MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

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.

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 th...

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 cultu...

What have we learned? What have we accomplished? Where do we go from here?

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...

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 emer...

"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 emergen...

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 sa...

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...

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 Entertainm...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

This lecture ties into Jesper Juul's recent book, Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds.

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 interm...

The first in a series of six podcasts, recorded during the first Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT.

This is the second in a series of six podcasts, recorded during the Futures of Entertainment Conference hosted by the Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Television Futures was the first session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are Andy Hunter, a Planning Director at GSD&M; Mark Warshaw, founder of FlatWorld Intertainment, Inc; and Josh B...

The panelists featured in this recording are Caterina Fake, Director of Tech Development at Yahoo! Inc; Ji Lee, founder of the Bubble Project; Rob Tercek, President and Co Founder of MultiMedia Networks; and Kevin Barrett, the Director of Design at BioWare Corp. The moderator was Joshua Green.

Transmedia Properties was the third session of the conference. The panelists featured in this recording are Paul Levitz, president and publisher of DC Comics; Michael Lebowitz, co-founder and CEO of Big Spaceship; and Alex Chisholm, ounder of [ICE]3 Studios. The moderator was Henry Jenkins.

Opening presentation for the second day, Viscerality and Web 2.0, given by Joshua Green, Research Manager for the Convergence Culture Consortium.

Panelists: John Lester, Ron Meiners, Todd Cunningham Virtual spaces are more than sites for emulating the real world. They are becoming platforms for thought experiments -- some of which involve fantasies we would not like to enact in the real world, others involve possibilities that we may want to test market before putting into practice. Much more than simulacra of Real Life or a 3D version of t...

The latest MIT Communications Forum, The Craft of Science Fiction, featured Joe Haldeman, four-time Nebula Award winner and author of The Forever War, his forthcoming novel The Accidental Time Machine and many other books. This forum was moderated by CMS Director Henry Jenkins.