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 c...
Nov 16, 2007•2 hr 10 min
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 ...
Nov 16, 2007•2 hr 25 min
Jason Mittell, Middlebury College; Jonathan Gray, Fordham University; Lee Harrington, Miami University
Nov 16, 2007•54 min
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...
Nov 15, 2007•2 hr 8 min
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" en...
Nov 15, 2007•2 hr 20 min
Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green
Nov 15, 2007•55 min
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 ...
Nov 14, 2007•1 hr 59 min
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 ga...
Nov 07, 2007•2 hr 5 min
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...
Oct 03, 2007•1 hr 58 min
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.
Sep 24, 2007•1 hr 23 min
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 ...
Sep 19, 2007•2 hr 5 min
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.
Sep 16, 2007•1 hr 21 min
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.
Sep 12, 2007•1 hr 36 min
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. F...
May 01, 2007•1 hr 32 min
What have we learned? What have we accomplished? Where do we go from here?
Apr 28, 2007•1 hr 21 min
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 a...
Apr 28, 2007•1 hr 28 min
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...
Apr 27, 2007•1 hr 28 min
"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 he...
Apr 26, 2007•1 hr 30 min
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 documente...
Apr 26, 2007•1 hr 52 min
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 Canterb...
Apr 25, 2007•1 hr 28 min
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 Be...
Apr 17, 2007•1 hr 31 min
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 telli...
Apr 11, 2007•1 hr 55 min
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, ...
Apr 04, 2007•2 hr 3 min
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-dema...
Mar 21, 2007•1 hr 51 min
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.
Mar 14, 2007•1 hr 37 min
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.
Feb 28, 2007•1 hr 53 min
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...
Feb 14, 2007•1 hr 44 min
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.
Nov 28, 2006•1 hr 29 min
This lecture ties into Jesper Juul's recent book, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds.
Nov 27, 2006•1 hr 9 min
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 ...
Nov 17, 2006•2 hr 20 min
