among his publications: Rethinking Media Change (2007), co-edited with Henry Jenkins.

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.

Courtesy of The New York Public Library. www.nypl.org

Re-use is subject to the New York Public Library's non-commercial use permissions: http://www.nypl.org/help/about-nypl/legal-notices/website-terms-and-conditions

Original event and recordings: http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/toni-morrison-junot-d%C3%ADaz

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 is 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Liveblog text: http://cmsw.mit.edu/liveblog-ethan-zuckerman-digital-cosmopolitanism-cognitive-diversity/

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.

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.

From http://rosalindwilliams.com/2013/09/introduction-a-podcast-conversation/

Annotations by Rosalind Williams.

What's In a Slash? by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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 discuss the Phoenix‘s legacy and the ways in which its loss will affect Boston.

Panelists are 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 moderates.

Roderick Coover, Temple University Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck Molly Sauter, MIT Dan Whaley, hypothes.is Moderator: James Paradis, MIT

Notions of a "public sphere" have always incited skepticism and qualification, in particular the recognition of "counterpublics" that operate inside and at the margins of consensus discourse. Counterpublics can be spaces of political opposition - sites of resistance, civil disobedience, disruption - or spaces of play and self-fashioning, enabling the emergence of alt-, sub-, and fan cultures and alternative forms of community and identity. How is digital technology - and social media in particular - generating categories of identity and belonging that define themselves in opposition to established norms of personhood or community? How do the counterpublics of the digital age differ from those of the past?

Cristobal Garcia, P. Universidad Catolica (Chile) Eric Gordon, Emerson College Henry Jenkins, USC Maria San Filippo, Harvard University Moderator: Noel Jackson, MIT

It is a truth universally acknowledged that digital technologies have immensely enhanced existing means of surveillance by government and corporations and have created powerful new instruments to monitor individual behavior. Do the ramifying systems for observing and recording our routine activities fundamentally threaten our privacy and freedom, as many have argued? In an era of dating mining and smart algorithms, is our awareness that we are being monitored, converted to bits and distributed among databases, changing the way we behave as citizens and individuals? Should it do so? Or is this framing of the question too pessimistic, ignoring the fact that many of the world's data collectors are or claim to be improving our lives by expanded productivity, services tailored to individual users, advances not merely in shopping but in health, education and public safety.

Goran Bolin, Sodertorn University (Sweden) Kelly Gates, University of California, San Diego Jose van Dijck, University of Amsterdam Moderator: Ethan Zuckerman, MIT

Amid disquiet over encroachments on privacy by government and corporations, another class of concerns has arisen: That some people (often young users of social media) are not respecting the traditional boundaries of privacy and are choosing to share "too much information." Do these people's technical skills outstrip their social skills? Are they unaware of how information can persist and potentially damage their reputation? Or are the stern adults who question this behavior clinging to an outmoded idea of privacy? Are the apps and algorithms and platforms of social media invisibly transforming norms of privacy and personal freedom?

Feona Attwood, Middlesex University (UK) David Rosen, author Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard University Moderator: Nick Montfort, MIT

Recent provocations (boyd and Crawford, 2011) about the role of "big data" in human communication research and technology studies deserve an outline of the value of anthropology, as a particular kind of "big data".

Mary L. Gray, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, will walk through the different dimensions of social inquiry that fall under the rubric of "big data". She argues for attending to different dimensions rather than scales of data, more collaborative approaches to how we arrive at what we (think we) know, and critical analysis of the cultural assumptions embedded in the data we collect. By moving from the "snapshot" of quantitative work to the "time-lapse photography" of ethnography, she suggests that researchers must imagine "big data" as an on-going process of modeling, triangulation, and critique.

Gray's current research includes work on ethnographically-informed social media research, compliance cyberinfrastructures in universities and their impact on emerging media research, online labour, and the importance of location and place in the context of mobile technologies. Her book Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America examined how youth in rural parts of the United States fashioned "queer" senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media--particularly internet access--played in their lives and political work.

In the 2012 presidential campaign, a handful of media outlets deployed "fact-checking" divisions which reported the lies and distortions of the candidates. Some commentators have argued that these truth-squads exposed the inadequacy of standard print and broadcast coverage, much of which seems more like entertainment than news. This forum will examine the changing role of the political media in the U.S. Is our political journalism serving democratic and civic ideals? What do emerging technologies and the proliferation of news sources mean for the future?

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.

Mark McKinnon is a senior advisor of Hill & Knowlton Strategies, an international communications consultancy, a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast and The London Telegraph, and is a co-founder of the bipartisan group No Labels. As a political advisor, he has worked for many causes, companies and candidates including former President George W. Bush, 2008 Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, late former Texas Governor Ann Richards and Congressman Charlie Wilson.

The statistician and political polling analyst Nate Silver will discuss his career -- from student journalist to baseball prognosticator to the creator of FiveThirtyEight.com, perhaps the most influential political blog in the world -- and the ways in which statistics are changing the face of journalism in a conversation with Seth Mnookin, a former baseball and political writer who co-directs MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic; author of a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, about his father's influence during his childhood in Baltimore; and, this year, an MLK Scholar at MIT. We talked about his impressions of MIT students and his growth as a writer, and we touched upon his research of the Civil War, the setting for an upcoming book.

The fate of narrative. What is happening to our culture’s stories and story-tellers? What has been the impact, what is the future import of the proliferation of audiences, creators and of ways to communicate on unstable platforms?

Public spheres. How are new technologies transforming our public discourse? Are newspapers dead or merely reinventing themselves digitally? What skills will be essential for journalists of the digital age? Who will be the journalists of the digital age? What hybrid forms are already emerging?

Visions, Nightmares. What concrete emerging practices or developments inspire optimism in you, what tendencies most trouble you?

Panelists:

Joshua Benton, Nieman Journalism Lab, Harvard Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Pomona College Mark Leccese, Emerson College Klaus Peter Muller, Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany Moderator: David Thorburn, MIT

Computing plays an important role in some types of media, such as video games, digital art, and electronic literature. It seems evident that an understanding of programming and computing systems may help us learn more about these productions and their role in culture. But few have focused on the levels of code and platform. Adding these neglected levels to digital media studies can help to advance the field, offering insights that would not be found by focusing on the levels of experience and interface by themselves. The recent project of Critical Code Studies and two book series just started by The MIT Press, Software Studies and Platform Studies, represent a new willingness to consider digital media at these levels. With reference to mass-market and more esoteric systems and works, ranging from Atari 2600 and arcade games to Talan Memmott’s Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)], this talk describes how looking at the code and platform levels can enhance our comparative media studies of computational works.

Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media at MIT and has been part of dozens of academic, editorial, and literary collaborations.

In an economy of informational abundance, does the traditional truth-revealing role of critical media practice still have any political relevance? Or are there other, perhaps more politically potent, ways of thinking about the liberatory possibilities of media? By considering a range of examples, from Thomas More’s 16th century Utopia to 21st century political art, we will explore the possibilities and pitfalls of mediated utopias as a means of revitalizing the critical practice of communications. Of particular interest are impossible utopias, “no-places” whose unrealizability is inscribed in their depiction. For it is through the encounter with their very impossibility that conditions for new critique and new imagination may be created.

Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture, the editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader, and co-author of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920′s New York. He also writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of scholarly and popular publications, from the cerebral, The Nation, to the prurient, Playboy. Duncombe is a life-long political activist, co-founding a community based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of an international direct action group. Currently, he is a Research Associate at the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in New York City where he co-founded and organized “The College of Tactical Culture” and is engaged in an ongoing investigation into the efficacy of political art. He is currently working on a book on the art of propaganda during the New Deal.

Ethan Gilsdorf discussed some of the themes of his new book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, a blend of travelogue, pop culture analysis, and memoir as forty-year-old former D&D addict Gilsdorf crisscrosses America, the world, and other worlds–from Boston to Wisconsin, France to New Zealand, and Planet Earth to the realm of Aggramar. He asks: Who are these gamers and fantasy fans? What explains the irresistible appeal of such “escapist” adventures? How do the players balance their escapist urges with the kingdom of adulthood?

Gilsdorf talked about the culture’s discomfort with the geek/nerd/gamer stereotype and looked at society’s ambivalent relationship with gaming and fantasy play, and the origins of that prejudice, as well as the author’s own past misgivings and final acceptance of his “geek”

Randy Testa, Vice-President of Education and Professional Development, Walden Media, LLC will discuss what it means to create educational content in tandem with commercially released family films, film adaptations of children’s literature. He will also discuss why Walden Media as a film studio has recently moved into publishing children’s literature as another platform for storytelling and content acquisition.

Globalization is eroding the notion of national cinema. As foreign-language remakes, globalized labor pools, and international co-productions become ever more common, distinct national cinemas are being replaced by a variety of transnational cinemas. Anime, often considered a uniquely Japanese cinematic form, is no exception. This talk will explore one recent example of transnational anime: Tekkon Kinkreet, the first Japanese anime to be written and directed by Americans. Christina Klein is associate professor of English and American Studies at Boston College. She is the author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 and is currently writing a book about the globalization of U.S. and Asian film industries.

This presentation / lecture / infomercial examines the nature and implications of object performance both as a global cultural tradition and as a contemporary medium that dominates our culture. While performing objects traditionally include puppets, masks, icons, and other “things”, the more recent innovations of film, television, and the internet can also be seen as aspects of our need to play with stuff. In all cases, the central dynamic of this form involves a focus on the material world instead of humans. The talk will be accompanied by images from 20th-century avant-garde film and performance work. John Bell began his performance work with Bread and Puppet Theater, after which he earned a Ph.D. in theater history at Columbia University. He is a founding member of the award-winning Great Small Works theater company of Brooklyn, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, and Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut. This spring he will be directing a “Living Newspaper”-style production about the politics of global healthcare with MIT students. His latest book, American Puppet Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), examines particular moments of puppet, mask, and object theater in the United States over the past 150 years. He is a trombonist with the Somerville-based Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, and organizer of the upcoming October 12th HONK! Festival Parade from Davis Square to Harvard Square.

The MIT Press book we affectionately call 10 PRINT -- actually 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 -- was an unusual project in several respects. The book focuses on a single line of now-unfamiliar code, code of the sort that millions typed in and modified in the 1970s and 1980s. The book contributes to several threads of contemporary digital media scholarship, including critical code studies, software studies, and platform studies. Also somewhat oddly, the book was written in a single voice by ten people: Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter.

At this CMS colloquium, co-authors will discuss the nature of their collaboration, which was organized by Montfort, designed as a book by Reas, and facilitated by structured conversations and writing done online (using a mailing list and a wiki) as well as (in a few cases) in person. The writing of 10 PRINT is offered as a new mode of scholarship, very suitable in digital media but capable of being applied throughout the humanities. It brings some of the benefits of laboratory work and collaborative design practice to the traditionally individual mode of scholarly research and argument.

Chris Boebel and David Tamés gave us an overview of the production of ZigZag, MIT's new video podcast/magazine, as well as a look into the future of media production, distribution, and consumption.

Newly appointed MLK scholar Frank Espinosa leads a discussion of his Eisner-award nominated graphic novel, Rocketo.

Cosponsored by the MIT Cool Japan Project.

Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience, despite remaining deeply underground. How did the submergent circulations of Noise become such a compelling metaphor for the complexities of globalization, intercultural exchange and participatory media at the turn of the millennium? In this talk, I trace the "cultural feedback" of Noise through the productive distortions of its mediated networks: its recorded forms, technologies of live performance, and into the lives and creative practices of musicians and listeners.

David Novak teaches in the Music Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work deals with the globalization of popular music, media technologies, experimental culture, and social practices of listening. He is the author of recent essays in Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, and Popular Music, as well as the book Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke University Press).

We often talk of video games as being "fun," but this is a mistake. When we play video games, our facial expressions are only occasionally those of of happiness, instead we frown and grimace when fail to achieve our goals. This is the paradox of failure: why do we play video games even though they make us unhappy?

In video games, as in tragic works of art, literature, theater, and cinema, it seems that we want to experience unpleasantness even if we also dislike it. Yet failure in a game is unique in that when we fail in a game, it means that we (not a character) are in some way inadequate, and games then motivate us to play more, in order to escape that inadequacy.

In this talk, based on his new book The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul will argue that the paradox of failure pervades games on many levels: in game design, in sports coaching, in strategy guides, in taunting, in the prejudices against sore losers. The issue of failure is also central to recurring controversies of what games can, or should be about: what does it mean to cause terrible events to happen in a fictional game world? Games, then are the Art of Failure: the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience it and experiment with it.

Jesper Juul is an assistant professor at the New York University Game Center and a visiting assistant professor at Comparative Media Studies. He has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990's. His publications include Half-Real on video game theory, and A Casual Revolution on how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii brought video games to a new audience. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on "game research and other important things".

D.T. Max, staff writer at the New Yorker, looks at David Foster Wallace and irony, with an eye especially on his 1990's attacks on David Letterman and the novelist Mark Leyner, both in publications and in private correspondence. When did David Foster Wallace become obsessed with irony and why? What made him so sure it was corrosive to civil culture or initiative? Or was the unease he felt in its presence really more the product of his own personal history?

Co-hosted with Literature at MIT.

Organized by Literature. Co-sponsored with CMS, the MIT HyperStudio for Digital Humanities, and Ancient and Medieval Studies.

Millions of documents produced around the world over more than four thousand years are now available in digital form -- Google Books alone had scanned, by March 2012, more than 20 million books in more than 400 languages. Images of manuscripts, papyri, inscriptions and other non-print sources are also appearing in increasing numbers. But if we have addressed physical access to images of textual sources, we are a long way from providing the intellectual access necessary to understand the written sources that we see. This talk explores the challenges and opportunities as we refashion our study of the past from ethnocentric monolingual conversations into a hyperlingual dialogue among civilizations, where humans work with machines and with each other to communicate and where books do, as Marvin Minksy opined decades ago, talk to each other.

Gregory Crane is Chair of the Department of Classics at Tufts University, as well as an Adjunct Professor in Tufts' Department of Computer Science. Since 1988, he has been Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Project, a long-running digital humanities effort focused on Greek, Latin, and Arabic Classics.

Co-sponsored by the MIT Open Documentary Lab.

Hybrid forms of multimedia, combining aspects of newspapers, documentary film and digital video are a notable feature of today's on-line journalism. How is this access to the power of the visual changing our journalism? What current projects are particularly significant? What will this convergence mean in the future?

Jason Spingarn-Koff is the series producer and curator of Op-Docs, a new initiative at the New York Times for short opinionated documentaries by independent filmmakers and artists. He directed the feature documentary "Life 2.0", which premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network's Documentary Club, and his work has appeared on PBS, BBC, MSNBC, Time.com and Wired News. In 2010-2011, he was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

Alexandra Garcia is a multimedia journalist for The Washington Post. She reports, shoots and edits video stories on topics ranging from health care and immigration to fashion and education. Awarded an Edward R. Murrow award, eight regional Emmy awards and named 2011 Video Editor of the Year by the White House News Photographers Association, Garcia is currently a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Moderator: Sarah Wolozin, director of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, has produced documentaries and educational media for a variety of media outlets including PBS, History Channel, Learning Channel and NPR.

Young people born in 1980's and 1990's China are the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention as they are the country's first generation of only children. They are also the first generation to come of age with the Internet, and, for many, playing Internet games forms an integral part of the youth experience. This presentation will explore the affective dimensions of digital games from the perspective of urban Chinese youth. What is the significance of an e-sports event that attracts tens of thousands of twenty-somethings, many of whom experience it as a teary-eyed "farewell to their youth"? Or a viral video created by World of Warcraft gamers that urges millions of viewers to "raise their fists in solidarity" to show support for their "spiritual homeland"? What should we make of these phenomena that demonstrate, ever more clearly, the ways in which games are intertwined with people's spiritual and emotional lives? Are games the imagined utopia they are made out to be in these nostalgic accounts or might these affective attachments prove to be a form of what Lauren Berlant (2011) has called "cruel optimism," a relationship in which the very thing that is desired becomes an obstacle to flourishing?

Marcella Szablewicz is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Duke University. Her research focuses on youth and digital media in urban China. She is currently working on a book based on her dissertation, provisionally entitled From Addicts to Athletes: Youth Mobilities and the Politics of Digital Gaming in Urban China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork supported by the Fulbright and National Science Foundations, the book will examine the precarious socio-economic futures of urban Chinese youth through the lens of digital gaming culture, while also considering how dominant discourse about digital leisure practice is shaped by larger cultural debates about patriotism and productivity, class and the crafting of the "ideal citizen". Her work can also be found in the Routledge volume Online Society in China and in the Chinese Journal of Communication.

Co-sponsored by the Cool Japan Project.

Al Filreis has taught his “ModPo” course at Penn for years; in Fall 2012 he offered a 10-week version of the course online, via Coursera, to more than 36,000 students. The course, as in its previous versions, does not include lectures, being based instead on discussion – the collaborative close readings of poems. The course grows out of Filreis’s work at the Kelly Writers House; he has been Faculty Director of this literary freespace since its founding in 1995. Filreis is also co-founder of PennSound, the Web’s main free archive of poetry readings, publisher of Jacket2 magazine, and producer and host of “PoemTalk,” a podcast/radio series of close readings of poems. In conversation with Nick Montfort, Filreis will discuss ModPo and his perspective on writing, teaching, and digital media.

Filreis is Kelly Professor of English and Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, Modernism from Right to Left, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modernism, 1945-60, and other works. He was chosen as Pennsylvania Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation in 2000.

Part of the Purple Blurb series, and co-sponsored by the SHASS Dean’s Office and the Literature Section.

