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 ...
Oct 23, 2015•1 hr 24 min
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 depiction...
Oct 18, 2015•1 hr 4 min
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, mos...
Oct 08, 2015•1 hr 49 min
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 o...
Oct 07, 2015•1 hr 42 min
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 ...
Sep 30, 2015•1 hr 27 min
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.
Sep 15, 2015•1 hr 8 min
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,...
May 05, 2015•1 hr 25 min
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...
May 02, 2015•1 hr 35 min
(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 towar...
Apr 23, 2015•1 hr 25 min
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 ...
Apr 19, 2015•1 hr 32 min
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...
Apr 08, 2015•1 hr 23 min
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 medi...
Apr 02, 2015•1 hr 45 min
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.
Mar 22, 2015•1 hr 48 min
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 ...
Mar 12, 2015•1 hr 20 min
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...
Mar 06, 2015•1 hr 30 min
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 ...
Mar 01, 2015•1 hr 16 min
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.
Feb 09, 2015•1 hr 7 min
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.
Dec 04, 2014•1 hr 48 min
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 Bo...
Nov 12, 2014•40 min
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 soc...
Nov 05, 2014•1 hr 36 min
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, novel...
Nov 04, 2014•1 hr 58 min
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/Writin...
Oct 21, 2014•1 hr 40 min
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 Cultu...
Oct 14, 2014•1 hr 19 min
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 participato...
Oct 12, 2014•1 hr 43 min
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 ...
Sep 24, 2014•45 min
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 ass...
Sep 17, 2014•1 hr 26 min
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 i...
Sep 11, 2014•1 hr 44 min
Transcript: http://cmsw.mit.edu/eduardo-marisca-peru-creative-industries-prototyping-lab/
Jun 26, 2014•10 min
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 industr...
May 08, 2014•51 min
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 kn...
Apr 30, 2014•1 hr 48 min
