Mit Cms/w

What's In a Slash? by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A generation of great journalists cut their teeth at alt-weeklies, and The Boston Phoenix produced some of the best of them. When the Phoenix announced it was closing last March, the city lost a powerful cultural force and a vibrant source of information. We discuss the Phoenix‘s legacy and the ways in which its loss will affect Boston. Panelists are author and essayist Anita Diamant, who started out answering the editor’s phone in the mid-1970s; Charles Pierce of Esquire and NPR, and a staff writer with the Phoenix in the 1980s and ’90s; poet and classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz, who won a Pulitzer Prize with the Phoenix; and Carly Carioli, who started as an intern and rose to become the paper’s editor. Seth Mnookin moderates.

Roderick Coover, Temple University Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck Molly Sauter, MIT Dan Whaley, hypothes.is Moderator: James Paradis, MIT

Notions of a "public sphere" have always incited skepticism and qualification, in particular the recognition of "counterpublics" that operate inside and at the margins of consensus discourse. Counterpublics can be spaces of political opposition - sites of resistance, civil disobedience, disruption - or spaces of play and self-fashioning, enabling the emergence of alt-, sub-, and fan cultures and alternative forms of community and identity. How is digital technology - and social media in particular - generating categories of identity and belonging that define themselves in opposition to established norms of personhood or community? How do the counterpublics of the digital age differ from those of the past? Cristobal Garcia, P. Universidad Catolica (Chile) Eric Gordon, Emerson College Henry Jenkins, USC Maria San Filippo, Harvard University Moderator: Noel Jackson, MIT

It is a truth universally acknowledged that digital technologies have immensely enhanced existing means of surveillance by government and corporations and have created powerful new instruments to monitor individual behavior. Do the ramifying systems for observing and recording our routine activities fundamentally threaten our privacy and freedom, as many have argued? In an era of dating mining and smart algorithms, is our awareness that we are being monitored, converted to bits and distributed among databases, changing the way we behave as citizens and individuals? Should it do so? Or is this framing of the question too pessimistic, ignoring the fact that many of the world's data collectors are or claim to be improving our lives by expanded productivity, services tailored to individual users, advances not merely in shopping but in health, education and public safety. Goran Bolin, Sodertorn University (Sweden) Kelly Gates, University of California, San Diego Jose van Dijck, University of Amsterdam Moderator:

Amid disquiet over encroachments on privacy by government and corporations, another class of concerns has arisen: That some people (often young users of social media) are not respecting the traditional boundaries of privacy and are choosing to share "too much information." Do these people's technical skills outstrip their social skills? Are they unaware of how information can persist and potentially damage their reputation? Or are the stern adults who question this behavior clinging to an outmoded idea of privacy? Are the apps and algorithms and platforms of social media invisibly transforming norms of privacy and personal freedom? Feona Attwood, Middlesex University (UK) David Rosen, author Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard University Moderator: Nick Montfort, MIT

Recent provocations (boyd and Crawford, 2011) about the role of "big data" in human communication research and technology studies deserve an outline of the value of anthropology, as a particular kind of "big data". Mary L. Gray, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, will walk through the different dimensions of social inquiry that fall under the rubric of "big data". She argues for attending to different dimensions rather than scales of data, more collaborative approaches to how we arrive at what we (think we) know, and critical analysis of the cultural assumptions embedded in the data we collect. By moving from the "snapshot" of quantitative work to the "time-lapse photography" of ethnography, she suggests that researchers must imagine "big data" as an on-going process of modeling, triangulation, and critique. Gray's current research includes work on ethnographically-informed social media research, compliance cyberinf

In the 2012 presidential campaign, a handful of media outlets deployed "fact-checking" divisions which reported the lies and distortions of the candidates. Some commentators have argued that these truth-squads exposed the inadequacy of standard print and broadcast coverage, much of which seems more like entertainment than news. This forum will examine the changing role of the political media in the U.S. Is our political journalism serving democratic and civic ideals? What do emerging technologies and the proliferation of news sources mean for the future? Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. Mark McKinnon is a senior advisor of Hill & Knowlton Strategies, an international communications consultancy, a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast and The London Telegraph, and is a co-founder of the bipartisan group No Labels. As a political advisor, he

The statistician and political polling analyst Nate Silver will discuss his career -- from student journalist to baseball prognosticator to the creator of FiveThirtyEight.com, perhaps the most influential political blog in the world -- and the ways in which statistics are changing the face of journalism in a conversation with Seth Mnookin, a former baseball and political writer who co-directs MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic; author of a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, about his father's influence during his childhood in Baltimore; and, this year, an MLK Scholar at MIT. We talked about his impressions of MIT students and his growth as a writer, and we touched upon his research of the Civil War, the setting for an upcoming book.