The Red Hen Lab is a distributed laboratory for the study of network news. In an earlier talk, Professor Francis Steen provided a technical overview of the activities of Red Hen and surveyed the study by Francis Steen and Mark Turner of international network news coverage of the Anders Bering Brevik event in Oslo, Norway, in July, 2011, with an emphasis on the way in which network news is occupied with the assessment of culpability, blame, and credit. This talk will discuss research on the cognitive underpinnings of network news, with an emphasis on blended joint attention, story-telling, counterfactuality, and hypotheticals.

Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University.

He is the founding director of the Cognitive Science Network. His most recent book publications are Ten Lectures on Mind and Language and two edited volumes, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, and Meaning, Form, & Body, edited with Fey Parrill and Vera Tobin. His other publications include Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think about Politics, Economics, Law, and Society, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, and many more. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Advanced Study of Durham University. He is a fellow of the Institute for the Science of Origins, external research professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive Neuroscience, distinguished fellow at the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, and Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftsliches Zentrum. In 1996, the Académie française awarded him the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises. For 2011-2012, he is a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

This presentation develops a theoretical framework (rooted in Science and Technology Studies) for understanding how, generally, social media's technical feature-sets create a system of capture and conversion. Capture describes the persistent ways in which social web platforms record and fix online/offline social and technical practices. Conversion applies to the way in which technical architectures convert what is captured into value (both culturally contingent and economic). The notions of capture and conversion are developed in light of other work in the field that seeks to understand how social web platforms use technology to leverage user generated content (UGC). The framework bridges a focus on ongoing social practice within/through platforms with analysis of technology as a determinant of probable practice. Ultimately this work is part of a larger project that seeks to develop a way of critically engaging the political economy of the social web while at the same time not ignoring the subject positions of those whose lives on display make it compelling.

Hector Postigo is Associate Professor in Media Studies and Production at Temple University's School of Media and Communication. He is the co-founder of the blog culturedigitally.org and most recently the author of The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright from MIT Press and co-editor of Managing Privacy Through Accountability from Palgrave Press. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the European Commission. He teaches and writes about video game culture, labor in digital networks, and privacy and copyright on the social web.

Sponsored by the Purple Blurb series.

Walden, a game, is an experiment in play being made about an experiment in living. The game simulates Henry David Thoreau’s experiment in living a simplified existence as articulated in his book Walden. It puts Thoreau’s ideas about the essentials of life into a playable form, in which players can take on the role of Thoreau, attending to the “meaner” tasks of life at the Pond–providing themselves with food, fuel, shelter and clothing–while trying not to lose sight of their relationship to nature, where the Thoreau found the true rewards of his experiment, his “finer fruits” of life. The game is a work in progress, and this talk will look closely at the design of the underlying system and the cycles of thought that have gone into developing it. It will also detail the creation of the game world, which is based on close readings of Thoreau’s work, and the projected path forward for the team as we continue our sojourn in experimental in play.

Tracy Fullerton, M.F.A., is an experimental game designer, professor and director of the Game Innovation Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she holds the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment. The Game Innovation Lab is a design research center that has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and The Night Journey — a collaboration with media artist Bill Viola. Tracy is also the author of “Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games,” a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide.

Purple Blurb is a series of presentations for digital writing, with its thanks given to Angus N. Macdonald Fund and MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies.

Despite many infrastructural and economic hurdles, entertainment media industries are burgeoning in West Africa. Today, the Nigerian cinema market–”Nollywood”–is the second largest in the world in terms of the annual volume of films distributed behind only the Indian film industry. And an era of digital distribution has empowered content created in Lagos, or Accra, to spread across geographic and cultural boundaries. New commercial models for distribution as well as international diasporic networks have driven the circulation of this material. But so has rampant piracy and the unofficial online circulation of this content. What innovations are emerging from West Africa? How has Nigerian cinema in particular influenced local television and film markets in other countries across West Africa, and across the continent? What does the increasing visibility of West African popular culture mean for this region–especially as content crosses various cultural contexts, within and outside the region? And what challenges does West Africa face in continuing to develop its entertainment industries?

Derrick N. Ashong leads the band Soulfège, a group that produces an eclectic blend of hip-hop, reggae, funk, world beat and West African highlife music and has been featured in such major media as MTV Africa and NPR. Also known as DNA, which is the name of his blog, Ashong hosted Oprah Radio’s The Derrick Ashong Experience and Al-Jazeera English’s social media TV show The Stream.

Colin M. Maclay is the managing director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Both as co-founder of Harvard’s International Technologies Group and at Berkman, Maclay’s research pairs hands-on multi-stakeholder collaborations with the generation of data that reveal trends, challenges and opportunities for the integration of communications technologies in developing communities.

Fadzi Makanda is a business development manager in the New York office of iROKO Partners, a distributor of African–and particularly Nollywood–entertainment. Makanda leads the development and execution of U.S. advertising sales strategies for the company.

Moderator: Ralph Simon is founder of the Mobilium Advisory Group, which studies innovation in mobile usage in such countries as Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. He has served as an executive at Capitol Records, Blue Note Records, and EMI Music, and he co-founded the Zomba Group with Clive Calder of South Africa. Simon earned the title “Father of the Ring Tone” when he created the first ring tone company in 1997.

The role of the library in the digital age is one of the compelling questions of our era. How are libraries coping with the promise and perils of our impending digital future? What urgent initiatives are underway to assure universal access to our print inheritance and to the digital communication forms of the future? How is the very idea of the library changing? These and related questions will engage our distinguished panelists, who represent both research and public libraries and two of whom serve on the steering committee for the Digital Public Library of America.

Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard, Director of the Harvard University Library and one of America’s most distinguished historians. He serves on the steering committee of the Digital Public Library of America and has been a trustees of the New York Public Library since 1995. In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Darnton defended a NYPL plan to liquidate some branches in the system while renovating the main Fifth Avenue branch. The essay sparked a number of responses. In November of last year, Darnton provided a status report on the DPLA. Darnton is the author of many influential books including The Case for Books, Past, Present, and Future and The Great Cat Massacre.

Susan Flannery is director of libraries for the City of Cambridge and past president of the Massachusetts Library Association.

Linda Gregerson discusses her new book of poems, The Selvage, and her calling as a poet and professor of Renaissance literature in conversation with Forum Director David Thorburn and members of the audience.

A 2007 National Book Award finalist and a recent Guggenheim Fellow, Linda Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature. She is the author of four books of poetry and two books of criticism. Gregerson’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Granta, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. Among her honors and awards are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Kingsley Tufts Award, four Pushcart Prizes, grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Bogliasco Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Poetry Society of America, and the National Humanities Center.

Gediminas Urbonas is artist and educator, and co-founder (with Nomeda Urbonas) of Urbonas Studio – an interdisciplinary research program that advocates for the reclamation of public culture in the face of overwhelming privatization, stimulating cultural and political imagination as tools for social change. Often beginning with archival research, their methodology unfolds complex participatory works investigating the urban environment, architectural developments, and cultural and technological heritage.

The Urbonases have established their international reputation for socially interactive and interdisciplinary practice exploring the conflicts and contradictions posed by the economic, social, and political conditions of countries in transition. Working in collaboration they develop models for social and artistic practice with the interest to design organizational structures that question relativity of freedom.

They use art platform to render public spaces for interaction and engagement of the social groups, evoking local communities and encouraging their cultural and political imagination. Combining the tools of new and traditional media, their work frequently involves collective activities such as workshops, lectures, debates, TV programs, Internet chat-rooms and public protests that stand at the intersection of art, technology and social criticism.

They are also co-founders of VILMA (Vilnius Interdisciplinary Lab for Media Art), and VOICE, a net based publication on media culture. They have exhibited internationally including the San Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon and Gwangju Biennales – and Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions – among numerous other international shows, including a solo show at the Venice Biennale and MACBA in Barcelona. Their work was awarded a number of high level grants and residency awards, including the Lithuanian National Prize (2007); a fellowship at the Montalvo Arts Center in California (2008); a Prize for the Best International Artist at the Gwangju Biennale (2006) and the Special Prize for the best national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007).

Their writings on artistic research as a form of intervention to social and political crisis was published in the books Devices for Action (2008) by MACBA Press, Barcelona and Villa Lituania (2008) by Sternberg Press.

Gediminas Urbonas is Associate Professor in Visual Arts at ACT – the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.

We have come to associate the internet with narratives of appealing unpredictability. We have become accustomed to scanning for the next best thing, to expecting novelty at our fingertips. We are habituated to stories of people using computers to throw established authorities into disarray: stories of surprising computer-related business start-ups, from Apple and Microsoft around 1980 through Facebook and beyond; of peculiar digital inventions taking the world by storm; of internet use by political rebels from Howard Dean to the Tea Party to the Arab Spring; of disruptive events that throw entire industries into disarray, like college students downloading music or uploading videos. The habit of throwing money at internet-related businesses in rough proportion to their air of rebelliousness persists to some degree, even if dampened by memories of the stock collapses and scandals of the early 2000s. Novelty in the digital does not surprise us; it is an expectation – at the same time that we have nearly given up on the idea of change in other in other aspects of our lives (e.g., in dysfunctional politics, our dependence on the automobile, the persistence of poverty).

The Net Effect (2011) attributed this pattern in part to an American tradition of reading experiences through a romantic individualist lens. Widespread interactive computing introduced common experiences to large swathes of the population: the compulsive draw that often comes with computer use, for example, or the repeated wonder of plugging in a new gizmo that a short time ago would have been impossibly expensive or just impossible, or the cubicle dweller’s secret pleasure of discovering, on a slow day at work, something striking on computer networks that is unknown to the powers that be. Romanticism provided a framework for making sense of those experiences, and thus a way to frame computing as an exploration, not a means to an end, as a means of personal expression, as an art.

This presentation elaborates on the sociology of this pattern of expectant novelty, using Papacharissi’s suggestion that the digital world offers a “habitus of the new,” with its own distinct inducements and blindspots. Bourdieu’s notion of a habitus offers a non-dualist, non-determinist way to make sense of the way digital novelty has become woven into the fabric of how we live our day to day lives.

Thomas Streeter is Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont. He has also taught for the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California, and was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (NYU Press, 2011) is a study of the role of culture in the social construction of internet technology. His award-winning Selling the Air, a study of the cultural underpinnings of the creation of the US broadcast industry and its regulatory apparatus, was published in 1996. He edited, with Zephyr Teachout, a volume about the use of the internet in Howard Dean’s run for President, called Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope, published in 2007. He has published articles and chapters in outlets ranging from the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal to the Journal of Communication to Critical Inquiry.

The so-called “yellow journalism” of the New York Journal and the New York World in the 1890s has been discredited by scholars and journalists for privileging sensational and biased stories. In its day, however, many within the news industry considered this experimental form of journalism to be a promising new direction for news writing. Both newspapers explored a reform-oriented form of news that some commentators and reformers believed could play a vital new role in advocating for the public interest. Revisiting the activist impulse behind yellow journalism provides a window on a changing media ecology in which the future of news was under debate. This moment of transition within nineteenth-century media also provides insight into the promise and potential dangers of activist media for today’s civically minded experiments with news.

Kelley Kreitz is a Visiting Scholar in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her research brings together media studies, the history of journalism, cultural studies, and U.S. and Latin American literary studies. She is completing a book called Electrifying News: A Hemispheric History of Newspapers, Novels, and Media Change. Kelley has also served as a radio journalist and as the director of the Idea Lab at Root Cause, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing new solutions to social problems. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University.

The first event in the Ancient and Medieval Studies Seminar Series and co-sponsored by Literature, HTC, and the SHASS Dean’s Office.

Writing, in relation to such affiliated topics as literacy, linguistics, cognition, and media studies, has a central place across and beyond the humanistic disciplines. It is time, in turn, for historians of medieval art to take a broader view of paleography, rather than view it primarily as a means of dating or localizing monuments, or, at the most literal level, deciphering illustrated texts or epigraphic inscriptions.

Within the realm of visual imagery, the written word can rise to a form of representation in its own right, prior to and independent of the complex phenomena generally considered under the rubric of “text and image” — a generalization as true of modern art as it is of the Middle Ages. In contrast to modernity, however, through much of the Middle Ages, as in Antiquity, the primary status of the spoken word and oral delivery ensured that writing, no less than picturing, was subject to suspicion.

Professor Hamburger’s presentation will survey some, if hardly all, of the many aspects of medieval script as a pictorial form, using examples ranging from Late Antiquity to the late Middle Ages and beyond.

Jeffrey Hamburger’s teaching and research focus on the art of the High and later Middle Ages. Among his areas of special interest are medieval manuscript illumination, text-image issues, the history of attitudes towards imagery and visual experience, and German vernacular religious writing of the Middle Ages, especially in the context of mysticism. Much of his scholarship has focused on the art of female monasticism. His current research includes a project that seeks to integrate digital technology into the study and presentation of liturgical manuscripts, a study of narrative imagery in late medieval German prayer books and a major international exhibition on German manuscript illumination in the age of Gutenberg.

Professor Hamburger’s books include The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Medieval West and The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany.

Hamburger holds both his B.A. and Ph.D. in art history from Yale University. He previously held teaching positions at Oberlin College and the University of Toronto. He has been a guest professor in Zurich, Paris, Oxford and Fribourg, Switzerland.

Close reading is a classic humanities methodology for the analysis and understanding of texts across a variety of media. It’s a rigorous discipline — in the words of van Looy and Baetans: “The text is never trusted at face value, but is torn to pieces and reconstituted by a reader who is at the same time a demolisher and a constructor.” This is a difficult task — the practice of close reading requires that the scholar immerse herself in the experience of the text on its own terms, and at the same time maintain a critical distance in order to observe and understand the construction and the effects of the text. Bizzocchi relies on close reading for his own scholarly work and uses various strategies to reconcile the contradictory states of experience and analysis.

Close reading can be used to explicate works across a variety of dimensions: thematic, cultural, historical, sociological, and others. Bizzocchi’s goal is to understand the poetics — the creative decisions — embedded in media works. Bordwell describes poetics as “inquiry into the fundamental principles by which artifacts in any representational medium are constructed, and the effects that flow from these principles”. Bizzocchi has always loved the magic of immersion in the experience of the moving image. As a scholar, he says his role is “to seek within that immersive experience the details of how the magic is created”. He will present his analyses of Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair, Tom Tykwer’s Run, Lola, Run, and Gerrie Villon and Alex Mayhew’s Ceremony of Innocence (an interactive adaptation of The Griffin and Sabine trilogy by Nick Bantock).

Jim Bizzocchi is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. His research includes work on narrative, interactive narrative, and the evolution of the moving image. He teaches classes in these areas, and is a recipient of the University Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is a practicing video artist, creating award-winning works in a genre he calls “Ambient Video”. Jim is a graduate of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (2001).

Everything we learn, know and understand is physical — a matter of brain circuitry. This basic fact has deep implications for how politics is understood, how campaigns are framed, why conservatives and progressives talk past each other, and why progressives have more problems framing messages than conservatives do — and what they can do about it.

George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. He previously taught at Harvard (1965-69) and the University of Michigan (1969-1972).

He graduated from MIT in 1962 (in Mathematics and Literature) and received his PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1966.

Read more at georgelakoff.com.

Social media have transformed relationships between those who create artistic work and those who enjoy it. Culture industries such as the music recording business have been left reeling as fans have gained the ability to distribute amongst themselves and artists have gained the ability to bypass traditional gatekeepers such as labels. The dominant rhetoric has been of ‘piracy,’ yet there are other tales to tell. How does direct access to fans change what it means to be an artist? What rewards are there that weren’t before? How are relational lines between fans and friends blurred and with what consequences? What new challenges other than making a living do artists face?

Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity), Internet Inquiry (co-edited with Annette Markham, Sage) and Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage). For the last two years she has been interviewing musicians about their relationships with audiences.

Television news provides a window into the cognitive processes commonly deployed to frame, explain, and reason about events. What Hart & Honore (1959/1985) show for courtrooms also holds for newsrooms: they rely on commonsense notions of causation to reconstruct events, assemble narratives, and determine responsibility.

The media provide a vehicle for a finer-grained ethical process than is captured by the legal system, often holding people accountable to a higher standard than the law. These standards emerge out of the different voices that appear in the media, creating either a more narrowly elitist or a more broadly-based and inclusive social dialogue. The implied goal of this dialogue is to help move society towards a better and more skillful level of functioning; the media firmly holds that free will is real and that human intentions and actions are potent forces of history that cause social change.

To achieve the intended results, however, journalists and others whose voices appear in the media must reconstruct events carefully, identifying possible windows of missed interventions and specific causal forks realistically. Illustrating the social debate in this Comparative Media Studies colloquium, Steen will examine the global media coverage of the July 22, 2011, attack in Norway, demonstrating that the news is not primarily about reporting what happened but about constructing narratives, performing event surgery, and assigning responsibility. Cultural values strongly influence the process of causal reasoning, subtly shaping the future direction of society.

Francis Steen is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Library Communication Studies Archive, a multimodal research corpus of some 200,000 television news programs automatically annotated by two billion words from closed captioning and transcripts. He will demonstrate some of the tools developed for the project, along with results from the ongoing NSF/CDI collaboration with computer vision and text mining teams. He and Mark Turner jointly direct the Red Hen Lab, a globally distributed laboratory for research on multimodal communication.

What is the role of design in modeling digital humanities? Can we imagine new forms of argument and platforms that support interpretative work? So much of the computationally driven environment of digital work has been created by design/engineers that humanistic values and methods have not found their place in the tools and formats that provide the platform for research, pedagogy, access, and use. The current challenge is to take advantage of the rich repositories and well-developed online resources and create innovative approaches to argument, curation, display, editing, and understanding that embody humanistic methods as well as humanities content. Designers have a major role to play in the collaborative envisioning of new formats and processes. Using some vivid examples and case studies, this talk outlines some of the opportunities for exciting work ahead.

Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson, 2008, 2nd edition late 2012). She is currently working on a database memoire, ALL, the online Museum of Writing in collaboration with University College London and King’s College, and a letterpress project titled Stochastic Poetics. A collaboratively written work, Digital_Humanities, with Jeffrey Schapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick is forthcoming from MIT Press.

