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 exper...
Apr 27, 2010•1 hr 17 min
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...
Apr 27, 2010•1 hr 24 min
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 Askwi...
Apr 26, 2010•1 hr 23 min
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 ov...
Apr 26, 2010•1 hr 27 min
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.
Apr 25, 2010•7 min
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.
Apr 25, 2010•6 min
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.
Apr 21, 2010•1 hr 40 min
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.
Apr 14, 2010•2 hr 2 min
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” — for...
Apr 13, 2010•1 hr 57 min
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 ...
Mar 18, 2010•1 hr 56 min
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...
Mar 08, 2010•1 hr 48 min
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 Face...
Feb 04, 2010•1 hr 42 min
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...
Dec 17, 2009•1 hr 22 min
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 specific...
Dec 13, 2009•1 hr 19 min
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...
Dec 07, 2009•1 hr 28 min
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 b...
Dec 03, 2009•1 hr 18 min
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 Vaidhyan...
Dec 01, 2009•1 hr 19 min
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”? W...
Nov 23, 2009•1 hr 50 min
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 ...
Nov 12, 2009•1 hr 50 min
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 ...
Nov 12, 2009•1 hr 39 min
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 mov...
Nov 01, 2009•1 hr 35 min
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 perfo...
Nov 01, 2009•1 hr 39 min
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 vid...
Oct 15, 2009•1 hr 43 min
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...
Oct 08, 2009•2 hr 3 min
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 re...
Sep 30, 2009•1 hr 24 min
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, develo...
May 28, 2009•1 hr 45 min
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 er...
May 03, 2009•1 hr 34 min
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
Apr 27, 2009•1 hr 34 min
Claude Mussou, INA France Pelle Snickars, Swedish National Archive Richard Wright, BBC Research and Information Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT and Utrecht University
Apr 27, 2009•1 hr 23 min
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
Apr 25, 2009•1 hr 14 min
