MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Episodes
The Online Migration of Newspapers
07 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Francisco Ricardo, "The Aesthetics of Projective Spatiality: New Media as Critical Objects"
04 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
One theme in the contemporary use of space involves the shift from production modeled around a physical, centralized “locus” to new virtual, exten...
Fox Harrell, "The Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab"
26 Sep 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Fox Harrell’s research group — the Imagination, Computation, and Expression (ICE) Lab — builds computational systems for expressing im...
CMS 10th Anniversary: "International Media Flows: Global Media and Culture"
27 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Aswin Punathambekar is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He teaches and wr...
CMS 10th Anniversary: "Participatory Culture: Democracy and Education in a Hypermediated Society"
27 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Erin Reilly is Research Director for Project New Media Literacies, a past CMS project now housed at the University of Southern California. Karen Sc...
CMS 10th Anniversary: "Creativity and Collaboration in the Digital Age"
26 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Beth Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies. Her field...
CMS 10th Anniversary: "Applied Humanities: Transforming Humanities Education"
26 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Pete Donaldson is a Professor in the MIT Literature section, which he headed from 1990 until 2005. Kurt Fendt is Research Director in Foreign Langu...
CMS 10th Anniversary: "William Uricchio's Introductory Remarks"
25 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
CMS 10th Anniversary: “Dean Deborah Fitzgerald’s Introductory Remarks”
25 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Deborah Fitzgerald, Dean of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, opens the CMS 10th Anniversary symposium with her remarks on the ...
Henry Jenkins' Farewell
21 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Civics in Difficult Places
14 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
This global call-in show, hosted by MIT Center for Future Civic Media fellow Ethan Zuckerman, featured a number of journalists, advocates and programm...
The Gutenberg Parenthesis: Oral Tradition and Digital Technologies
13 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
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 printi...
Government Transparency and Collaborative Journalism
18 Mar 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Linda Fantin and Ellen Miller, with moderator Chris Csikszentmihalyi. In December, the Obama administration directed federal agencies and departmen...
Ian Condry and Cynthia Breazeal, "Robots and Media"
08 Mar 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Ian Condry, Associate Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies and Associate Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures, will discuss the prevale...
Joel Burges and Wayne Marshall, "Old-fashioned Futures and Re-fashionable Media"
04 Feb 2010
Contributed by Lukas
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 takin...
Lisa Nakamura, "Race, Rights, and Virtual Worlds: Digital Games as Spaces of Labor Migration"
17 Dec 2009
Contributed by Lukas
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 gen...
McKenzie Wark, "From Gamer Theory to Critical Practice"
13 Dec 2009
Contributed by Lukas
How might the critical tradition in media studies respond to the wildly proliferating media phenomena of today? In this presentation, Ken Wark starts ...
Mia Consalvo, "Western Otaku: Games Crossing Cultures"
07 Dec 2009
Contributed by Lukas
From Nintendo’s first Famicom system, Japanese consoles and videogames have played a central role in the development and expansion of the digital ga...
Angela Ndalianis, "Viva Las Vegas: A Neo-Baroque Conception of the World"
03 Dec 2009
Contributed by Lukas
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 extendi...
Siva Vaidhyanathan, "The Googlization of Everything"
01 Dec 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Google seems omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. It also claims to be benevolent. It’s no surprise that we hold the company to almost deific le...
Booklife: The Private and the Public in Transmedia Storytelling and Self-Promotion
23 Nov 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Fictional experiments in emerging media like Twitter and Facebook are influencing traditional printed novels and stories in interesting ways, but anot...
The Culture Beat and New Media: Arts Journalism in the Internet Era
12 Nov 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Newspapers and magazines are reducing their critical coverage of the arts, but the human appetite to evaluate culture, to debate reactions and opinion...
Wayne Marshall, "Skinny Jeans and Fruity Loops: the Networked Publics of Global Youth Culture"
12 Nov 2009
Contributed by Lukas
What can we learn about contemporary culture from watching dayglo-clad teenagers dancing geekily in front of their computers in such disparate sites a...
Richard Rouse, "Cinematic Games"
01 Nov 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Many people talk about “cinematic” games, but what does this really mean? Over their century of existence, films have been using a range of techni...
John Picker, "Transatlantic Acousmatics"
01 Nov 2009
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
Elisa Kreisinger, "Political Remix Video"
15 Oct 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Remixers are on the front lines of the battle between new media technologies and impeding copyright laws that threaten to obstruct the public discursi...