Mainstream and avant-garde poets and fiction writers have been exploring the literary potential of the computer for decades, creating work that goes far beyond today’s e-books. The creators of electronic literature have developed new interface methods, new techniques for collaboration, and new ways of linking language, computing, and other media elements. How has electronic literature influenced other media, including the Web and the book? What are the implications of having literary projects in the digital sphere alongside other forms of communication and art?

Katherine Hayles is professor in the literature program at Duke University. Her books include Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008) and My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005).

Rita Raley is associate professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara where she directs Transcriptions, a research and pedagogic initiative on literature and the culture of information. Her most recent publications include the co-edited Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2.

Participants: Bonnie Mak (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), James Reid-Cunningham (Boston Athenaeum), Wyn Kelley (MIT Literature), Mary Fuller (MIT Literature)

Moderator: Gretchen Henderson (MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies)

Participants: N. Katherine Hayles (Duke University), Rita Raley (University of California Santa Barbara), Nick Montfort (Comparative Media Studies and Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, MIT)

Moderator: David Thorburn (MIT Literature and Comparative Media Studies)

Participants: Christian Bök (University of Calgary), Bob Stein (SocialBook), Gita Manaktala (MIT Press)

Moderator: Amaranth Borsuk (MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies)

Kick-Off Performance by Christian Bök

Participants: Opening remarks by Amaranth Borsuk and Gretchen Henderson, Introduction by Nick Montfort, and opening poems by MIT undergraduate writers Alvin Mwijuka and Aimee Harrison.

S. Craig Watkins studies young people’s social and digital media behaviors. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, in the departments of Radio-Television-Film, Sociology, and the Center for African and African American Studies. Craig is also a Faculty Fellow for the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan.

He is the author of three books, including The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. He is a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s research network on Connected Learning. Among other things his work in the network will include leading a team of researchers in an ethnographic study of teens and their participation in diverse digital media cultures and communities.

Working with an Austin-based game studio Craig is also developing a game design workshop for young teens. The workshop will explore the connections between digital media, game authorship, literacy, and civic engagement.

Craig blogs for dmlcentral, the online presence for the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub hosted at the UC Irvine campus, and the HuffingtonPost. For updates on Craig’s research visit his website, theyoungandthedigital.com.

New communications technologies are revolutionizing our experience of news and information. The avalanche of news, gossip, and citizen reporting available on the web is immensely valuable but also often deeply unreliable. How can professional reporters and editors help to assure that quality journalism will be recognized and valued in our brave new digital world?

Jay Rosen is director of NYU's Studio 20, a master's level journalism program which uses projects to teach innovation in journalism. He is the author of the blog PressThink, and of the book What are Journalists For?

Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and a principal research scientist at the Media Lab. He blogs at ethanzuckerman.com/blog.

A Knight Science Journalism event. Co-sponsored by the Center for Civic Media; Comparative Media Studies; Science, Technology, and Society; and the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies.

The urban database documentary is a mode of media art practice that uses structural systems as generative processes and organizational frameworks to explore the lived experience of place. The genre emerges in the early 20th century, and can be read as symptomatic of panoramic perception, sensory estrangement and networked participation, cultural utopias which respond to modernity’s underlying paradoxes. As such, the invention of the computer did not give rise to the urban database documentary, it only enabled new forms of its realization. The hope is to shift the conversation from a fetishization of ever-new technological possibilities to a discussion of the underlying cultural aims/assumptions of media art practice and the specific forms through which works address modernity’s cultural tensions.

Jesse Shapins is a media theorist, documentary artist, and social entrepreneur whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Metropolis, PRAXIS and Wired, cited in books such as The Sentient City and Networked Locality, and been exhibited at MoMA, Deutsches Architektur Zentrum and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, among other venues. He is Co-Founder/Chief Strategy Architect of Zeega, Co-Founder/Associate Director of metaLAB (at) Harvard, and on the faculty of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he has invented courses such as The Mixed-Reality City and Media Archaeology of Place.

David Kelley primarily works with digital video installation and photography, with recent projects involving performance and sculpture. His practice consistently interrogates the apparatus of photography and film to encounter narrative in the process of becoming. His latest films, set in Newfoundland and the Brazilian Amazon, draw on the genre of ethnography as a narrative device to rehearse the real and imagined social relations of these sites. In Newfoundland, Kelley participated in a remote art residency founded as a socio-economic redevelopment project on Fogo island, an outport community with a failing fishing industry. In Manaus in the Amazon, he filmed rehearsals of an independent film about drug-fueled indigenous suicides in the colonial Teatro Amazonas. The theater was funded by the fortunes of rubber barons and also served as the location for Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Kelley will show selections of his recent projects and related narrative and ethnographic films, as well as rehearse a lecture/performance about architectural morphology and global tourism.

Kelley is an artist and Assistant Professor of Photography at Wellesley College. He received his MFA from University of California in Irvine and is a recent alumni of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Kelley’s work has been shown at MassMoCA, The Kitchen, BAK in Utrecht, and Bangkok Experimental Film Festival. His project with Patty Chang Flotsam Jetsam (2007) exhibited in New York at Museum of Modern Art’s 2008 New Directors New Films Festival and won the Golden Pyramid at the Cairo IMFAY Media Arts Festival.

Emerging digital technologies are opening powerful new ways to create and even to reconceptualize the documentary film. How will handheld video cameras and ubiquitous open-source computing change the nature of documentaries? What are the implications for makers and viewers of documentaries of today’s unprecedented access to online editing and distribution tools, to an ocean of data never before available to the general public? These and related questions will be central to our discussion. Panelists will include a scholar of digital culture, a director who has begun to exploit emerging technologies, and a representative of a newly-important specialty of the digital age – a curator of digital artifacts.

Gerry Flahive is a producer for the National Film Board of Canada. He has produced more than 50 films and new media projects including Project Grizzly, Waterlife and Highrise. Shari Frilot is senior programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and curator of the New Frontier section of the event.

Ingrid Kopp, Tribeca Film Institute

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She has curated the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar several times, including a retrospective on American documentary history and a documentary summit between Glasnost and American documentarians.

Moderated by MIT Comparative Media Studies co-director William Uricchio.

The American postal service has an impressive history, but an uncertain future. Older than the Constitution, it was a wellspring of American democracy and a catalyst for the creation of a nationwide market for information and goods. Today, however, its once indispensable role in fostering civic discourse and facilitating personal communications has been challenged by the Internet and mobile telephony. How is the post office coping? What are its prospects in the digital age?

Richard R. John is a professor in the Columbia University Journalism School who specializes in the political economy of communications in the United States. His many publications include two monographs: Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995) and Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010).

Kent B. Smith is the manager of strategic business planning for the US Postal Service and is involved in developing perspectives of the future of the postal service and the mailing industry with such groups as the Institute for the Future, the Universal Postal Union, and the International Postal Corporation.

David C. Williams is the Inspector General (IG) of the US Postal Service. The IG’s office conducts independent audits and investigations of postal service operations. Previously, he served as IG for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Social Security Administration, Department of the Treasury and Housing and Urban Development.

Moderator: V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is a lecturer at MIT in both the Department of Biological Engineering and Comparative Media Studies. He directs the EMAIL Lab and works with the US Postal Service Office of Inspector General exploring ways to retain postal workers’ jobs through the provisioning of email services. His book The EMAIL Revolution is forthcoming this fall.

Scholars and activists have hotly debated the relationship between social media and social movement activity during the current global cycle of protest. This talk investigates media practices in the Occupy movement and develops an analytical framework of social movement media culture: the set of tools, skills, social practices, and norms that movement participants deploy to create, circulate, curate, and amplify movement media across all available platforms.

Movement media cultures are shaped by their location within a broader media ecology, and can be said to lean towards open or closed based on the diversity of spokespeople, the role of media specialists, formal and informal inclusion mechanisms, messaging and framing norms, and levels of transparency. The social movement media culture of the Occupy movement leans strongly towards open, distributed, and participatory processes; at the same time, highly skilled individuals and dedicated small groups play key roles in creating, curating, and circulating movement media. Insight into the media culture of the Occupy movement is based on mixed qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative insights come from semi-structured interviews with members of Media Teams and Press Working Groups, participant observation and visual research in multiple Occupy sites, and participation in Occupy Hackathons. Quantitative insights are drawn from a survey of over 5,000 Occupy participants, a crowdsourced database of the characteristics of approximately 1200 local Occupy sites, and a dataset of more than 13 million tweets with Occupy related hashtags.

Sasha Costanza-Chock is Assistant Professor of Civic Media in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. He is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, co-PI of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and cofounder of the Occupy Research Network.

As a journalist covering games since 2001, Chaplin has seen a lot of changes in the industry and among game academics. In this talk she will give an overview of the most important and interesting trends, including emerging thinking on ideas about game literacies and the acceptance of games as facilitators of transformative experiences. This will include ideas about play as a crucial part of human development and a potentially subversive act, and the rise of systems thinking. Chaplin is not a games evangelist, so the talk will cast a skeptical eye on the current trend of games as an answer for all that ails society. She will also talk about my experiences in general as a journalist during the rise of the Internet, and share my thinking on the journalism program she is developing at The New School.

Heather Chaplin is an assistant professor of journalism at The New School and author of the book, Smartbomb: The Quest for Art Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, Details, and Salon. She was a regular contributor for All Things Considered, covering videogames. She has been interviewed for and cited in on the topic of games for publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Businessweek, and The Believer and has appeared on shows such as Talk of the Nation, and CBS Sunday Morning.

“This game meant everything to me” – statements like this emphasize how players encounter deep and meaningful experiences playing video games in their lives. Playful mediated experiences strike players’ minds at particular phases of their lives, in relation to the space and time they inhabit, and in the context of specific subjective experiences. However, these transformative experiences cannot be standardized; they do not happen to everyone through the same game or at the same time and place. The question arises, how we can trace these highly subjective experiences. What methods are appropriate for researching, how players put meaning into their games and how their biographies reflect these experiences?

In this talk the methodology of playographies – a visualization of playful experiences as part of qualitative biographic interviews – is introduced. Insights from Mitgutsch’s research on transformative playful experiences are provided and the development of this mixed-method research tool will be outlined. Besides demonstrating the methods and presenting recent results, the theoretical framework guiding this study are outlined. It will be reflected why and how games foster transformative experiences of players. On this basis the limits and potentials of this research method will be debated and future research challenges will be discussed. This talk is accompanied with a small self-exploration exercise…

Konstantin Mitgutsch is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. His research focuses on learning processes in computer games, empirical research on players’ experience, educational game design, and transformative learning in games. He worked in the fields of learning, media studies, computer games and age rating systems at the University of Vienna for several years. In 2010 he was Max Kade Postdoctoral Fellow at the Education Arcade at CMS. In his recent research project he investigates learning patterns in games and different methodologies of game evaluation.

Videogames are performance activities, like theatre, sports, rituals or dance. The presentation will draw comparisons and contrasts with theatre to understand how videogames can incorporate narratives as part of the performance: games give cues to the player, who has to figure out the script of the story. How can these cues contribute to the narrative of the game? Focusing on the design of the space, and how it provides opportunities for action, provides some of the answers. The novel concept of indexical storytelling describes a series of strategies that use environmental design to help the player form the narrative script of a game. The game gives indications to the player to interpret, carry out, or even react against. These strategies help understand how videogames tell stories, create narrative opportunities, and open up new avenues for innovation.

Clara Fernández-Vara is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. She is particularly interested in applying methods from textual analysis and performance studies to the study of video games and cross-media artifacts. Her work concentrates on adventure games, as well as the integration of stories in simulated environments through game play. Her goal as a researcher is to bridge disciplines – humanities and sciences, theory and practice – in order to find ways to innovate and open new ground in video games studies and design.

Clara holds a Ph.D. in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She earned a BA in English Studies by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and was awarded a fellowship from La Caixa Foundation to pursue a Masters in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Clara has presented her work at various international academic conferences, such as DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association), Foundations of Digital Games and Future Play. She has also been a speaker at the Game Developer’s Conference, one of the main video game industry gatherings worldwide. She teaches courses on videogame theory and game writing at MIT, and has worked on two experimental adventure games as part of her research, Rosemary (2009), Symon (2010) and Stranded in Singapore (2011).

Otto Santa Anna presents findings from his forthcoming book, Juan in a Hundred: Faces and Stories of Latinos on the Network News (Texas). In it he elaborates standard cognitive metaphor analysis (as is used for printed texts), blending cognitive science with humanist scholarship, to attempt to capture the full semiotic range of televised reporting. His review of a full year of contemporary network news stories about Latinos reveals both the high production values and journalistic limitations of network reporting. This critical semiotic analysis offers an explanation about how news viewers construct partial understandings about Latinos from the news stories they watch. At the end of this talk he offers a range of recommendations, from modest to radical, to address these limitations.

Otto Santa Ana, UCLA Associate Professor, received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Pennsylvania. Santa Ana’s scholarship has focused on language that constructs social hierarchies, particularly how the mass media reinforce unjust inequity in their representations of Latinos. His first book, Brown Tide Rising (2002) offered a close study of newspapers. The American Political Science Association named it Book of the Year on Ethnic and Racial Political Ideology. Santa Ana has now extended his research to multi-modal mass media. His forthcoming book, Juan in a Hundred: The Faces and Stories of Latinos on the Evening News, (University of Texas Press) analyzes a year of network news imaging of Latinos. He maps out an explicit procedure by which news consumers build their understandings out of the multimodal stimuli of television news stories using recent cognitive science scholarship (Lakoff, Fauconnier) as well as humanist theories (Foucault, Calvin McGee, Barthes, Hadyen White) to explain how news viewers construct their skewed understandings about Latinos from the news stories they watch. Throughout the book, Santa Ana offers explicit suggestions to television news professionals.

Visualizing games and gameplay reveals both startling complexity…and stunning simplicity. This talk discusses many applications of information visualization to games: for theory, historical research, design, development, and creative art practice. Considering examples from across decades of video games (from blockbusters to art house experiments) reveals that most games are already information visualizations of a few particular kinds, and can be further transformed in ways that reveal the original through new eyes, suggesting new forms of play.

Jeremy Douglass is a researcher in games and playable media, electronic literature, and the art and science of data mining and information visualization. He is active in the Software Studies and Critical Code Studies research communities, which study software society and the cultural meaning of computer source code. Douglass is a founding member of Playpower, a MacArthur/HASTAC funded digital media and learning initiative to use ultra-affordable 8-bit game systems as a global education platform, and a participant in an NSF grant exploring creative user behavior in virtual worlds. His recording room for gameplay research includes systems spanning over three decades. The Atari 2600 has wood veneer; the PS3 does not.

The rise of e-sports signals a development in computer gaming well worth paying attention to. Not only are we witnessing the emergence and refinement of elite play in formalized competitive environments, but the growth of an industry around it — complete with team owners, league organizers, broadcasters, and corporate sponsors. Based on extensive qualitative research, this talk will explore the nature of professional computer game play as embodied, technical, and social practice. It will then situate these player performances within a broader context of various institutional actors that are also shaping how high-end competition is developing. In particular, it will look at issues around the ownership of e-sports playing fields, and the status of player action within them.

T.L. Taylor is Associate Professor in the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen. She has been working in the field of internet and multi-user studies for over fifteen years and has published on topics such as play and experience in online worlds, values in design, intellectual property, co-creative practices, game software modification, avatars and online embodiment, gender and gaming, pervasive gaming, and e-sports. As a qualitative sociologist, her research looks at the socio-cultural aspects of network life and play. Her book Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006) presented an ethnographic study of a popular massively multiplayer online game and her new book, Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (MIT Press, forthcoming March 2012) will be the first published scholarly monograph looking extensively at the rising phenomenon of high-end competitive computer game play. She is also a co-author (along with Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, and Celia Pearce) on the soon to be published Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (Princeton University Press, forthcoming summer 2012). Her website (including copies of many of her articles) can be found at tltaylor.com.

Games are increasingly seen as a way to address human needs, from the intimate work of maintaining social relationships to the pragmatic benefits of games for learning, health, and social change. If we hope to design games that address these needs, we must understand how people create meaning with, through, and around games. How do specific game design decisions impact the way players think, feel, and behave? What kinds of imaginative and social affordances can games provide players? And what kinds of problems are most appropriate to solve with games in the first place? This talk explores the complex interaction between game design, user experience, and real-world problems through the lens of game-based research projects on discrimination, smoking, and history.

Jessica Hammer is a Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Fellow at Columbia University, a founding member of the Teachers College EGGPLANT game research laboratory and a member of the Creativity Research Group. She is the lead designer and researcher for the Advance game project, on which she is writing her dissertation. Her larger research interests include stories, games, communities, gender, creativity and learning. She also developed the game design course sequence for the Communications, Computing and Technology program at Teachers College Columbia University. Before joining the department, Jessica worked as a writer, consultant and game designer with an emphasis on serious games and social software. She has taught at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, consulted for both academic and business clients, and worked at noted New York game company Gamelab. She received a masters degree in interactive telecommunications from NYU and her BA in computer science from Harvard University. In her free time, she runs an experimental storytelling group in New York City.

In the last few years a new trend of designing video games intended to fulfill a serious purpose through impacting the players in real life contexts has emerged. These games claim to raise awareness about social and political issues such as inequity, injustice, poverty, racism, sexism, exploitation, and oppression. Their intent is to reach a specific purpose beyond pure entertainment. But what are the specific attributes of purposeful games and how can they be researched? Which game design challenges arise and how are they addressed? How do players make meaning of their game play experiences in general? And what is the future of purposeful games research?

