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...
Oct 27, 2011•2 hr 2 min
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 exp...
Oct 23, 2011•1 hr 32 min
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 Technolo...
Oct 11, 2011•1 hr 35 min
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 m...
Sep 22, 2011•2 hr
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 o...
Sep 08, 2011•1 hr 31 min
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
May 16, 2011•1 hr 18 min
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 techni...
May 14, 2011•1 hr 28 min
“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 i...
May 13, 2011•1 hr 20 min
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 ...
May 08, 2011•2 hr
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 humanitie...
May 02, 2011•1 hr 34 min
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 le...
Apr 25, 2011•2 hr 9 min
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 ...
Apr 13, 2011•1 hr 8 min
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 ...
Apr 12, 2011•2 hr 3 min
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 genr...
Mar 17, 2011•1 hr 26 min
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...
Mar 14, 2011•1 hr 38 min
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...
Feb 24, 2011•1 hr 55 min
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 ...
Feb 23, 2011•1 hr 36 min
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. T...
Feb 09, 2011•1 hr 18 min
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 comm...
Jan 23, 2011•1 hr 4 min
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 ...
Jan 23, 2011•1 hr 15 min
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...
Jan 10, 2011•1 hr 18 min
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 s...
Nov 18, 2010•1 hr 59 min
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 ...
Nov 07, 2010•1 hr 1 min
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 polici...
Nov 04, 2010•1 hr 51 min
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, w...
Nov 04, 2010•1 hr 21 min
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...
Oct 21, 2010•2 hr 7 min
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 ...
Oct 21, 2010•1 hr 35 min
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 o...
Oct 07, 2010•2 hr 3 min
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, mis...
Oct 04, 2010•1 hr 44 min
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 ...
Sep 26, 2010•1 hr 22 min