Race, Politics, and American Media
08 Oct 2009
Contributed by Lukas
The election of an African-American president in November 2008 has been hailed as a transforming event. But has Obama’s ascension transformed anythi...
Hanna Rose Shell, "How Not to Be Seen"
30 Sep 2009
Contributed by Lukas
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 ab...
Ralph Baer, "Anecdotes from a Lifetime of Electronic Product Creation"
28 May 2009
Contributed by Lukas
A long lifetime of developing electronic consumer products has taken Ralph Baer from vacuum tube through microprocessor designs. Although the technolo...
Tucker Eskew, "The Discipline of Political Messages in an Unruly Era"
03 May 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Presidential elections are considered decisions on politicians’ virtues and reflections of public values. On an ongoing basis, polling data and snap...
Media in Transition 6: "The Future of Publishing"
27 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Gavin Grant, Small Bear Press Jennifer Jackson, Donald Maass Literary Agency Robert Miller, HarperCollins Bob Stein, Institute for the Future of th...
Media in Transition 6: "Institutional Perspectives on Storage"
27 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Claude Mussou, INA France Pelle Snickars, Swedish National Archive Richard Wright, BBC Research and Information Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT an...
Media in Transition 6: "Summary Perspectives"
25 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Mary Bryson, University of British Columbia Marlene Manoff, MIT Libraries John Durham Peters, University of Iowa Thomas Pettitt, University of Sout...
Media in Transition 6: "Archives and History"
23 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
John Miles Foley, Univ. of Missouri Lisa Gitelman, Harvard Univ. Rick Prelinger, Prelinger Archives Ann Wolpert, MIT Libraries Moderator: Peter Wa...
Media in Transition 6: "New Media, Civic Media"
23 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Jessica Clark, Center for Social Media (American University) Ellen Hume, Center for Future Civic Media (MIT) Persephone Miel, Media Re:public and In...
Global Media
22 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
This panel explored theoretical, methodological, and practical issues surrounding the study of media circulation in an age of increasing global connec...
Chris Claremont, "Opening Doors, Building Worlds: The Origins of the X-Men"
20 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
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 c...
On the WOW Pod: A Design for Extimacy and Fantasy-Fulfillment for the World of Warcraft Addict
15 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
A discussion about the inducement of pleasure, fantasy fulfillment, and the mediation of intimacy in a socially-networked gaming paradigm such as Worl...
Film Music and Digital Media
02 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
The widespread adoption of computer-based methods of digital recording technology has profoundly changed film scoring practices around the globe, not ...
John Bryant and Wendy Seltzer, "Authorship, Appropriation, and the Fluid Text: Versions of the Law"
23 Mar 2009
Contributed by Lukas
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 version...
Jennifer Robertson, "Gendering Robots: Posthuman Sexism in Japan"
05 Mar 2009
Contributed by Lukas
In humans, gender–femininity, masculinity–is an array of performed behaviors, from dressing in certain clothes to walking and talking in certain w...
Popular Culture and the Political Imagination
25 Feb 2009
Contributed by Lukas
Robert Putnam has suggested that the political consciousness and civic engagement of the post-World War II generation may have taken shape in bowling ...
Celia Pearce, "Identity-as-Place: Fictive Ethnicities in Online and Virtual Worlds"
07 Feb 2009
Contributed by Lukas
This talk, with Celia Pearce, Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Tech and Director and the Emergent Game Group and Experimental Game Lab,...
Michael Mateas, "The Authoring Challenge for Interactive Storytelling"
30 Nov 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Mateas is an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Cruz where his research focuses on artificial inte...
The Campaign and the Media 2
12 Nov 2008
Contributed by Lukas
The Obama campaign’s extensive deployment of digital media, especially its tech-savvy outreach to the young, was widely reported before the election...
Tak Toyoshima, "Tracking Secret Asian Man"
02 Nov 2008
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Comics and Social Conflict
29 Oct 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Comics have emerged as a key means of interpreting and disseminating controversial and contested histories: Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, Keiji Nakaza...
Robert Darnton, "Books and Libraries in the Digital Age"
15 Oct 2008
Contributed by Lukas
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. Pfo...
Stephen Greenblatt
14 Oct 2008
Contributed by Lukas
With respondent Diana Henderson, Greenblatt speaks on the transformation of literary study in America and his own career as a teacher and writer.
Stefan Helmreich, "Submarine Media: Sounding the Sea with Cyborg Anthropology"
06 Oct 2008
Contributed by Lukas
This presentation delivers a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s three-perso...
The Campaign and the Media 1
01 Oct 2008
Contributed by Lukas
How have American news media responded to this historic presidential campaign? Is it true, as many have suggested, that the influence of newspapers an...