In this talk three perspectives of Mitgutsch’s recent research on purposeful games are outlined: To begin, insights from a recent study on meaningful experiences in players’ lives are examined and the research method of playographies is discussed. In the second part, a research-based game design project on subversive game design and recursive learning is presented and the background of the game Afterland is highlighted. Finally, the narrative of serious games and the design of purposeful games are discussed. On this basis, recent research results will be explored and future challenges for game design and purposeful games research will be outlined.

Dr. Konstantin Mitgutsch is a post-doctoral researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and a Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna. In 2010 he was a Max Kade Fellow at the Education Arcade at the Program of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He worked at the University of Vienna for several years and published books in the field of game studies and education. Since 2007 he organizes and chairs the annual Vienna Games Conference FROG and is on the expert council of the Pan European Game Information (PEGI).

In her transmedia project, Designing Culture, Anne Balsamo investigates the way in which culture influences the process of technological innovation. Drawing on her experiences working as part of collaborative research-design teams that combine art/science/design/engineering, she will describe her new research on public interactives and the infrastructures of public intimacy.

Anne Balsamo’s work focuses on the relationship between the culture and technology. This focus informs her practice as a scholar, researcher, new media designer and entrepreneur. She is currently a Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Cinematic Arts, and of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. From 2004-2007, she served as the Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.

In the Cold War years, there was a tremendous surge in right-wing broadcasting in America. Hendershot explains how radio and TV extremists feigned a “balanced” presentation of their ideas in the 1950s; in the 60s, those same broadcasters switched to an overtly right-wing line. Ultraconservative broadcasting was eventually shut down by the IRS, citizen activists, and the FCC. The Fairness Doctrine was the most powerful tool used against the extremists, and, thus, right-wing broadcasting was reborn when Reagan suspended the doctrine in 1987, enabling the rise of Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News shortly thereafter. Hendershot’s work thus provides useful context for understanding not only the history of the conservative movement but also the contemporary landscape.

Heather Hendershot’s research centers on regulation, censorship, FCC policy, and conservative media and political movements. She is the editor of Nickelodeon Nation: The History, Politics and Economics of America’s Only TV Channel for Kids and the author of Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip, Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture, and What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest. She is also editor of Cinema Journal, the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

"To have great poets, there must be great audiences too." (Walt Whitman)

This paper outlines recent developments in the field of cultural and media studies, including an account of changes in the economy, culture and technology, and consequent initiatives in educational provision for the creative industries. It goes on to outline the case for a new approach to the media and culture, based on evolutionary and complexity studies, in which the comparative media environment is recast in terms of 'micro-productivity' (user-created content) and 'social learning' (networked knowledge).

John Hartley is an educator, author, researcher and commentator on the history and cultural impact of television, journalism, popular media and creative industries.

The relationship between the media industries and their audiences is in the midst of a period of profound change. A key aspect of this transition is that traditional exposure-based conceptualizations of the audience are being challenged by conceptualizations that rely primarily on social media data and that are oriented around constructs such as appreciation, engagement, and emotional involvement. This presentation presents ongoing research that examines the institutional factors that are enabling and inhibiting this transition in the television industry, as well as the implications of this transition for audience representation and cultural production.

Philip Napoli is Professor and the Area Chair in the Communication and Media Management area of Fordham University’s Schools of Business. His research focuses on media institutions and media policy.

A “newsgame” is a videogame that does journalism. Drawing from five years of commercial development and academic research on this new approach, this talk summarizes the principles of newsgames and then offers two related but conflicting perspectives on its role in the future of newsmaking, framed by general thoughts on the challenges of designing and understanding contemporary media.

Ian Bogost, Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech, is a designer, philosopher, critic, and researcher who focuses on computational media–videogames in particular. He is also an author and an entrepreneur. He is also a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games and a Board Member at Open Texture (an educational publisher).

This talk explores what it means to consider games an aesthetic form -- something akin to literature, music, or film. That this is the most appropriate category within which to place games seems like an emerging consensus. But what does it actually mean? Are only video games an aesthetic form, or do non-digital games also deserve that status? Are the aesthetics of games a hybrid blend of other forms or a distinct form unto themselves? Do they express a new aesthetic fresh-born of the computer age or a primal, fundamental aesthetic that computers have amplified and brought into focus? The talk will examine these and other related questions.

Frank Lantz is the Interim Director of the NYU Game Center. For over 12 years, Frank has taught game design at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. He has also taught at the School of Visual Arts, and Parsons School of Design. His writings on games, technology and culture have appeared in a variety of publications. In 2005 Frank co-Founded Area/Code, a New York based developer that created cross-media, location-based, and social network games. In 2011 Area/Code was acquired by Zynga and is now Zynga New York. Frank has worked in the field of game development for the past 20 years. Before starting Area/Code, Frank worked on a wide variety of games as the Director of Game Design at Gamelab, Lead Game Designer at Pop & Co, and Creative Director at R/GA Interactive. Over the past 10 years, Frank helped pioneer the genre of large-scale realworld games, working on projects such as the Big Urban Game, which turned the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul into the world's largest boardgame; ConQwest, which featured the first major application of semacodes in the United States, PacManhattan, a life-size version of the arcade classic created by the students in his Big Games class at NYU, and many other experiments in pervasive and urban gaming.rst major application of semacodes in the United States, PacManhattan, a life-size version of the arcade classic created by the students in his Big Games class at NYU, and many other experiments in pervasive and urban gaming.

In 1955, the Museum of Modern Art mounted one of the most widely seen – and widely excoriated – photography exhibitions of all time, The Family of Man. For the last forty years, critics have decried the show as a model of the psychological and political repression of cold war America. This talk challenges that view. It shows how the immersive, multi-image aesthetics of the exhibition emerged not from the cold war, but from the World War II fight against fascism. It then demonstrates that The Family of Man aimed to liberate the senses of visitors and especially, to enable them to embrace racial, sexual and cultural diversity – even as it enlisted their perceptual faculties in new modes of collective self-management. For these reasons, the talk concludes, the exhibition became an influential prototype of the immersive, multi-media environments of the 1960s – and of our own multiply mediated social world today.

Fred Turner is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the Program in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford University. He is the author most recently of From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. His essays have tackled topics ranging from the rise of reality television to the culture of engineering at Google. He is currently drafting a history of immersive media environments in the decades after World War II.

As a prologue to the conference, this Forum will focus on the emergence of powerful new production cultures in such cities as Mumbai, Shanghai, and Rio de Janeiro. What do these developments portend for the international flow of media content? How does the nature of these cities shape the entertainment industries they are fostering? At the same time, new means of media production and circulation now permit individuals to produce content from suburban or rural areas. How do these apparently opposed trends co-exist? What is their likely impact on audiences and on the international media landscape?

Speakers include Sérgio Sá Leitão, president of RioFilme; 2005 CMS graduate and author of Gay Bombay Parmesh Shahani, who now heads the Godrej India Culture Club and is Editor at Large for Verve magazine; and Ernest James Wilson III, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.

As the design of our digital landscape is increasingly guided by commercial purposes and not by developmental concerns, there is a sense of urgency for developing strategies and educational programs that promote positive development by taking into consideration the children’s social, emotional, cognitive, physical, civic and spiritual needs. But we should also consider the unique design features of each technology and the practices and policies that shape different interactions in the digital landscape. Although this talk will focus on new technologies, it is inspired by an old question: “How should we live?” This talk will present an approach to help children gain the technological literacies of the 21st century while developing a sense of identity, values and purpose. Too often youth’s experiences with technology are framed in negative terms. This talk acknowledges problems and risks, and takes an interventionist perspective. Based on over a decade and a half of research, this talk provides a theoretical framework for guiding the implementation of experiences that take advantage of new technologies to support learning and personal development, as well as examples from concrete experiences. These engage children in playful learning by supporting digital content creation, creativity, choices of conduct, communication, collaboration and community building. These are the six C’s proposed by the Positive Technological Development framework. They can guide the design and the evaluation of digital experiences from early childhood to adolescence, and offer a possible path to help children out of the playpens into the playgrounds of this technological era.

Marina Umaschi Bers, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development and the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She heads the interdisciplinary Developmental Technologies research group. Her research involves the design and study of innovative learning technologies to promote positive youth development. Dr. Bers received prestigious awards such as the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a five year National Science Foundation Young Investigator’s Career Award and the American Educational Research Association’s Jan Hawkins Award. Over the past decade and a half, Dr. Bers has conceived, designed and evaluated diverse technological tools ranging from robotics to virtual worlds in after-school programs, museums, hospitals, and schools both in the U.S. and abroad. Dr. Bers has received several NSF grants and is active in publishing her research in academic journals. Her book Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom was published in 2008 by Teacher’s College Press. Most recently, Dr. Bers wrote The Design of Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: Out of the playpen into the playground, to be published by Oxford University in early 2012. Dr. Bers is from Argentina. In 1994 she came to the U.S. and received a Master’s degree in Educational Media from Boston University and a Master of Science and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory.

Digital technologies have exponentially expanded the power of government and corporations to keep tabs on citizens. But citizens in turn are exploiting new technologies to expose the activities of governments, companies and even each other. How does the persistence and ubiquity of surveillance in our digitizing world affect what it means to be a citizen? Does our emerging condition of constant surveillance encourage individuals to curtail how they speak and act — or to offer more information? In what ways are new forms of citizen surveillance and public witness instruments of democracy and transparency? In what ways are they tools of distortion and propaganda for ideologues or special interests? Our panel of three distinguished scholars will engage these and related questions on evolving notions of citizenship in the digital age.

Panelists include Sandra Braman, a professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and author of Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power from The MIT Press; Susan Landau, a visiting professor at Harvard University and author of Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, also published by The MIT Press; and Marcos Novak, professor and artist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In revising their own texts, or other people’s texts, writers erase the past, remodel it, or reinvent it. They create versions of themselves, and those versions are recorded in the textual identities they create through revision. By studying revision, we are able to see not only how a single writer evolves but also how a culture insists upon certain evolutions, with or without the writer’s consent.

Therefore, the dynamics of revision can take us to the heart of identity formation both in its expressive and repressive strains. What compels a culture to rewrite its texts? How do we track revision in order to “see” or rather “give witness to” revisionary processes? In addressing these problems, digital scholarship can offer far more access to the fluid texts that expose the dynamics of revision and help us confront the necessity of revision in our culture.

John Bryant draws upon examples from revision studies, adaptation, and translation in order to highlight the elements of creativity, appropriation, and cultural difference that are at stake in dealing with the ethics and editing of revision. Along the way, he demonstratse TextLab, the Melville Electronic Library’s revision editing tool, and discusses the ethical as well as editorial dimensions of other imagined tools, such as Melville Remix and How Billy [Budd] Grew.

Bryant is Professor of English at Hofstra University and received his BA. MA, and PhD from the University of Chicago. He has written on Melville, related writers of the nineteenth-century, and textual scholarship. He is also editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. His recent book, Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of Typee (Michigan 2008), is based on his online fluid-text edition Herman Melville’s Typee. He is currently working on a critical biography, Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life (Wiley) and the NEH-funded Melville Electronic Library (MEL), an online critical archive and “We the People” project.

By providing a critical description of existing technologies and projects related to the use of information and communication technologies to enhance social connectivity, this talk will illustrate innovative ways to design creative new media and digital interactions to foster connections between people, information, and places.

Federico Casalegno, Ph.D., is the Director of the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and Associate Director of the MIT Design Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 2008, he is the director of the Green Home Alliance between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy. He is adjunct full professor at IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, Italy.

A social scientist with an interest in the impact of networked digital technologies in human behavior and society, Casalegno both teaches and leads advanced research at MIT, and design interactive media to foster connections between people, information and physical places using cutting-edge information technology.

Is local news a casualty of the digital age? A recent report from the Federal Communications Commission suggests that although the broad media landscape is more vibrant than ever, many state and local communities face a shortage of professional reporting, undermining journalism’s watchdog role at the local level. This Forum assesses the state of local journalism, paying special attention to the changing environment for news in New England.

Our speakers, drawn from traditional as well as online media, include Callie Crossley, host of her own talk show on WGBH; David Dahl, who oversees local news initiatives for the Boston Globe; and Adam Gaffin of the online news site Universal Hub. Dan Kennedy, a media analyst who teaches at Northeastern University, moderates the discussion.

Over the last 15 years, there has been an explosion of innovation in board game styles and mechanisms. The Settlers of Catan was the game that crossed the ocean from Germany to the U.S. in the late 1990′s and kicked off this new era in board gaming. These modern board games, or Eurogames, are more engaging experiences and based less on luck than the typical roll-and-move board game design prevalent in the 20th century.

Attendees will learn about a variety of game mechanisms through discussions of exemplar games and see how these games relate. Many of these mechanisms are appropriate for digital games as well as tabletop games, so attendees will improve their toolkit of mechanisms for their own design work.

Dr. Scott Nicholson is a visiting scholar with MIT Comparative Media Studies for the 2011-2012 academic year, working with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and The Education Arcade. He is an associate professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, where he has focused on games in libraries and game design as a pedagogical tool. He was the host of Board Games with Scott from 2005-2010 and is the designer of Tulipmania 1637, a board game published in 2009. In addition, he is the author of Everyone Plays at the Library: Creating Great Gaming Experiences for All Ages, published in 2010 by Information Today.

The closing plenary from Media in Transition 7: Unstable Platforms:

Goran Bolin, Sodderton University, Sweden Pat Brereton, Dublin City University Jennifer Holt, University of California, Santa Barbara Lana Swartz, USC Moderator: James Paradis, MIT

New technologies and media systems have been deployed for new distributions of power, knowledge and social organization. What do you see as the most compelling shifts in these sectors? What are the greatest dangers and opportunities, and with what implications?

Factors such as influence over regulatory process, ever-expanding proprietary claims to technology and code, and the control of information including personal data all constitute zones of contention in this time of transition. What techniques and strategies might we use to enhance public literacy and efficacy in these matters?

What role might best be taken up by educators and media specialists when the old certainties slip away? Developing new tools and methodologies to make sense of emerging behaviors? Recuperating lost literacy and cognitive skills? Deconstructing legal and regulatory structures, and pressing for new safeguards? Encouraging the production of new forms of content?

As new generations enter a digital culture that seems ever more taken for granted as a condition — and ever more unfathomable as a technological practice — how can we cultivate and empower a critical citizenry?

Networked digital technologies have been used to construct new collectivities and social formations. What are the most promising of these from your perspective, and what lessons can we take from them as we seek to enable individuals to engage with one another to form active and effective publics?

Transitional moments bring with them inadvertent opportunities, whether new forms of data (hyperlinks, tags, recommendation systems), new standardization paradigms, or new affordances for representation. Although these opportunities can be put to many ends, how might they serve the interests of illuminating shifts in power, improving social equity and enhancing civic engagement?

Sandra Braman, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Giuliana Cucinelli, Concordia University Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT

“Web 2.0″ has been shaped by startup corporations and systems (such as Wikipedia) that employ large-scale collaboration and crowdsourcing. How do these two forces relate to the project of preserving our cultural memory?

A genuine anxiety of many computer users is that our collective memory will be too good: Old offhand blog comments, drunken photos on Facebook, and other communications may persist when we would rather they’d not. This concern does not contradict our need to preserve culturally important materials, but it suggests a related question: Do we need to consider how to be better as a culture at forgetting?

In the digital realm, does it still make sense to distinguish the roles of museums, galleries, and spaces for exhibition from those of archives and repositories?

Computers have proven to be a valuable tool for investigating our cultural heritage. From YouTube to the digital life of newspapers to video games, computers are also deeply connected to our culture and, in the past several decades, have been an important part of our culture heritage. Are there chances for a fruitful convergence between the project of computing on our past (“the digital humanities”) and the project of understanding the culture relevance of computing (“digital media”)?

A tremendous amount of important information is now being generated in digital form — but this is not all of the material we want to preserve. How will the abundance of important digital material affect the preservation of traditional archival materials?

Frank Marchese, Pace Digital Gallery Julia Noordegraaf, University of Amsterdam Jason Rhody, Office of Digital Humanities, NEH Moderator: Nick Montfort, MIT

Drawing on recent U.S. television series “The Unit” and “Sleeper Cells,” Cynthia Young examines recent shifts in media representations of African American men, arguing that in the context of the “war on terror,” the image of the criminal and anti-social young black male has mutated into the image of the black patriot, at war against a new enemy of the nation, the Muslim terrorist. Exploring the figure of the black soldier, her work asks the questions: What kind of popular culture is made in the context of war? How do notions of civil rights shift in a post-Civil Rights era? And when and how are such notions mobilized in service to violent and racist conceptions of Iraqis, Arabs, and other Muslims? In his commentary, Visiting Scholar Anamik Saha will draw upon his research on popular cultural representations of South Asians and Muslims in Britain during the same period.

Cynthia Young is an Associate Professor of English and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College where she teaches courses on literature and popular culture. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her book on U.S. Third World Leftists, Soul Power, was published by Duke University Press in 2006. She is currently working on a project that considers race, specifically blackness, after the September 11 attacks. Interrogating popular culture and political organizing sites, this project considers how the Civil Rights legacy has been hijacked by Conservatives supporting an anti-immigrant, pro-war and often white supremacist agenda.

There is an ontological distinction between the natively digital and the digitized, that is, the objects, content, devices and environments that are “born” in the new medium, as opposed to those that have “migrated” to it. Should the current methods of study change, however slightly or wholesale, given the focus on objects and content of the medium? The research program put forward here thereby engages with “virtual methods” that import standard methods from the social sciences and the humanities. That is, the distinction between the natively digital and the digitized also could apply to current research methods. What kind of Internet research may be performed with methods that have been digitized (such as online surveys and directories) vis-á-vis those that are natively digital (such as recommendation systems and folksonomy)? Second, he will propose propose that Internet research may be put to new uses, given an emphasis on natively digital methods as opposed to the digitized. Rogers will strive to shift the attention from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits, and instead inquire into how research with the Internet may move beyond the study of online culture only. How to capture and analyze hyperlinks, tags, search engine results, archived Websites, and other digital objects? How may one learn from how online devices (e.g., engines and recommendation systems) make use of the objects, and how may such uses be repurposed for social and cultural research? Ultimately, he proposes a research practice that grounds claims about cultural change and societal conditions in online dynamics, introducing the term “online groundedness.” The overall aim is to rework method for Internet research, developing a novel strand of study, digital methods.