The fate of narrative. What is happening to our culture’s stories and story-tellers? What has been the impact, what is the future import of the proliferation of audiences, creators and of ways to communicate on unstable platforms? Public spheres. How are new technologies transforming our public discourse? Are newspapers dead or merely reinventing themselves digitally? What skills will be essential for journalists of the digital age? Who will be the journalists of the digital age? What hybrid forms are already emerging? Visions, Nightmares. What concrete emerging practices or developments inspire optimism in you, what tendencies most trouble you? Panelists: Joshua Benton, Nieman Journalism Lab, Harvard Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Pomona College Mark Leccese, Emerson College Klaus Peter Muller, Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany Moderator: David Thorburn, MIT

Computing plays an important role in some types of media, such as video games, digital art, and electronic literature. It seems evident that an understanding of programming and computing systems may help us learn more about these productions and their role in culture. But few have focused on the levels of code and platform. Adding these neglected levels to digital media studies can help to advance the field, offering insights that would not be found by focusing on the levels of experience and interface by themselves. The recent project of Critical Code Studies and two book series just started by The MIT Press, Software Studies and Platform Studies, represent a new willingness to consider digital media at these levels. With reference to mass-market and more esoteric systems and works, ranging from Atari 2600 and arcade games to Talan Memmott’s Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)], this talk describes how looking at the code and platform levels can enhance our comparative media studies of computational works. Nick M

In an economy of informational abundance, does the traditional truth-revealing role of critical media practice still have any political relevance? Or are there other, perhaps more politically potent, ways of thinking about the liberatory possibilities of media? By considering a range of examples, from Thomas More’s 16th century Utopia to 21st century political art, we will explore the possibilities and pitfalls of mediated utopias as a means of revitalizing the critical practice of communications. Of particular interest are impossible utopias, “no-places” whose unrealizability is inscribed in their depiction. For it is through the encounter with their very impossibility that conditions for new critique and new imagination may be created. Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics o

Ethan Gilsdorf discussed some of the themes of his new book, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, a blend of travelogue, pop culture analysis, and memoir as forty-year-old former D&D addict Gilsdorf crisscrosses America, the world, and other worlds–from Boston to Wisconsin, France to New Zealand, and Planet Earth to the realm of Aggramar. He asks: Who are these gamers and fantasy fans? What explains the irresistible appeal of such “escapist” adventures? How do the players balance their escapist urges with the kingdom of adulthood? Gilsdorf talked about the culture’s discomfort with the geek/nerd/gamer stereotype and looked at society’s ambivalent relationship with gaming and fantasy play, and the origins of that prejudice, as well as the author’s own past misgivings and final acceptance of his “geek”

Randy Testa, Vice-President of Education and Professional Development, Walden Media, LLC will discuss what it means to create educational content in tandem with commercially released family films, film adaptations of children’s literature. He will also discuss why Walden Media as a film studio has recently moved into publishing children’s literature as another platform for storytelling and content acquisition.

Globalization is eroding the notion of national cinema. As foreign-language remakes, globalized labor pools, and international co-productions become ever more common, distinct national cinemas are being replaced by a variety of transnational cinemas. Anime, often considered a uniquely Japanese cinematic form, is no exception. This talk will explore one recent example of transnational anime: Tekkon Kinkreet, the first Japanese anime to be written and directed by Americans. Christina Klein is associate professor of English and American Studies at Boston College. She is the author of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 and is currently writing a book about the globalization of U.S. and Asian film industries.

This presentation / lecture / infomercial examines the nature and implications of object performance both as a global cultural tradition and as a contemporary medium that dominates our culture. While performing objects traditionally include puppets, masks, icons, and other “things”, the more recent innovations of film, television, and the internet can also be seen as aspects of our need to play with stuff. In all cases, the central dynamic of this form involves a focus on the material world instead of humans. The talk will be accompanied by images from 20th-century avant-garde film and performance work. John Bell began his performance work with Bread and Puppet Theater, after which he earned a Ph.D. in theater history at Columbia University. He is a founding member of the award-winning Great Small Works theater company of Brooklyn, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, and Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut. This spring he will be dir

The MIT Press book we affectionately call 10 PRINT -- actually 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 -- was an unusual project in several respects. The book focuses on a single line of now-unfamiliar code, code of the sort that millions typed in and modified in the 1970s and 1980s. The book contributes to several threads of contemporary digital media scholarship, including critical code studies, software studies, and platform studies. Also somewhat oddly, the book was written in a single voice by ten people: Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter. At this CMS colloquium, co-authors will discuss the nature of their collaboration, which was organized by Montfort, designed as a book by Reas, and facilitated by structured conversations and writing done online (using a mailing list and a wiki) as well as (in a few cases) in person. The writing of 10 PRINT is offered as a new mode of scholarship, very suitable

Chris Boebel and David Tamés gave us an overview of the production of ZigZag, MIT's new video podcast/magazine, as well as a look into the future of media production, distribution, and consumption.

Newly appointed MLK scholar Frank Espinosa leads a discussion of his Eisner-award nominated graphic novel, Rocketo.