The Myths and Politics of Media Violence Research
14 Sep 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson present findings from their book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Pare...
A Conversation with Junot Díaz
13 Sep 2008
Contributed by Lukas
A conversation with Junot Díaz, regarding questions of genre and secondary world construction in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and the Caribbe...
Edward Dimendberg, "Remembering Los Angeles in the Digital Age: Pat O'Neill's The Decay of Fiction"
16 May 2008
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Youth and Civic Engagement
15 May 2008
Contributed by Lukas
The current generation of young citizens is growing up in an age of unprecedented access to information. Will this change their understanding of democ...
Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
14 May 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Much discussion of our impending digital future is insular and without nuance. Skeptics talk mainly among themselves, while utopians and optimists als...
Gregory Anderson, "The Show Business High Wire Act"
10 May 2008
Contributed by Lukas
In the year 2008, artists and businesspersons navigate the vast divide between the world of independent filmmaking and the Hollywood studio system as ...
How and Why a Group of Writers Called Wu Ming Set to Disrupt Italian Literature and Popular Culture
10 May 2008
Contributed by Lukas
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 d...
Learning through Remixing
27 Apr 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Historically, engineers learned by taking machines apart and putting them back together again. Can young people also learn how culture works by sampli...
A Talk with Denis Dyack
19 Mar 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Denis Dyack is the founder and president of Silicon Knights. In this capacity, he oversees the creation and development of games, and continues to fur...
Global Television
12 Mar 2008
Contributed by Lukas
A salient feature of contemporary TV has been the appearance of programs that appeal more widely across national boundaries than many earlier televisi...
John Romano, "Prime Time in Transition"
05 Mar 2008
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Viral Media: How's and Why's
20 Feb 2008
Contributed by Lukas
Non-traditional and viral marketing campaigns raise questions about the content status of advertising and the authenticity of commercial art. This pan...
Futures of Entertainment 2: "Advertising and Convergence Culture"
16 Nov 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Migratory audiences and declining channel loyalty are seen as two key challenges convergence culture poses to the advertising industry. At the same ti...
Futures of Entertainment 2: "Cult Media"
16 Nov 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Cult properties have become mass entertainment. Marvel’s success bringing comic book characters to the big screen and the resurgence of the space op...
Futures of Entertainment 2: "Opening Remarks (Second Day)"
16 Nov 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Jason Mittell, Middlebury College; Jonathan Gray, Fordham University; Lee Harrington, Miami University
Futures of Entertainment 2: "Opening Comments"
15 Nov 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green
Futures of Entertainment 2: "Fan Labor"
15 Nov 2007
Contributed by Lukas
There is growing anxiety about the way labor is compensated in Web 2.0. The accepted model -- trading content in exchange for connectivity or experien...
Futures of Entertainment 2: "Metrics and Measurement"
15 Nov 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Panelists: Bruce Leichtman, Leichtman Research Group; Stacey Lynn Schulman, Turner Broadcasting; Maury Giles, GSD&M Idea City As media companies ha...
NBC's Heroes: Appointment TV to Engagement TV?
14 Nov 2007
Contributed by Lukas
The fragmenting audiences and proliferating channels of contemporary television are changing how programs are made and how they appeal to viewers and ...
Games and Civic Engagement
07 Nov 2007
Contributed by Lukas
A generation of scholars, critics and political leaders has denounced videogames as at best a distraction and at worst a negative influence on society...
Collective Intelligence
03 Oct 2007
Contributed by Lukas
A conversation about the theory and practice of collective intelligence, with emphasis on Wikipedia, other instances of aggregated intellectual work a...
Lee Hunt's New Best Practices 2007
24 Sep 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Media strategist and author of Fundamentals of Television Branding and Marketing Lee Hunt presents recent innovations in television branding and discu...
What Is Civic Media
19 Sep 2007
Contributed by Lukas
In Bowling Alone (2000), Robert Putnam wrote about a generation of Americans cut off from traditional forms of community life and civic engagement, pa...
B. Joseph Pine II, "Technology & Media in the Experience Economy"
16 Sep 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Author and management advisor B. Joseph Pine II discusses how ideas outlined in his book The Experience Economy fit within the context of digital tech...
The Harry Potter Alliance: How the Myth of Harry Potter Is Changing the World
12 Sep 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Andrew Slack, founder of The HP Alliance, an organization seeking to engage Harry Potter fans in social and political activism, discusses the origins ...