Prof. Dr. Richard Rogers holds the Chair and is full University Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is Director of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative, reworking method for Internet research. Among other works, Rogers is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004), awarded the 2005 best book of the year by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). His forthcoming book, Digital Methods, is also with MIT Press.

In the Age of Always Connect, are we witnessing a plague of oversharing? If so, are social networks its vectors of transmission? Does this much-discussed phenomenon mark the Death of Shame, perhaps even a return to pre-modern notions of public and private? What does it mean to live in a historical moment when the faces in our high-school yearbooks materialize, without warning, in our Facebook lives, Walking Dead eager to rekindle friendships we thought we’d buried long ago? In his illustrated lecture, “(Face)Book of the Dead,” cultural critic and media theorist Mark Dery, author of seminal essays on online subcultures, culture jamming, and Afrofuturism, will address these and other questions, from the posthuman psychology of disembodied friendship to our growing unwillingness to untether ourselves from our social networks or the media drip, even for an instant. What does it say about us, as a society, if we’re unable to be alone and unplugged without being bored or lonely? Is this, at root, a fear of the emptiness in our heads? Should we preserve some small space in our lives for solitude — a Walden of the mind, away from the Matrix?

Mark Dery (www.markdery.com) is a cultural critic. He is best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, Elle, and Wired; on websites such as True/Slant and Thought Catalog; and in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. Dery’s latest book is an anthology of his recent writings, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Essays on American Empire, Digital Culture, Posthuman Porn, and Lady Gaga’s Lesbian Phallus, published in Brazil by Editora Sulina. Dery is widely associated with “culture jamming,” the guerrilla media criticism movement he popularized through his 1993 essay “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs,” and “Afrofuturism,” a term he coined in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future” (included in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, which he edited). He has been a professor of journalism at New York University, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He is at work on a biography of the artist Edward Gorey for Little, Brown.

Amaranth Borsuk discusses her poetic practice as a multi-media writer and artist, reading selections from recent work and showing images and performance footage from current projects. What is a poetics of materiality and how does it play out across print and digital media? What does a focus on the material of language do to our constructions of authorship? Borsuk will read from Between Page and Screen, a digital pop-up book of poems, Tonal Saw, a chapbook constructed from a religious tract, and Excess Exhibit, a flip-book of conjoined poems that mutate from constraint into rapturous abundance. She will also show digital work in progress and read selections from her recently completed manuscript Handiwork, whose poems explore the relationship between torture and writing, trauma and creativity through a combination of Oulipo constraint and surreal lyricism.

A poet and scholar, Amaranth Borsuk’s work focuses on textual materiality–from the surface of the page to the surface of language. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies and Writing and Humanistic Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she works on and teaches digital poetry. She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where she co-founded The Loudest Voice cross-genre reading series and the Gold Line Press chapbook series. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in print and online. Poems have recently appeared in Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, FIELD, Eleven Eleven, and Denver Quarterly, among other journals. She is the author of a chapbook-length poem, Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010), and Excess Exhibit (ZG Press, forthcoming), a book of conjoined poems written collaboratively with poet and performance artist Kate Durbin, which includes drawings by Zach Kleyn. She has also collaboratively translated and transverted the work of Oulipo poet Paul Braffort together with Gabriela Jauregui and crafted an augmented-reality chapbook, Between Page and Screen, together with Brad Bouse. Recent collaborative work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Caketrain, New American Writing, and Action, Yes!. In addition to writing and studying poetry, Amaranth is also a letterpress printer and book artist whose fascination with printed matter informs her work on digital media.

The eminent MIT professor, author most recently of Alone, Together, discusses her darkening view of our digitizing world, her sense of the culture of MIT and its students, and her own career with Communications Forum Director David Thorburn, a longtime colleague.

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

Co-sponsor: Technology and Culture Forum at MIT

Digital filming has transformed documentary, offering new potentials to filmmakers and at the same time transforming audience attitudes. Filmmakers have been able to work more informally with their subjects, giving rise to the fusion format of reality TV as well as changing the nature of documentaries themselves. From the audience perspective, affordable digital platforms mean that almost everyone knows what it is like to film and be filmed. The result is a transformation of the documentary genre, where films are now seen as documents of interactions rather than expositions of fact. Ellis explores this new phase in documentary, using methods derived from Goffman as well as an intimate understanding of the technologies of filming.

John Ellis is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London, and this semester’s visiting scholar at the Annenberg Institute, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Visible Fictions (1982), Seeing Things (2000) and TV FAQ (2007) and the co-author of Language and Materialism (1977). His Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation will appear in 2012, and is based in part on his 19 years as an independent producer for British TV, making documentaries about cinema and the arts, the politics of media, and the food industry. He served on the editorial board of Screen magazine (1975-1985), was the vice-chair of the film producers’ association PACT (1988-1994), and now chairs the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC).

The computer’s creative involvement in the visual and literary arts is the topic of this panel discussion, held on the occasion of the Drawing with Code: Computer Art from the Anne and Michael Spalter Collection exhibit at the deCordova. The panelists include that exhibit’s curator George Fifield, exhibiting artist Mark Wilson, poet and Brown University professor John Cayley, and MIT Media Lab professor Leah Buechley. Held in collaboration with the deCordova Museum.

About the Purple Blurb series: Run by Nick Montfort, authors read and discuss their “D1G1T4L WR1T1NG” at MIT. All events are free and open to the public.

The digital age has been heralded but also pilloried for its impact on journalism. As newspapers continue their mutation into digital formats and as news and information are available from a seeming infinity of websites, what do we actually know about the dynamics of news-consumption online? What does the public do with online news? How influential are traditional news outlets in framing the news we get online?

Pablo Boczkowski is a Professor of Communications Studies at Northwestern Univeresity where he leads a research program that studies the transition from print to digital media. He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (2004) and News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (2010).

Joshua Benton is the founding director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University — an effort to help the news business make the radical changes required by the Internet age. Before that, he was an investigative reporter, columnist, foreign correspondent and rock critic for two newspapers, The Dallas Morning News and The Toledo Blade.

Moderator: Jason Spingarn-Koff, a 2010-11 Knight Journalism Fellow at MIT, is a documentary filmmaker specializing in the intersection of science, technology, and society. His feature documentary Life 2.0, about a group of people whose lives are transformed by the virtual world “Second Life,” premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and will be featured on Oprah Winfrey’s documentary film club in 2011. He served as producer of NOVA’s The Great Robot Race, and the development producer for PBS’s Emmy-winning Rx for Survival, as well as documentaries for Frontline and Time magazine. He is a graduate of Brown University and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

What do Shakespeare and videogames have in common? Clara Fernández-Vara, a Comparative Media Studies alumna, explains her journey from researching Shakespeare in performance to studying and developing videogames. Applying concepts from theatre in performance illuminates the relationship between the player and the game, as well as between game and narrative.

Videogames are not theatre, but the comparison gives way to productive questions: What is the dramatic text of the game? How does this text shape the actions of the player? Who are the performers? Who is the audience? These questions will be addressed in the context of adventure games, a story-driven genre where the player solves puzzles that are integrated in the fictional world of the game.

Clara Fernández-Vara is a post-doctoral researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, where she teaches courses on videogame theory and game writing, as well as develop games with teams of students. Clara is a graduate from the Comparative Media Studies program, and holds a PhD in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research concentrates on adventure games, game playing as a performance activity, and the integration of stories in simulated environments. She has released two experimental adventure games, Rosemary (2009) and Symon (2010).

This lecture examines the impact of globalization on the urban imaginary in relation to a recent art exhibition, commissioned by the Dutch government in 2009, in which a group of contemporary New York artists were invited to photograph Amsterdam to mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of Manhattan.

Registering a long history of transnational exchange between the two cities, the selected artists sought to produce work capable of defamiliarizing established images of Amsterdam. The claim of the exhibition was that seeing Amsterdam through the lens of New York photographers enabled new and surprising perspectives on four key aspects of the city: the street, the night, the water, and the outskirts. Interrogating this claim, the lecture will analyze individual artworks, the marketing and staging strategies of the exhibition, and — most importantly — the role that transnational exchange can play in both resisting and reinforcing dominant, globalized images of contemporary city spaces.

Christoph Lindner is Professor of Literature and Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is also a Research Affiliate at the University of London Institute in Paris. His recent books include Globalization, Violence, and the Visual Culture of Cities (2010), Urban Space and Cityscapes (2006), and Fictions of Commodity Culture (2003).

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a scholar and mediamaker who works in areas including: social movements and ICTs; participatory technology design and community based participatory research; the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights; comunicación populár; mobile phones and social change; digital literacies and digital inclusion; race, class, and gender in digital space, the transformation of public media systems; the political economy of communication; and information and communications policy. He holds a PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate, and is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Sasha presently lives in Los Angeles, where he works with community-based organizations to develop critical digital literacies (for example, see http://vozmob.net). More information about Sasha’s work can be found at http://schock.cc.

Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella (Biella) Coleman examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. Between 2001-2003 she conducted ethnographic research on computer hackers primarily in San Francisco, the Netherlands, as well as those hackers who work on the largest free software project, Debian. She is completing a book manuscript “Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software.”

Nitin Sawhney, Ph.D. is a Research Fellow and Lecturer with the Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) in the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. His ongoing research, teaching and creative practice engages the critical role of arts interventions in contested spaces and participatory media with marginalized youth. Nitin completed his doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab where he conducted research on open design collaboration and DIY cultures in the context of sustainable development, as well as wearable and responsive community media interfaces in transitional spaces.

In 2008-2009 he served as a Visionary Fellow with the Jerusalem 2050 project, sponsored by the Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning and the Center for International Studies at MIT, conducting research on urban renewal and civic engagement through the media arts in divided cities such as Belfast and Jerusalem. Nitin co-founded the “Department of Play”, a research collaborative at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, focused on designing participatory technologies and pedagogical approaches to facilitate civic empowerment among marginalized children and youth.

Over the past few years he has been conducting a digital storytelling and youth media program in the West Bank and Gaza, while developing a longitudinal research study on the role of participatory media for resilience and civic agency among youth in conditions of conflict and crisis. Nitin is currently working on a feature-length documentary film, Flying Paper, about the culture of kite making and flying in the Gaza Strip.

Governments, corporations, and communities plan for sudden crises: the White House drafts strong responsive rhetoric for the next terrorist attack; Toyota runs reassuring national TV spots within hours of a product recall; and 32 Massachusetts towns successfully publicize water distribution sites following a water main rupture. However, like the housing collapse or the recent Gulf oil spill, some crises are complex, difficult to warn of, and don’t cleanly fit traditional media frames. They are slow moving, and the media still struggles to rhetorically or technologically cover these simmering, rather than boiling, dramas.

With government regulators weak, corporations still focused on the bottom line, and communities adapting to structural change, this Communications Forum asks: What new media tools and strategies can be used to help everyone better prepare for the unique communications challenges of slow-moving crises?

Andrea Pitzer is editor of Nieman Storyboard, a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University that looks at how storytelling works in every medium. Storyboard’s mission is to feature the best examples of visual, audio and multimedia narrative reporting.

Abrahm Lustgarten is an investigative reporter for ProPublica — his recent work has focused on oil and gas industry practices. He is a former staff writer and contributor for Fortune, and has written for Salon, Esquire, the Washington Post and the New York Times since receiving his master’s in journalism from Columbia University in 2003. He is the author of the book China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet, a project that was funded in part by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Rosalind Williams is a historian who uses imaginative literature as a source of evidence and insight into the history of technology. She has taught at MIT since 1982 and currently serves as the Dibner Professor for the History of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. She has also served as head of the STS Program and Dean for Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs at the Institute, as well as president of the Society for the History of Technology. She has written three books as well as essays and articles about the emergence of a predominantly human-built world and its implications for human life. Her forthcoming book extends this theme to examine consciousness of the condition of “human empire” as expressed in the writings of Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson in the late 19th century.

Moderated by Tom Levenson, who is Head and of the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies as well as Director of its graduate program. Professor Levenson is the winner of Walter P. Kistler Science Documentary Film Award, Peabody Award (shared), New York Chapter Emmy, and the AAAS/Westinghouse award. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Boston Globe, Discover, The Sciences, and he is winner of the 2005 National Academies Communications Award for Origins.

In December of 2007, Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu, two of the creators of Mystery Science Theater 3000, assembled many of the original members of that cult TV phenomenon to form Cinematic Titanic, a live and DVD version based on their original formula of riffing on terrible movies. The actors essentially play themselves as they participate in an experiment for some unknown, possibly shadowy corporation or military force. The story currently provided to the cast is that there is a tear in the “electron scaffolding” that threatens all digital media in the world. Their experience doing MST3K is key to the organization’s plans. Two of the cast, Trace Beaulieu and Mary Jo Pehl, discussed their thoughts on producing Cinematic Titanic which came to Boston on October 29th at the Wilbur Theater.

They spoke with Generoso Fierro and Jason Begy, both of CMS’s GAMBIT Game Lab.

There are a growing number of games that are location-based. They use mobile devices and locative technologies to turn physical space into a game board. Games like Foursquare get people moving from place to place, exploring the world around them and potentially meeting people nearby. But while many games use location as the context for interaction, few use location as the content for interaction. Local Engagement Games (LEGs) are location-based games designed for the specificity of a location, with the intention of integrating into local cultures and local institutions. They reinforce existing geographical communities because the rules of the game are couched within existing rules of civic participation. Whether it’s a game built around a town hall meeting or a government planning process, LEGs scaffold local processes to foster community and commitment to civic life.

In this talk, Gordon discusses two LEGs developed at the Engagement Game Lab. Participatory Chinatown is a 3-D role-playing game designed to be integrated into the master planning process of Boston’s Chinatown. And CommunityPlanIt, a location-based mobile game platform (in development), is designed to engage neighborhoods in official planning processes, while forging geographically-based communities and advocacy groups around local issues.

Eric Gordon is an associate professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College and director of the new Engagement Game Lab. He is the author of The Urban Spectator: American Concept-cities from Kodak to Google (Dartmouth, 2010) and the co-author of the forthcoming book tentatively titled, Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (Blackwell, 2011).

What do citizens need to know when they publicly address legally challenging or dangerous topics? Journalists have always had the privilege, protected by statute, of not having to reveal their sources. But as more investigative journalism is conducted by so-called amateurs and posted on blogs or websites such as Wikileaks, what are the legal dangers for publishing secrets in the crowdsourced era? We convene an engaging group law scholars to help outline the legal challenges ahead, suggest policies that might help to protect citizens, and describe what steps every civic media practitioner should take to protect themselves and their users.

David Ardia is director of the Citizen Media Law Project which provides legal resources for those involved in online journalism and citizen media.

Daniel Schuman is the policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation, where he helps develop policies that further Sunlight’s mission of catalyzing greater government openness and transparency.

Moderator: Micah Sifry is a co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum.

Co-sponsor: The MIT Center for Future Civic Media

What is happening to the intellectual field called the humanities? Powerful political and corporate forces are encouraging, even demanding science and math-based curricula to prepare for a globalized and technological world; the astronomical rise in the cost of higher education has resulted in a drumbeat of complaints, some which question the value of the traditional liberal arts and humanities. And of course, and far more complexly, the emerging storage and communications systems of the digital age are transforming all fields of knowledge and all knowledge industries.

How has and how will the humanities cope with these challenges? How have digital tools and systems already begun to transform humanistic education? How may they do so in the future? More broadly, is there a significant role for the humanities in our digital future? Our panelists will explore these and related questions in what is expected to be the first in a continuing series on this subject.

Alison Bylerly is provost and executive vice president and professor of English at Middlebury College.

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and previously taught at MIT. He is the author of many essays and books including The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and How the Mind Works.

Professor Wang discusses the genesis and implementation of a civic media project that she conceptualized and launched in China in May 2009. The project, titled NGO2.0, is a social experiment that introduces Web 2.0 thinking and social media tools to the grassroots NGOs in the underdeveloped regions of China. How has new media complicated social action and civic engagement? What are the evolving stakes for social change proponents? How are change agents coping with governmental intervention in a country where social media is held suspect? Professor Wang speculates on the emergence of a new field of inquiry — social media action research — while sharing insights and findings about her involvement in shaping an NGO 2.0 culture in China.

The fate of newspapers is an ongoing subject for the Forum. This conversation explores the migration of newspapers to the internet and what that means for traditional concepts of journalism. Amid the emergence of citizens’ media and the blogosphere, newspapers are adapting to a changing mediascape in which print readership is in steady decline. David Carr, culture reporter and media columnist for the New York Times, and Dan Kennedy, professor of journalism at Northeastern University and author of the Media Nation blog, explore these developments with Forum Director David Thorburn.

Among their topics: the best and the worst examples of news on the net, online-only news sites, hyperlocal news and collaborative journalism, business models for online newspapers, and the impact of social media on journalism.

One theme in the contemporary use of space involves the shift from production modeled around a physical, centralized “locus” to new virtual, extended and multi-axial modes of “projective” organization. We see this in new sculpture, new architecture, and, in electronic art, an expressive embrace of geographic dispersal. Although new materials, methods, and media have been central to modernist optimism, many of their resulting physical and actual constructions have been dismissed, discredited, misunderstood, or attacked. Using physical and virtual examples, Ricardo examines the strange tension between unanimous acceptance of new media and materials and the frequent rejection of new forms and structures they have made possible.

Francisco Ricardo is media and contemporary art theorist. A Research Associate at the University Professors Program and co-director of the Digital Video Research Archive at Boston University, he also teaches digital media theory at the Rhode Island School of Design. His research examines historical, conceptual, and computational intersections between contemporary art and architecture, on one hand,and new media art and literature, on the other. Recent publications include Cyberculture and New Media (Rodopi, 2009) and Literary Art in Digital Performance (Continuum, 2009).

Professor Fox Harrell’s research group — the Imagination, Computation, and Expression (ICE) Lab — builds computational systems for expressing imaginative stories and concepts — “phantasmal media” systems.

In particular, his research uses artificial intelligence/cognitive science-based techniques to understanding the human imagination to invent and better understand new forms of computational narrative, identity, games, and related types of expressive digital media. In this talk, he will discuss his recent works and collaborations including the “Living Liberia Fabric,” an AI-based interactive video documentary produced in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia to memorialize 14 years of civil war, “Generative Visual Renku,” an AI-based form of generative animation, and several other projects.

Harrell received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” He is currently completing a book, Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, for the MIT Press. Harrell is Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Comparative Media Studies, and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

Erin Reilly is Research Director for Project New Media Literacies, a past CMS project now housed at the University of Southern California.

Karen Schrier, a CMS grad, is the Director of Interactive Media and Technology at ESI Design and a part-time doctoral student at Columbia University in games and learning.

Sangita Shresthova is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer, who currently manages Henry Jenkins new project on participatory culture and civic engagement at USC.

Pilar Lacasa is a researcher at Alcalá University in Spain. She also works on a project for Electronic Arts in Spain about how to use commercial games in education.

Mitch Resnick is Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Laboratory. He develops new technologies that engage children in creative learning experiences and is a principal investigator with the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, a CMS-partnered project.

Aswin Punathambekar is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He teaches and writes about media globalization, with a focus on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora.

Xiaochang Li lives in New York, where she consults as something of a media and branding mercenary, specializing in the intersection of globalization, digital media, and rampant delight.

Ana Domb recently graduated from CMS and is currently working on user experience research at The Meme, a design consultancy firm based out of Cambridge.

Orit Kuritsky–a scriptwriter, content editor, and creative director–is also a graduate of the CMS master’s program.

Jing Wang is a professor in Chinese Cultural Studies and the Director of New Media Action Lab. She is a CMS-affiliated faculty currently working on a project (NGO2.0) that brings together social media and nonprofit organizations in China.

Pete Donaldson is a Professor in the MIT Literature section, which he headed from 1990 until 2005.

Kurt Fendt is Research Director in Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Comparative Media Studies Graduate Program and directs the HyperStudio, a CMS research project.

Scot Osterweil leads several Education Arcade projects promoting learning in math, literacy, history, science and foreign language.

Rekha Murthy, CMS ’05, works at the intersection of public radio and digital media, currently overseeing distribution and content strategy initiatives for PRX, an online distributor of audio programs to public radio networks, stations, and audio platforms including mobile, internet, and satellite radio.

Matthew Weise, CMS ’04, is Lead Game Designer at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

Beth Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies. Her fields of research interest include new media, contemporary aesthetics, electronic music, critical theory and literature, and race theory.

Philip Tan is a CMS grad who now directs the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a partnership between MIT/CMS and the government of Singapore to explore new directions for the development of games as a medium.

Ivan Askwith is a CMS grad working in New York City as Director of Strategy at Big Spaceship, a digital creative agency.

Clara Fernandez-Vara is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab and a graduate of the CMS master’s program.

CMS director William Uricchio discusses the history of the program, some of the challenges it has faced, as well as the unique role it has assumed at MIT and within higher education when it comes to a new vision of the humanities.

Deborah Fitzgerald, Dean of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, opens the CMS 10th Anniversary symposium with her remarks on the role of CMS at MIT and the essence of applied humanities education within the MIT mission.

Henry Jenkins’ 20-year presence at MIT was formative for him and profoundly valuable for MIT. A year after his departure for USC, Jenkins returns to talk with long-time colleagues about his pioneering scholarship on digital culture, his work as the founding director of Comparative Media Studies, and his experiences as a teacher and housemaster at MIT.

This global call-in show, hosted by MIT Center for Future Civic Media fellow Ethan Zuckerman, featured a number of journalists, advocates and programmers who utilize new technologies to gather information in contentious geographic regions:

Cameran Ashraf, Iran Mehdi Yahyanejad, Iran Georgia Popplewell, Haiti Huma Yusuf, Pakistan Ruthie Ackerman, Liberia Brenda Burrell and Bev Clark, Zimbabwe Lova Rakotomalala, Madagascar

Co-Sponsor: MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

Is our emerging digital culture partly a return to practices and ways of thinking that were central to human societies before the advent of the printing press? This question has been posed with increasing force in recent years by anthropologists, folklorists, historians and literary scholars, among them Thomas Pettitt, who has contributed significantly to elaborating and communicating the version of this question named in the title of today’s forum.

The concept of a “Gutenberg Parenthesis” — formulated by Prof. L. O. Sauerberg of the University of Southern Denmark — offers a means of identifying and understanding the period, varying between societies and subcultures, during which the mediation of texts through time and across space was dominated by powerful permutations of letters, print, pages and books. Our current transitional experience toward a post-print media world dominated by digital technology and the internet can be usefully juxtaposed with that of the period — Shakespeare’s — when England was making the transition into the parenthesis from a world of scribal transmission and oral performance.

MIT professors Peter Donaldson and James Paradis join Thomas Pettitt in a discussion of the value of historical perspectives on our technologizing human present.

Linda Fantin and Ellen Miller, with moderator Chris Csikszentmihalyi.

In December, the Obama administration directed federal agencies and departments to implement “principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration,” including deadlines for providing government information online. At the same time, citizens and journalists are developing new technologies to manage and analyze the exponential increase in data about our civic lives available from governmental and other sources. What new ways of gathering and presenting information are evolving from this nexus of government openness and digital connectedness?

Ian Condry, Associate Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies and Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures, will discuss the prevalence of giant robots in anime (Japanese animated films and TV shows). From the sixties to the present, robot or “mecha” anime has evolved in ways that reflect changing business models and maturing audiences, as can be seen in titles like Astro Boy, Gundam, Macross, and Evangelion. How can we better understand the emergence of anime as a global media phenomenon through the example of robot anime? What does this suggest about our transmedia future?

Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and founder/director of the Lab’s Personal Robots Group, will discuss how science fiction has influenced the development of real robotic systems, both in research laboratories and corporations all over the world. She will explore of how science fiction has shaped ideas of the relationship and role of robots in human society, how the existence of such robots is feeding back into science fiction narratives, and how we might experience transmedia properties in the future using robotic technologies.

Joel Burges and Wayne Marshall, MIT’s Mellon Fellows in the Humanities (2009-11), will contribute to the rethinking of media studies at MIT by taking up the shared metaphor of fashion—the fashionable, the old-fashioned, the re-fashioned. Burges will talk about the turn away from the digital in contemporary cinema, particularly the case of Fantastic Mr. Fox, in an attempt to think about the uneven development of media over time. Marshall will discuss how popular but privatized platforms like Facebook and YouTube, pop culture fashion—and the negotiable refashionability of both—present crucial challenges to the study of media today.

Joel Burges works at the intersection of literary studies, critical studies, and media studies. His first book, which is in progress, is entitled The Uses of Obsolescence; it considers the fate of historical thinking in the media of late modernity, especially literature and cinema. His second book, in its very early stages, is called Fiction after TV; it considers how a major mode of imaginative processing—fiction—is altered by the introduction of TV to post-1945 mediascapes.

Wayne Marshall is an ethnomusicologist, blogger (wayneandwax.com), and DJ, specializing in the musical and cultural production of the Caribbean and the Americas, and their circulation in the wider world. Currently a Mellon Fellow at MIT, he’s writing a book on music, social media, and digital youth culture. He co-edited and contributed to Reggaeton (Duke 2009) and has published in journals such as Popular Music and Callaloo while writing for popular outlets like XLR8R, The Wire, and the Boston Phoenix.

As ICT’s become available to new groups of users, notably those from the global South, new social formations of virtual labor, race, nation, and gender are being born. And if virtual world users’ claims to citizenship and sovereignty within them are to be taken seriously, so too must the question of “gray collar” or semi-legal virtual laborers and their social relations and cultural identity in these spaces. Just as labor migrants around the globe struggle to access a sense of belonging in alien territories, so too do virtual laborers, many of whom are East and South Asian, confront hostility and xenophobia in popular gaming worlds and virtual “workshops” such as World of Warcraft and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Do these users have the right to have rights? This presentation considers the affective investments and cultural identities of these workers within the virtual worlds where they labor.

Lisa Nakamura is the Director of the Asian American Studies Program, Professor in the Institute of Communication Research and Media Studies Program and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. She is the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Routledge, 2002) and a co-editor of Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000). She has published articles in Critical Studies in Media Communication, PMLA, Cinema Journal, The Women’s Review of Books, Camera Obscura, and the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. She is editing a collection with Peter Chow-White entitled Digital Race: An Anthology (Routledge, forthcoming) and is working on a new monograph on Massively Multiplayer Online Role playing games, the transnational racialized labor, and avatarial capital in a “postracial” world.

How might the critical tradition in media studies respond to the wildly proliferating media phenomena of today? In this presentation, Ken Wark starts with his own experience writing Gamer Theory as a ‘networked book’, mediating between Plato, WordPress, and World of Warcraft. This was an experiment in which critical media approaches were made to confront the computer game as an historically specific form, the form perhaps of our times. It was also an attempt to create online tools for a specifically critical mode of collaborative writing, at some remove from the argumentative and consensus style of the blog and wiki respectively. A third dimension to the experiment explored the relation of the gift of writing, of time, of attention, to the commodified form of the book. What can be learned from the results of this experiment? How can media studies be both in and of the emergent media forms, and yet retain a creative and critical distance from them? It is in its difference from what it studies that media studies begins to find the intellectual resources to respond adequately to the extraordinary world of media, in all its historical and anthropological depth and breadth.

McKenzie Wark is chair of Culture & Media and associate dean of Eugene Lang College, and an associate professor of critical studies at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP, 2004), Gamer Theory (Harvard UP, 2007) and various other things.

From Nintendo’s first Famicom system, Japanese consoles and videogames have played a central role in the development and expansion of the digital game industry. Players globally have consumed and enjoyed Japanese games for many reasons, and in a variety of contexts. This study examines one particular subset of videogame players, for whom the consumption of Japanese videogames in particular is of great value, in addition to their related activities consuming anime and manga from Japan. Through in-depth interviews with such players, this study investigates how transnational fandom operates in the realm of videogame culture, and how a particular group of videogame players interprets their gameplay experience in terms of a global, if hybrid, industry.

Mia Consalvo is visiting associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. She is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames and is co-editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies.

Emerging in the mid 20th century (when Disneyland opened its doors in 1955), the theme park created the ultimate in trompe l’oeil effects by extending the fictional world of Disney animation into the social sphere. In doing so, Disney produced a networked environment that conjured wondrous spaces that both performed for the audience and which were for performing within. Over the last two decades, Las Vegas has adopted and extended this theme park logic into the urban sphere. Travelling briefly back to the era of the movie palace, this paper will consider contemporary Las Vegas as a neo-baroque mediascape that extends the theme park’s delight in performativity, theatricality and sensorial engagement into the wider social realm. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s concept of ‘pansemiotics’, it will be argued that spectacle cities like Las Vegas operate according to the logic of a giant wunderkammer — relying on an emblematic understanding of the meaning of objects and the interrelationship between them. In particular, this paper will analyse how this city-as-monument to entertainment and leisure culture has appropriated tropes and modes of engagement taken from pre-20th Century high culture traditions of the Church and aristocracy. But whereas palaces, theatrical spectacles, churches, and piazzas stood as monuments to the grandeur of their aristocratic patrons, in our current time, these new entertainment environments stand as monuments to corporate conglomerates and the masses who inhabit these worlds.

Angela Ndalianis is currently associate professor in cinema and cultural studies at the University of Melbourne.

Google seems omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. It also claims to be benevolent. It’s no surprise that we hold the company to almost deific levels of awe and respect. But what are we really gaining and losing by inviting Google to be the lens through which we view the world? This talk will describe Siva Vaidhyanathan’s own apostasy and suggest ways we might live better with Google once we see it as a mere company rather than as a force for good and enlightenment in the world.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, cultural historian and media scholar, is currently associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia.

Fictional experiments in emerging media like Twitter and Facebook are influencing traditional printed novels and stories in interesting ways, but another intriguing new narrative is also emerging: the rise of “artifacts” that, although they support a writer’s career, have their own intrinsic creative value. What are the benefits and dangers of a confusion between the private creativity and the public career elements of a writer’s life caused by new media and a proliferation of “open channels”? What protective measures must a writer take to preserve his or her “self” in this environment? In addition to the guerilla tactics implicit in storytelling through social media and other unconventional platforms, in what ways is a writer’s life now itself a story irrespective of intentional fictive storytelling? Examining these issues leads naturally to a discussion on the tension and cross-pollination between the private and public lives of writers in our transmedia age, including the strategies and tactics that best serve those who want to survive and flourish in this new environment. What are we losing in the emerging new paradigm, and what do we stand to gain?

A writer for the New York Times Book Review, Huffington Post, and Washington Post, Jeff VanderMeer is also the award-winning author of the metafictional City of Saints & Madmen, the noir fantasy Finch, and Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for 21st-Century Writers. His website can be found at jeffvandermeer.com.

Kevin Smokler is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books) which was a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2005. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Fast Company and on National Public Radio. He lives in San Francisco, blogs for the Huffington Post and at kevinsmokler.com, and is the CEO of BookTour.com.

Presented in conjunction with Futures of Entertainment 4

Newspapers and magazines are reducing their critical coverage of the arts, but the human appetite to evaluate culture, to debate reactions and opinions, remains as vibrant as ever. Panelists Doug McLennan (editor of ArtsJournal.com) and Bill Marx (editor of TheArtsFuse.com) discuss how cyberspace is transforming arts journalism, in some cases radically redefining its form and content. The forum debates what critical values from the traditional media should survive, explores how digital media is changing the ways we articulate our responses to the arts, and points to promising contemporary business models and experiments in cultural coverage.

What can we learn about contemporary culture from watching dayglo-clad teenagers dancing geekily in front of their computers in such disparate sites as Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, and Mexico City? How has the embrace of “new media” by so-called “digital natives” facilitated the formation of transnational, digital publics? More important, what are the local effects of such practices, and why do they seem to generate such hostile responses and anxiety about the future?

Wayne Marshall is an ethnomusicologist, blogger, DJ, and, beginning this year, a Mellon Fellow in Foreign Languages and Literatures at MIT. His research focuses on the production and circulation of popular music, especially across the Americas and in the wider world, and the role that digital technologies are playing in the formation of new notions of community, selfhood, and nationhood.

Many people talk about “cinematic” games, but what does this really mean? Over their century of existence, films have been using a range of techniques to create specific emotional responses in their audience. Instead of simply using more cut-scenes, better script writers, or making more heavily scripted game experiences, game designers can look to film techniques as an inspiration for new techniques that accentuate what games do well. This lecture presents film clips from a number of classic movies, analyzes how they work from a cinematic standpoint, and then suggests ways these techniques can be used in gameplay to create even more stimulating experiences for gamers, including examples from games that have successfully bridged the gap.

Richard Rouse III is a game designer and writer, best known for The Suffering horror games and his book Game Design: Theory & Practice. He is currently the Lead Single Player Designer on the story-driven first-person shooter Homefront at Kaos Studios in New York City.

In 1897, the year H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man was published, Marconi filed his patent and established the first station for wireless telegraphy, what would become radio. Wells’s novel reads as if it were an instruction manual for the uses and abuses of the nascent radio voice. In this podcast, Picker argues that, in conjunction with the racist basis of much fin-de-siecle anxiety, the acousmatic status of Wells’s protagonist allows for a conspicuous if incoherent racial performance. This performance tests the limits of Wells’s sympathetic imagination even as it further amplifies the voice of Griffin, the Invisible Man. Picker begins with Wells’s story and goes on to show how, when one attends to questions of voice and sound technologies in several different media, the racial and ethnic dimensions that become audible forge invisible connections among modes of art that we have been taught to keep distinct. Tracing a transatlantic route from fiction to radio and sound film back to fiction, this approach offers a new way to characterize a crucial period of change from the late Victorian to the modern world.

John Picker is Visiting Associate Professor of Literature at MIT, where he arrived this fall after several years as Associate Professor of English at Harvard. He is the author of Victorian Soundscapes and has ongoing interests in sound studies, media history, and the literature and culture of the Victorian era. His many articles and book chapters include, most recently, an essay on “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” in A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors and out this September from Harvard University Press.

Remixers are on the front lines of the battle between new media technologies and impeding copyright laws that threaten to obstruct the public discursive space for critiquing popular culture. These spaces are abundant with meticulously crafted and articulate video remixes that deconstruct social myths, challenge dominant media messages and form powerful arguments reflecting the participatory nature of both pop and remix cultures. We’ll deconstruct these videos, honor the history of female fan vidders and the influences of African-American hip-hop cultures and debate the remix’s ability to effect actual change.

Elisa Kreisinger is a video remix artist, hacktivist, and writer. She co-edits the blog, PoliticalRemixVideo.com, teaches new media to Cambridge teens and is currently working on her first screenplay.

The election of an African-American president in November 2008 has been hailed as a transforming event. But has Obama’s ascension transformed anything? Many people’s answer to that question changed this summer when a famous Harvard professor was arrested at his home in Cambridge. Are the harsh realities of race and class in the U.S. clearer now or murkier, following the media tsunami of Gatesgate? And has this polarizing event given greater visibility to racial minorities in the media’s coverage of politics? How are race issues and racial politics covered in our national media, and what are the implications of the demise of major city newspapers for the coverage of race and politics?