Soap Opera Writer Kay Alden
01 May 2007
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Media in Transition 5: "Summary Perspectives"
28 Apr 2007
Contributed by Lukas
What have we learned? What have we accomplished? Where do we go from here?
Media in Transition 5: "Reproduction, Mimicry, Critique and Distribution Systems in Visual Art"
28 Apr 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Today, artists working in new media, including video, web projects and music confront contested and conceptually confusing terrain in which reproducti...
Media in Transition 5: "Copyright, Fair Use and the Cultural Commons"
27 Apr 2007
Contributed by Lukas
How has the American tradition of intellectual property law understood the relationship between originality and tradition? What rights do artists and ...
Media in Transition 5: "Collaboration and Collective Intelligence"
26 Apr 2007
Contributed by Lukas
"Collective Intelligence" and "the wisdom of crowds" have become central buzz phrases in recent discussions of networked culture. But what do they rea...
Media in Transition 5: "Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures"
26 Apr 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Digital visionaries such as Yochai Benkler have described the emergence of a new networked culture in which participants with differing intentions and...
Sharon Mazer, "What's Live Got To Do With It"
25 Apr 2007
Contributed by Lukas
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 se...
Michael Cuthbert, "Ambiguity, Process, and Information Content in Minimal Music"
17 Apr 2007
Contributed by Lukas
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 abilit...
Mick Foley, "The Real World's Faker Than Wrestling"
11 Apr 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Mick Foley, one of the top wrestling performers of the past decade, talked about his experiences as an entertainer and bestselling author who has writ...
Evangelicals and the Media
04 Apr 2007
Contributed by Lukas
American evangelicals have a long history of engagement with the media, dating back to Great Awakening of the late eighteenth century. Today evangelic...
This One's Gonna Be a Slobberknocker: WWE's Jim Ross
21 Mar 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Jim Ross, the longtime voice of World Wrestling Entertainment, joins CMS graduate student Sam Ford to discuss the unique blend of reality and fiction ...
Alan Moore, "Old World, New World"
14 Mar 2007
Contributed by Lukas
Alan Moore, CEO of engagement marketing company SMLXL and co-author of Communities Dominate Brands, believes that community-based engagement initiativ...
Frank Moss and Henry Jenkins, "What's New at the Media Lab"
28 Feb 2007
Contributed by Lukas
A conversation between Frank Moss, new director of the Media Lab, and CMS Director Henry Jenkins about ongoing projects and inventive digital applicat...
Remixing Shakespeare
14 Feb 2007
Contributed by Lukas
New technologies are enabling forms of borrowing, appropriation and “remixing” of media materials in exciting, provocative ways. In this Forum, tw...
Sharon Kinsella, "Men Imagining a Girl Revolution"
28 Nov 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Foreign Languages and Literatures visiting professor Sharon Kinsella examines the media constructions of a teenage female revolt in contemporary Japan...
Jesper Juul, "Half-Real: A Video Game in the Hands of a Player"
27 Nov 2006
Contributed by Lukas
This lecture ties into Jesper Juul's recent book, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds.
Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Fan Cultures"
17 Nov 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Panelists: Diane Nelson, danah boyd, Molly Chase Once seen as marginal or niche consumers, Fan communities look more 'mainstream' than ever before....
Futures of Entertainment 2006: Henry Jenkins, "Opening Remarks"
16 Nov 2006
Contributed by Lukas
The first in a series of six podcasts, recorded during the first Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and ...
Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Not the Real World Anymore"
16 Nov 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Panelists: John Lester, Ron Meiners, Todd Cunningham Virtual spaces are more than sites for emulating the real world. They are becoming platforms f...
Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Viscerality and Web 2.0"
16 Nov 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Opening presentation for the second day, Viscerality and Web 2.0, given by Joshua Green, Research Manager for the Convergence Culture Consortium.
Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Transmedia Properties"
16 Nov 2006
Contributed by Lukas
Transmedia Properties was the third session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC...
Futures of Entertainment 2006: "User-Generated Content"
16 Nov 2006
Contributed by Lukas
The panelists featured in this recording are Caterina Fake, Director of Tech Development at Yahoo! Inc; Ji Lee, founder of the Bubble Project; Rob Ter...
Futures of Entertainment 2006: "Television Futures"
16 Nov 2006
Contributed by Lukas
This is the second in a series of six podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium a...
Joe Haldeman, "The Craft of Science Fiction"
15 Nov 2006
Contributed by Lukas
The latest MIT Communications Forum, The Craft of Science Fiction, featured Joe Haldeman, four-time Nebula Award winner and author of The Forever War,...