Juan Williams of NPR and Fox News discussed these and related questions in a candid conversation with Phillip Thompson, associate professor of urban politics in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, and David Thorburn, Professor of Literature and Director of the MIT Communications Forum. This forum is the first of two this term in our ongoing civic media series, a collaboration of the Communications Forum and the Media Lab’s Center for Future Civic Media.

Hanna Rose Shell, a historian and media artist, is as Assistant Professor in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at MIT. This was a talk about camouflage framed by the question of “how not to be seen”–in film, on film, as film. In the first part, Shell introduced “how not to be seen” in terms of the aspiration for, and actualization of concealment in both filmic and natural ecologies through mixed-media practices that simultaneously incorporate and subvert the photographic media of reconnaissance. In the second part, Shell screened and discussed her film-in-progress, called Blind, about the phenomenology of camouflage. Blind as in blindness, and blind as in that actively constructed structure intended for the concealment of a hunter from her game. Shell’s book Hide and Seek: Camouflage and the Media of Reconnaissance will be published by Zone Books.

A long lifetime of developing electronic consumer products has taken Ralph Baer from vacuum tube through microprocessor designs. Although the technology has undergone vast changes, the underlying motivation for, and execution of, the process has not changed radically. Baer cited numerous examples of specific product designs that made it all the way through the process to a successful product and drew some conclusions from that experience that shed some light on the continuum of invention, development, and marketing novel product ideas.

Presidential elections are considered decisions on politicians’ virtues and reflections of public values. On an ongoing basis, polling data and snap punditry engorge the body politic between elections. Taken together, these judgments on leadership and partisanship – on statecraft and stagecraft – lie at the core of democracy today. Tucker Eskew explores the permanent campaign of the last ten years. What is “message discipline” in an era of atomized opinion leadership – a necessity or a fool’s errand? Are the parties inevitably devoted to different styles of communication, and is this era’s favored approach inextricably the domain of the new Administration? Can unfettered dialogue, as an expression of freedom, be a pure benefit to society, or is “Fire!” being texted in a crowded coffee house? Consistent with his conservatism, Eskew will have firm answers to some of these and other questions. Reflecting his consulting firm ViaNovo’s “new ways”, he welcomed dialogue on all.

Gavin Grant, Small Bear Press Jennifer Jackson, Donald Maass Literary Agency Robert Miller, HarperCollins Bob Stein, Institute for the Future of the Book Moderator: Geoff Long, MIT

Claude Mussou, INA France Pelle Snickars, Swedish National Archive Richard Wright, BBC Research and Information Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT and Utrecht University

Mary Bryson, University of British Columbia Marlene Manoff, MIT Libraries John Durham Peters, University of Iowa Thomas Pettitt, University of Southern Denmark Moderator: James Paradis, MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies

Jessica Clark, Center for Social Media (American University) Ellen Hume, Center for Future Civic Media (MIT) Persephone Miel, Media Re:public and Internews Network Respondents: Dean Jansen, Participatory Culture Foundation Jake Shapiro, Public Radio Exchange (PRX) Moderator: Pat Aufderheide, American University

John Miles Foley, Univ. of Missouri Lisa Gitelman, Harvard Univ. Rick Prelinger, Prelinger Archives Ann Wolpert, MIT Libraries Moderator: Peter Walsh, Andover Newton Theological School

This panel explored theoretical, methodological, and practical issues surrounding the study of media circulation in an age of increasing global connectivity. “Global media” often serves as a placeholder for media outside Anglo-American academic settings, with “global” gesturing towards “Other” media ecologies. This panel brought together scholars and practitioners who wrestle with the simultaneous indispensability and inadequacy of Anglo-American paradigms – both for media practitioners and scholars – in Asian, African, and Latin American contexts. In what ways can we move away from the “national” as the pre-eminent analytic frame? How do media producers in the global south grapple with the challenges and opportunities of globalization? What role are audiences playing in shaping media circuits? In tackling these and other questions, panelists Jonathan Gray, Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University; Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia; African filmmaker Abderrahamane Sissako; and CMS alum Aswin Punathambekar SM ’03, Communication Studies, University of Michigan explored ways in which recent developments in diverse settings worldwide might inform and revitalize our understanding of how media circulates. Henry Jenkins will moderate this forum which kicks off the sixth Media in Transition conference at MIT.

Chris Claremont is best known for his 17 year unbroken run on the X-Men comic series — a feat in world building that has supported many uses, from comics to movies to video games and more. Now Chris is returning to that world, with a new comics series titled X-Men Forever. This time, the rules are different. Mr. Claremont addressed thoughts and considerations that go into building a world that can support years of use, and variations. How has the concept of world-building changed over time? What is the purpose of continuity? Multiplicity? How to take into account growth and risk, and play outside the rules.

A discussion about the inducement of pleasure, fantasy fulfillment, and the mediation of intimacy in a socially-networked gaming paradigm such as World of Warcraft (WOW) this event was held in conjunction with the exhibition SHADA/JAHN/VAUCELLE, “Hollowed,” which includes the WOW Pod, a collaborative project by Cati Vaucelle & Shada/Jahn. Panelists included Jean-Baptiste Labrune, Postdoctoral Associate at the Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab; Raimundas Malasauskas, Curator, Artists Space (NYC); Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program; Marisa Jahn, Artist in Residence, MIT Media Lab; Steve Shada, artist collaborator; Cati Vaucelle, PhD candidate Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab; and Laura Knott, Curatorial Associate, MIT Museum.

The widespread adoption of computer-based methods of digital recording technology has profoundly changed film scoring practices around the globe, not least in Hollywood. This panel will explore those changes with attention to current techniques compared to those of past generations. Our speakers, Paul Chihara of UCLA and Dan Carlin of the Berklee College of Music, are widely respected professional film scorers as well as teachers. Drawing on their own experiences in film production, they explored the decisive changes in personnel, economics, and stylistic values at work in Hollywood today. Moderator Martin Marks of MIT provided historical perspectives and guided the discussion with questions for the panelists concerning the music of landmark films past and present.

A fluid text is any work that exists in multiple versions. What are the ethics and legality in the creation, sharing, and ownership of textual versions? What are the boundaries of textual appropriation? How does technology abet appropriation; how might it assist in the useful designation of boundaries? Is the law keeping up?

Hofstra University professor John Bryant explores the larger applications of the notion of fluid text to culture, and in particular identity formation in a multicultural democracy. Wendy Seltzer is a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and is a visiting professor at American University. She founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats, and to research the effects of these threats on free expression.

In humans, gender–femininity, masculinity–is an array of performed behaviors, from dressing in certain clothes to walking and talking in certain ways. These behaviors are both socially and historically shaped, but are also contingent upon many situational influences, including individual choices. Female and male bodies alike can perform a variety of femininities and masculinities. What can human gender(ed) practices and performances tell us about how humanoid robots are gendered, and vice versa? Jennifer Robertson, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, explored and interrogated the gendering of humanoid robots manufactured today in Japan for use in the home and workplace. She showed that Japanese roboticists assign gender to their creations based on rigid assumptions about female and male sex and gender roles. Thus, humanoid robots can productively be understood as the vanguard of a “posthuman sexism,” and are being developed in a socio-political climate of reactionary conservatism.

Robert Putnam has suggested that the political consciousness and civic engagement of the post-World War II generation may have taken shape in bowling alleys and other spaces where community members gathered. Might the political consciousness of the new generation be taking shape in and around popular culture? Are we seeing a blurring of the roles of citizen and consumer? Is this fusion between entertainment and news a good or a bad thing? What links exist between our cultural and our political preferences? How are activists and political leaders utilizing metaphors from popular culture as resources to mobilize their supporters? Is it possible that aspects of our popular culturemay generate utopian visions that fuel political change? These and other questions were explored by panelists Johanna Blakley, deputy director of the Norman Lear Center at USC; David Carr, media and culture writer for the New York Times; and Stephen Duncombe, associate professor at NYU and author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy.

Henry Jenkins moderated.

This talk, with Celia Pearce, Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech and Director and the Emergent Game Group and Experimental Game Lab, explored the connection of identity to virtual place, referencing in particular anthropology, humanist and socio-geography and Internet studies to look at the construction and performance of “fictive ethnicity” tied to a specific, though virtual and fictional, locality. To illustrate, Pearce used the example of the “Uru Diaspora,” a game community from the defunct massively multiplayer game Uru: Ages Beyond Myst (based on the Myst series), which immigrated into other games and virtual worlds, adopting the collective fictive ethnicity of “Uru Refugees,” and referring to Uru as their “homeland.”

Michael Mateas is an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz where his research focuses on artificial intelligence (AI)-based art and entertainment. As head of the Expressive Intelligence Studio at Santa Cruz, he is involved in such projects as automated support for game generation, automatic generation of autonomous character conversations, story management, and authoring tools for interactive storytelling. Mateas is a collaborator on the interactive drama Facade (see interactivestory.net).

The Obama campaign’s extensive deployment of digital media, especially its tech-savvy outreach to the young, was widely reported before the election. Some predicted that this digital advantage would make a decisive difference. Did it? What role did the Internet play in the election? How has it changed presidential politics? What are the future implications of the impact of new media on journalism and on American society? These and other questions will be addressed by Marc Ambinder, who covers politics for The Atlantic; Cyrus Krohn, the director of the National Republican Committee’s eCampaign; and Ian V. Rowe, who headed up MTV’s coverage of the presidential election.

Tak Toyoshima’s comic strip Secret Asian Man has brought to light the challenges of being Asian American in America. Challenges like not being able to find his name on a key chain at souvenir shops, being asked where he was delivering the Chinese food that he just picked up and being his friend’s default camera technician. In 2007, SAM began syndication through United Features and has since become a daily strip featured in papers across the country. SAM’s focus has broadened beyond purely Asian-American race relations, and now discusses themes that involve dynamics between groups to which we all belong: race, gender, political, religious, left-handed, sexual orientation, dog people…etc. In this informal presentation, Toyoshima explores the relationship between his preferred content (the exploration of Asian-American identity), his medium (comics), and his mode of distribution (syndication primarily through independent newspapers). How does Secret Asian Man address the historical role of racial stereotypes in comics as a medium? What might his experiences as an independent comics producer tell us about the opportunities offered by alternative media?

Comics have emerged as a key means of interpreting and disseminating controversial and contested histories: Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, Joe Sacco’s Palestine, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis are just some of the works that take definitive social and political conflict as their topic. Why has historical material become so important for comics art? What unique opportunities does comics allow for critiquing and revising dominant historical narratives? These are the questions our speakers discussed, in relation to their own work and to the comics world in general.

Diana Tamblyn is writing a biography of Canadian arms trader and weapons engineer Gerald Bull; Ho Che Anderson authored King, a 3-volume biography of MLK; and Jeet Heer is a historian and a leading comics scholar.

A pioneering scholar of the Enlightenment and of the history of the book, Robert Darnton is the director of the University Library and the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard. A former Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow, his books include The Business of the Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History, and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France. He has written extensively on the impact of digital technologies on the culture of print and on the responsibilities of libraries in the computer age.

In this Forum, Darnton discussed and took questions about the emergence of the discipline of the history of the book, the future of books and reading, and his own vision of the ways in which new and old media can reinforce each other, strengthening and transforming the world of learning.

With respondent Diana Henderson, Greenblatt speaks on the transformation of literary study in America and his own career as a teacher and writer.

This presentation delivers a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s three-person submersible, Alvin. Meditating on the sounds rather that the sights of the dive, Stefan Helmreich explores multiple meanings of immersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of Alvin as a submarine cyborg, he shows how interior and exterior soundscapes create a sense of immersion, and he argues that torquing media theory to include water as a medium can make explicit the technical structures and social practices of sounding, hearing, and listening that support senses — scientific, everyday, and anthropological — of embodied sonic presence.

Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies life scientists, from those who engage in the computer modeling of living things (Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, University of California Press, 1998) to those who work in deep-sea environments (Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, University of California Press, 2009). He is particularly interested in the limits of “life” as an analytical category for contemporary biology.

How have American news media responded to this historic presidential campaign? Is it true, as many have suggested, that the influence of newspapers and television has declined in the digital era? Have the media become more partisan and polarized? More preoccupied with polls and campaign strategy than with substantive issues? Has the coverage by traditional media been qualitatively different from that by online news sources? In this first of two forums on the campaign and the media, noted journalists Tom Rosenstiel, who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington D.C., and John Carroll, a local reporter and media critic who teaches at Boston University, will offer report cards on the current state of American political journalism.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Future Civic Media and the Technology and Culture Forum

Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson present findings from their book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do (Simon & Schuster, 2008), including the complex ways in which video games may benefit or disadvantage children. They will also talk about myths and politics in media violence research, and how they influence the views of academics and mass media. Lawrence Kutner, Ph.D. and Cheryl K. Olson, Sc.D. are cofounders and co-directors (with Eugene Beresin, M.D.) of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital. They are both on the psychiatry faculty of Harvard Medical School. Kutner received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and trained at the Mayo Clinic. He’s a licensed psychologist and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He wrote the “Parent & Child” column for the New York Times as well as five books on child development. Olson was principal investigator for a $1.5 million study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice on the effects of video games on young teenagers, which formed the basis for Grand Theft Childhood. She has a Doctor of Science degree in health and social behavior from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a postdoctoral certificate in pharmaceutical medicine from the University of Basel.

A conversation with Junot Díaz, regarding questions of genre and secondary world construction in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and the Caribbean, and the failure of realism as a narrative strategy to describe the deep history of the New World. Díaz is the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at MIT. He is the author of Drown and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the John Sargent First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Los Angeles artist and special effects virtuoso Pat O’Neill filmed The Decay of Fiction (2002) in the landmark Ambassador Hotel, once the center of Hollywood celebrity culture. His film blurs the boundaries between architectural investigation, urban documentation, and aesthetic exploration. At once a poetic homage to classical film genres, it is also a suggestive indication of how remembering the city is changing in response to new technologies. Edward Dimendberg is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and German at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004), co-editor of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (1994), and currently serves as Multimedia Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

The current generation of young citizens is growing up in an age of unprecedented access to information. Will this change their understanding of democracy? What factors will shape their involvement in the political process?

Lance Bennett is Ruddick C. Lawrence Professor of Communication and Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, where he founded and directs the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement.

Ingeborg Endter is the outreach manager for the MIT Center for Future Civic Media and a graduate of the electronic publishing group at MIT’s Media Lab where her research focused on creating collaborative community uses of the Internet. She previously served as a program manager for the Computer Clubhouse Network, a collaboration between the Boston Museum of Science and Media Lab that provides an after-school learning environment where young people from under-served communities use technology for creative self-expression.

Alan Khazei co-founded City Year, which enlists more than 1,200 young adults, in 16 communities across America and in Johannesburg, South Africa, for a year of full-time community service. He is currently founder and CEO of Be the Change, a non-partisan citizens’ civic organization.

Much discussion of our impending digital future is insular and without nuance. Skeptics talk mainly among themselves, while utopians and optimists also keep company mainly within their own tribal cultures. This forum challenges this unhelpful division, staging a conversation between Yochai Benkler and Cass Sunstein, two of our country’s most thoughtful and influential writers on the promise and the perils of the Internet Age.

In the year 2008, artists and businesspersons navigate the vast divide between the world of independent filmmaking and the Hollywood studio system as the lines between the two become increasingly more blurred. As pop culture integration – the fusing of music, sports, dance, event programming, reality, and other subcultures geared toward mainstream audiences while highlighting the genre demographic – has become the lifeline for both the artistic and commercial filmmaker, where do you find the happy medium, or is there one anymore? Writer, producer, distributor, and president of Tri Destined Films, Gregory Anderson has been called a part of the “new” Oscar Micheaux movement as a trailblazer for independent film distribution. Gregory created Stomp the Yard, one of the most profitable dance films of all time, and produced, marketed, and theatrically distributed the independent film Trois, one of the Top 50 highest grossing Independent Films of its release year according to Daily Variety.

Wu Ming 1 is a founding member and representative of the Wu Ming Foundation, a collective of writers from Italy. Most members of the collective were deeply involved in the Luther Blissett Project, an international experiment in culture jamming, radical pranksterism and guerrilla mythology that ran from 1994 to 1999. During that time, a group of LBP activists wrote a controversial novel titled Q, which was published to much acclaim in 1999. In January 2000 the authors of Q founded the Wu Ming Foundation, which takes its name from a Chinese word meaning either “anonymous” or “five names” depending on how the first syllable is pronounced. The name is meant both as a tribute to dissidents (“Wu Ming” is a common byline among Chinese citizens demanding democracy and freedom of speech) and as a refusal of the celebrity-making machine which turns authors into stars.

Historically, engineers learned by taking machines apart and putting them back together again. Can young people also learn how culture works by sampling and remixing the materials of their culture? Might this ability to appropriate and transform valued cultural materials be recognized as an important new kind of cultural competency, what some people are calling the new media literacies? How might we meaningfully incorporate this fascination with mash-ups into our pedagogical practices and what values should we place on the kinds of new content which young people produce by working on and working over existing cultural materials? In this program, we will showcase a range of contemporary projects that embrace a hands-on approach to contemporary and classical media materials as a means of getting young people to think critically about their own roles as future media producers and consumers.

Denis Dyack is the founder and president of Silicon Knights. In this capacity, he oversees the creation and development of games, and continues to further the growth of the company. Dyack is a noted authority on interactive software development and offers valuable insight into the process of designing next-generation games that appeal to the masses. Under Dyack’s direction, Silicon Knights has evolved into one of the top independent interactive software developers in the world. Dyack (B. Phed, H. B.Sc, M. Sc.) founded Silicon Knights in 1992 after publishing Cyber Empires in 1991. Since that time, Silicon Knights has moved from creating PC games to premiere AAA console titles, such as Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain for the original PlayStation. Working with Nintendo as a second party, Silicon Knights created the critically acclaimed Eternal Darkness. Together with Nintendo, Silicon Knights worked with Konami to create another critically acclaimed game, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. Dyack and his team are currently working with Microsoft on the Too Human trilogy for the Xbox 360, and developing an exciting new game for Sega of America.

A salient feature of contemporary TV has been the appearance of programs that appeal more widely across national boundaries than many earlier television shows. Examples include a range of reality shows such as Big Brother or Survivor as well as fiction series such as Ugly Betty, which undergo relatively small facelifts before being introduced to new audiences. And many American programs – e.g., Lost, Desperate Housewives – travel abroad with no alterations, as country-specific promotion and distribution strategies adjust them to their new national contexts. In this forum, distinguished media scholars Eggo Müller, Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio will discuss the origins and significance of the international distribution of television formats and programs.

The prime-time series has been a central narrative form in America for the last half-century, as the Hollywood movie had been in a previous era. Are the radical transformations of television in recent years challenging this domination? How has series TV changed over the past 20 years? What does the prolonged writers’ strike signify for the future of TV fiction and the medium as a whole? Leading writer-producer John Romano (Third Watch, Party of Five, Hill Street Blues) addresses these and related questions in a candid conversation.

Non-traditional and viral marketing campaigns raise questions about the content status of advertising and the authenticity of commercial art. This panel discussion will consider the challenges of engaging audiences in non-conventional ways, looking at the status of viral media and the nature of non-traditional marketing campaigns. Berkman Center Fellow and Convergence Culture Consortium consulting researcher Shenja van der Graaf will moderate the converation with Natalie Lent from Fanscape and Mike Rubenstein of The Barbarian Group.

Co-sponsored by the Convergence Culture Consortium

Jason Mittell, Middlebury College; Jonathan Gray, Fordham University; Lee Harrington, Miami University

Cult properties have become mass entertainment. Marvel’s success bringing comic book characters to the big screen and the resurgence of the space opera suggest niche properties may no longer mean marginalized audience appeal. This panel explores the politics, pitfalls, and potentials of exploiting niches and mainstreaming once marginalized properties. How do you stay true to the few but build properties attractive to the many? What role do fans play in developing cult properties for success? Is it profitable to build a franchise on the intense interest of the few and relying on Long Tail economics? Are smaller audiences viable in the short term, or do we need to rethink the length of time for a reasonable return?

Panelists: Danny Bilson, Transmedia Creator; Jeff Gomez, Starlight Runner; Jesse Alexander, Heroes; Gordon Tichell, Walden Media

Migratory audiences and declining channel loyalty are seen as two key challenges convergence culture poses to the advertising industry. At the same time, campaigns that respond by capitalizing on the creativity of audiences prompt questions about the continuing role for creatives. This panel looks at the unfolding role for advertisers within convergence culture, looking at questions about the nature of agencies, transmedia planning and the increasing circulation of advertising as entertainment content. Does the agency structure need to be rethought? What are the implications of breaking down the distinction between content and advertising? What are effective ways to collaborate with creative audiences? How is convergence culture changing the value of different advertising sites?

Panelists: Mike Rubenstein, The Barbarian Group; Baba Shetty, Hill/Holliday; Tina Wells, Buzz Marketing Group; Faris Yakob, Naked Communications; Bill Fox, Fidelity Investments

Panelists: Bruce Leichtman, Leichtman Research Group; Stacey Lynn Schulman, Turner Broadcasting; Maury Giles, GSD&M Idea City

As media companies have come to recognize the value of participatory audiences, they have searched for matrixes by which to measure engagement with their properties. A model based on impressions is giving way to new models which seek to account for the range of different ways consumers engage with entertainment content. But nobody is quite clear how you can "count" engaged consumers or how you can account for various forms and qualities of engagement. Over the past several years, a range of different companies have proposed alternative systems for measuring engagement. What are the strengths and limits of these competing models? What aspects of audience activity do they account for? What value do they place on different forms of engagement?

There is growing anxiety about the way labor is compensated in Web 2.0. The accepted model -- trading content in exchange for connectivity or experience -- is starting to strain, particularly as the commodity culture of user-generated content confronts the gift economy which has long characterized the participatory fan cultures of the web. The incentives which work to encourage participation in some spaces are alienating other groups and many are wondering what kinds of revenue sharing should or could exist when companies turn a profit based on the unpaid labor of their consumers. What do we know now about the "architecture of participation" (to borrow Kevin O'Reilly's formulation) that we didn't know a year ago? What have been the classic mistakes which Web 2.0 companies have made in their interactions with their customers? What do we gain by applying a theory of labor to think about the invisible work performed by fans and other consumers within the new media economy?

Panelists: Mark Deuze, Indiana University; Catherine Tosenberger, University of Florida; Jordan Greenhall, DivX; Elizabeth Osder, Buzznet; Raph Koster, Areae

Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green

The fragmenting audiences and proliferating channels of contemporary television are changing how programs are made and how they appeal to viewers and advertisers. Some media and advertising spokesmen are arguing that smaller, more engaged audiences are more valuable than the passive viewers of the Broadcast Era. They focus on the number of viewers who engage with the program and its extensions -- web sites, podcasts, digital comics, games, and so forth. What steps are networks taking to prolong and enlarge the viewer's experience of a weekly series? How are networks and production companies adapting to and deploying digital technologies and the Internet? And what challenges are involved in creating a series in which individual episodes are only part of an imagined world that can be accessed on a range of devices and that appeals to gamers, fans of comics, lovers of message boards or threaded discussions, digital surfers of all sorts? In this forum, producers from the NBC series Heroes will discuss their hit show as well as the nature of network programming, the ways in which audiences are measured, the extension of television content across multiple media channels, and the value that producers place on the most active segments of their audiences.

A generation of scholars, critics and political leaders has denounced videogames as at best a distraction and at worst a negative influence on society. Yet for a growing generation of activists and researchers, games may also represent a resource for engaging young people with the political process and heightening their awareness of social issues. In what ways do young people use the online societies constructed in multiplayer games to rehearse and refine skills at citizenship? Can we imagine games as a medium that encourages public awareness and citizenship? And what might it mean to empower young people to create their own games to reflect their perceptions of the world around them? This is the second in a continuing series from the new MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

A conversation about the theory and practice of collective intelligence, with emphasis on Wikipedia, other instances of aggregated intellectual work and on recent innovative applications in product development for both large and small businesses. Thomas Malone, founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, will anchor the discussion.

Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also the founder and director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and author of the book The Future of Work. Malone has published over 75 articles, research papers, and book chapters and is an inventor with 11 patents.

Media strategist and author of Fundamentals of Television Branding and Marketing Lee Hunt presents recent innovations in television branding and discusses some of the struggles being faced by networks in the era of convergence and transmedia.

In Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam wrote about a generation of Americans cut off from traditional forms of community life and civic engagement, passive consumers of mass media. But others have noted the expansion of participatory cultures and virtual communities on the web, the growth of blogs, podcasts, and other forms of citizen journalism, the rise of new kinds of social affiliations within virtual worlds. What lessons can we learn from these online worlds that will make an impact in the communities where we work, sleep, and vote? What new technologies and practices offer us the best chance of revitalizing civic engagement? This forum marks the launch of the new MIT Center for Future Civic Media, a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program and is the first in a series of events designed to focus attention on the relationship between emerging media and civic engagement. The center has been funded by a $5 million grant from the Knight Foundation. Its directors will be Chris Csikszentmihalyi and Mitchel Resnick of the Media Lab and Henry Jenkins of CMS.

Author and management advisor B. Joseph Pine II discusses how ideas outlined in his book The Experience Economy fit within the context of digital technologies, virtual worlds, and convergence culture.

Andrew Slack, founder of The HP Alliance, an organization seeking to engage Harry Potter fans in social and political activism, discusses the origins and motivations behind the group and their current project to raise awareness about the genocide in Darfur.

Longtime soap opera writer Kay Alden talks about her decades in the industry with CMS graduate student Sam Ford ’07 who is writing his thesis about soap operas. Alden worked for more than 30 years on The Young and the Restless, the top-rated daytime drama that she served as head writer for from 1998 to 2006. Recently, she took on a consulting position with ABC Daytime and continues working with the genre during what is seen as a period of substantial change for the daytime television industry. Ford’s thesis, “"As the World Turns in a Convergence Environment",” focuses on the shifting technologies and cultural patterns that are affecting daytime television.

Today, artists working in new media, including video, web projects and music confront contested and conceptually confusing terrain in which reproduction can be as perfect as the artist desires and endless copies theoretically possible. Yet many find the lack of clarity stimulating and a compelling space in which to break new ground. Why are so many artists today mimicking new forms of visual culture and their distribution systems -- even at the risk of confusion with their popular sources? How are artists debating the value of tightly controlling distribution of media art versus allowing its wider reproduction? What are the tradeoffs artists make between creating artificial scarcity to increase a work's unique value and increasing its visibility through broader reproduction? How are the needs of those who teach and write on video going to be met in the face of hyper-commodification?

What have we learned? What have we accomplished? Where do we go from here?

How has the American tradition of intellectual property law understood the relationship between originality and tradition? What rights do artists and educators have to draw inspiration from or comment on existing works in existing media? What habits, beliefs, legal and policy decisions threaten the emergence of a more participatory culture? What have people done, and what can we do to protect the Fair Use rights of artists, educators, and amateurs so that explore the opportunities created by new media and a networked society?

Digital visionaries such as Yochai Benkler have described the emergence of a new networked culture in which participants with differing intentions and professional credentials co-exist and cooperate in a complex media ecology. Are we witnessing the appearance of a new or revitalized folk culture? Are there older traditions and practices from print culture or oral societies that resemble these emerging digital practices? What sort of amateur or grassroots creativity have been studied or documented by literary scholars, anthropologists, and students of folklore? How were creativity and collaboration understood in earlier cultures? Are there lessons or cautions for digital culture in the near or distant past?

"Collective Intelligence" and "the wisdom of crowds" have become central buzz phrases in recent discussions of networked culture. But what do they really mean? What do we know about the new forms of collaboration that is emerging as people work together across geographic distances online? Are we working, learning, socializing, creating, consuming, and playing in new ways as a result of the emergence of our participation in online communities? What have we learned over the past decade that may help us to design more powerful communities in the real world? What lessons can we carry from our Second Lives into our First?

It is possible that live performance is not so live any more. In this talk, Sharon Mazer looked at the ways that audience “performances” may be seen to challenge the live-ness of the onstage action in the Road to Wrestlemania 23, which the WWE takes to New Zealand in early 2007, and in Te Matatini, the National Kapa Haka Festival, a biennial Maori cultural performance competition happening that same weekend. Mazer is head of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand). Her book Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle was published by the University Press of Mississippi, and her current research is focused on Maori performance.

Recent trends in music composition push bounds by creating pieces which are either more complex or simpler than works of the past. And yet, our ability to understand and be interested in the compositions at these extremes has kept pace. In this talk, Michael Cuthbert shows how simple minimalist processes give rise to highly ambiguous structures, while many of the most complex moments are reducible to easier to comprehend processes. The effect of potentially endless works—including sections of Beethoven symphonies–will generalize the talk to other musical styles and other media. Cuthbert, visiting assistant professor of music at MIT, has worked extensively on fourteenth-century music and on music of the past 40 years. A recipient of the Rome Prize of the American Academy, Cuthbert earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2006.

Mick Foley, one of the top wrestling performers of the past decade, talked about his experiences as an entertainer and bestselling author who has written three memoirs (including Foley Is Good: And the Real World is Faker Than Wrestling) two novels, and a variety of children’s books. Foley has been a professional wrestler since the mid-1980s and was a headlining star for World Wrestling Entertainment (www.wwe.com) under the personas of Mankind, Cactus Jack and Dude Love. Foley will discuss telling stories in a variety of written and performative genres and how he has managed to bridge the gap across multiple genres and entertainment forms.

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

Jim Ross, the longtime voice of World Wrestling Entertainment, joins CMS graduate student Sam Ford to discuss the unique blend of reality and fiction in the world of American professional wrestling. Ross will talk about how WWE’s distribution across multiple media platforms creates an interesting storytelling atmosphere, and he will share experiences from his many years in the television industry as wrestling has moved from broadcast to cable and pay-per-view and now to DVD distribution, on-demand, and the Web. See Ross’s Web site at www.jrsbarbq.com.

Alan Moore, CEO of engagement marketing company SMLXL and co-author of Communities Dominate Brands, believes that community-based engagement initiatives and the enabling of peer-to-peer flows of communication within organizations, and those that engage with them, will replace the traditional media orthodoxies of government, management, business, media distribution and marketing.

A conversation between Frank Moss, new director of the Media Lab, and CMS Director Henry Jenkins about ongoing projects and inventive digital applications at MIT’s legendary laboratory. Demonstrations were also shown and discussed.

New technologies are enabling forms of borrowing, appropriation and “remixing” of media materials in exciting, provocative ways. In this Forum, two MIT scholars who have studied and written about the remixing of Shakespeare will describe their research, show some salient audio-visual examples and discuss the implications of their work for contemporary culture. Literature Professor Peter Donaldson is director of the Shakespeare Electronic Archive which since 1992 has used computers to develop new ways of studying the text, image and film records of Shakespearean publication and production. Literature Professor Diana Henderson is the author of Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media and A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen. She is an active participant in MIT’s partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The forum will be moderated by Mary Fuller of the Literature Faculty.

Foreign Languages and Literatures visiting professor Sharon Kinsella examines the media constructions of a teenage female revolt in contemporary Japan drawing from her current book project Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation.

This lecture ties into Jesper Juul's recent book, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds.

Panelists: Diane Nelson, danah boyd, Molly Chase

Once seen as marginal or niche consumers, Fan communities look more 'mainstream' than ever before. Some have argued that the practices of web 2.0 are really those of fan culture without the stigma. Courted, encouraged, engaged and acknowledged, fans are more and more frequently being recognized as trendsetters, viral marketers, and grassroots intermediaries. Fan affinity is being seized as a form of grassroots marketing, representing the bleeding edge of brand and property commitment. The sophistication of fan-created products rivals the professional products they honor, sometimes keeping defunct properties alive long after their shelf life might otherwise have expired. How is the increasing importance of fan behavior re-writing the media landscape? What kinds of accountability should media companies have to their most committed consumers? What kinds of value do fans create through their activities? What are the sources of tension that still exist between media producers, advertisers, and fans?

The first in a series of six podcasts, recorded during the first Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.

This is the second in a series of six podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.

Television Futures was the first session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are Andy Hunter, a Planning Director at GSD&M Mark Warshaw, founder of FlatWorld Intertainment, Inc; and Josh Bernoff, a vice president at Forrester. The moderator was Henry Jenkins.

The panelists featured in this recording are Caterina Fake, Director of Tech Development at Yahoo! Inc; Ji Lee, founder of the Bubble Project; Rob Tercek, President and Co Founder of MultiMedia Networks; and Kevin Barrett, the Director of Design at BioWare Corp. The moderator was Joshua Green.

Transmedia Properties was the third session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics; Michael Lebowitz, co-founder and CEO of Big Spaceship; and Alex Chisholm, ounder of [ICE]3 Studios. The moderator was Henry Jenkins.

Opening presentation for the second day, Viscerality and Web 2.0, given by Joshua Green, Research Manager for the Convergence Culture Consortium.

Panelists: John Lester, Ron Meiners, Todd Cunningham

Virtual spaces are more than sites for emulating the real world. They are becoming platforms for thought experiments -- some of which involve fantasies we would not like to enact in the real world, others involve possibilities that we may want to test market before putting into practice. Much more than simulacra of Real Life or a 3D version of text-based Internet communities, online worlds represent new sites for considering questions of community and connectivity. Marked by user- creativity, online worlds balance, sometimes precariously, the rights of users with the rights of sponsoring organizations. As we move closer to the cyberpunk vision of a wholly parallel 'metaverse', questions of power, community, and property are coming to the fore.

The latest MIT Communications Forum, The Craft of Science Fiction, featured Joe Haldeman, four-time Nebula Award winner and author of The Forever War, his forthcoming novel The Accidental Time Machine and many other books.

This forum was moderated by CMS Director Henry Jenkins.

Timothy Stoneman, National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at MIT, discusses his research on missionary and evangelical radio in America from an historical perspective.

Featured speakers included Lauren Cornell, director of Rhizome.org; Jon Ippolito, media artist, curator, author; and our own Beth Coleman, Assistant Professor of Comparative Media Studies and of Writing and Humanistic Studies, co-founder of the SoundLab Cultural Alchemy project.

Scott Donaton, associate publisher and editorial director of the Ad Age Group and author of Madison & Vine talked about why user-empowerment is the key trend in business, and the ways marketers are adapting to it, including the rise of branded entertainment.

This is the third and final forum in the Will Newspapers Survive? series presented by the MIT Communications Forum. Why Newspapers Matter, features Jerome Armstrong of Netroots.com and MyDD.com; Pablo Boczkowski, associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University; Dante Chinni from the Christian Science Monitor; and David Thorburn, professor of literature and director of the Communications Forum at MIT.

This entry in the MIT Communications Forum series, Will Newspapers Survive?, hosted Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, and included our directors, Henry Jenkins and William Uricchio.

The next entry in this series, Why Newspapers Matter will be held October 5, 2006 from 5-7 PM at Bartos Theater, and like all of our events is open to the public. Check our website regularly for more upcoming events.

This is the first forum in the Will Newspapers Survive? series presented by the MIT Communications Forums. The Emergence of Citizens' Media features Alex Beam of the Boston Globe, Ellen Foley from the Wisconsin State Journal and Dan Gillmor, founder of the Center for Citizen Media.

Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics (1993) and Reinventing Comics (2001) graced us with an excellent talk about his latest book, Making Comics, as a part of his Making Comics Fifty States tour, which he is also blogging.

Brenda Brathwaite, "Sex in Games" by Massachusetts Institute of Technology