MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

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 social media enhances, rather than replaces, face-to-face organizing. He argues that social movements engage in transmedia organizing: despite the current spotlight on digital media, social movement media work is often cross-platform, participatory, and linked to action. Immigrant rights organizers leverage social media creatively, alongside a range of tools from posters and street theater to Spanish-language radio, print, and television. In his talk, Costanza-Chock draws on extensive interviews, workshops, and media organizing projects to describe the evolution of transmedia organizing in the immigrant rights movement between 2006 and 2012. Key threads include the mass protests against the anti-immigrant Sensenbrenner Bill; coverage of police brutality against peaceful protesters; and the implications of professionalized transmedia organizing for community accountability. The book is published by the MIT Press, with a full-text preprint available online under a Creative Commons license: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/out-shadows-streets This event is presented in collaboration with the MIT Center for Civic Media.

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, novelist, and journalist. His works of nonfiction include An American Requiem, which won the National Book Award, and Constantine's Sword, now an acclaimed documentary. Writing frequently about Catholicism in the modern world, Carroll has a prize-winning column in The Boston Globe. He is Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist and the author of ten books, including, most recently, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away. Goldstein is on the World Economic Forum's Global Council of Values and was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association in 2011. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her scholarship and fiction, including a MacArthur Fellowship. Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and essayist. In astrophysics, he has made fundamental contributions to gravitation theory, the behavior of black holes, and radiation processes in extreme environments. His 1993 novel Einstein’s Dreams was an international bestseller, and in 2000, his book The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. He is currently Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT and teaches in the Graduate Program in Science Writing. Robert A. Weinberg is one of the world’s leading molecular biologists and the discoverer of the first gene known to cause cancer. His work focuses on the molecular and genetic mechanisms that lead to the formation of human tumors, and his recent work has examined how human cancer cells metastasize. In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor. Weinberg is Professor of Biology at MIT and a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Seth Mnookin is Associate Director of the MIT Communications Forum and Acting Director of MIT's Gradute Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, was published in 2011.

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/Writing; and an instructor with Western Kentucky University’s Popular Culture Studies Program. Sam currently serves as Co-Chair of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Ethics Committee. He has recently published work with The Journal of Fandom Studies, Panorama Social, Cinema Journal, The Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing, Advertising Age, PRWeek, PR News, O’Dwyer PR, IABC Communication World, The Public Relations Strategist, PropertyCasualty360, Oxford University Press Bibliographies, and the NYU Press book, Making Media Work, among other outlets. He’s based in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Rekha Murthy is Director of Projects + Partnerships at PRX, where she finds innovative ways for public media stations and producers to reach audiences and earn revenue. Rekha runs PRX’s digital distribution program, where she forges new, non-broadcast pathways for audio works. These range from established channels like iTunes and Amazon, to aggregators like TuneIn and Stitcher, to entertainment and education services large and small. As part of PRX’s award-winning Apps team, Rekha has set new standards for public media’s mobile strategy and adoption with apps including the Public Radio Player, This American Life, and for major stations. She launched PRX’s iTunes distribution service, making independent productions and major national programs available for sale in the iTunes Store. Rekha advises various transmedia initiatives for public media and served on the board of the Integrated Media Association (now part of Greater Public). Before PRX, Rekha was a producer for NPR’s All Things Considered and an editor of NPR.org. She’s been a project manager and user experience designer for web and mobile clients. Parmesh Shahani, listed in 2012 as one of 25 Indians to watch out for by Financial Times, is the head of the Godrej India Culture Lab — an experimental idea-space that cross-­pollinates the best ideas and people working on India from across the academic, creative and corporate worlds to explore what it means to be modern and Indian. In addition, Parmesh also serves as the Editor-at-large for Verve magazine, India. He is a Yale World Fellow, currently spending a semester in New Haven. He is also a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, TED Fellow, and a Utrecht University-Impakt Fellow. Parmesh’s masters’ thesis at CMS was released as a book “Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)Longing in Contemporary India” by Sage Publications in 2008. You can follow Parmesh on Twitter at @parmeshs.

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 Cultural Agents Initiative.

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 participatory documentary, complication seems more like confusion. One might try to clarify the situation by disambiguating these genres, solidifying their boundaries. We seek instead to make productive use of the situation by taking advantage of their commonalities, finding ways to re-invent and re-invigorate both documentary and journalism, in the process expanding their audiences and enhancing their relevance. Documentaries have demonstrated the advantages of synergistic thinking, finding a new place and new publics through digital journalism portals. But what can new forms of documentary contribute back to journalism? To answer that question, we have to think critically and creatively about the affordances of these different traditions in light of their new ecosystem. * Raney Aronson, deputy executive producer, FRONTLINE * Katerina Cizek, documentary director, National Film Board of Canada * Jason Spingarn-Koff, New York Times Op-Docs editor * Francesca Panetta, Guardian multimedia special projects editor * Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT

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 cohabit with mass media, consumer electronics, and each other. Caetlin Benson-Allott is Associate Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) and Remote Control (New York: Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming 2015). Her articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, Jump Cut, Film Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, Film Criticism, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video as well as multiple anthologies. Co-sponsored with MIT Literature.

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 assessment. In addressing these issues, this analysis seeks to: Identify important points of distinction between contemporary notions of media impact and more traditional notions of media effects; Assess the methods and metrics being employed to assess media impact; Identify the key challenges and tensions inherent in such efforts. This presentation also illustrates that impact represents only one of a number of aspects of journalistic performance that are being converted to quantitative performance metrics. Related areas of ongoing research include efforts to assess the health of local media ecosystems and the quality of journalistic content. The broader implications of this wide-ranging transformation in how journalistic performance may be assessed will be considered. Philip M. Napoli (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is Professor of Journalism & Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University, where he leads the Media and the Public Interest Initiative. His current research projects include an analysis of the functioning of the New York City information ecosystem during and after Hurricane Sandy (funded by Internews) and the News Measures Research Project (funded by the Democracy Fund and the Dodge Foundation).

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 identity and reputation online. He explores some of the implications for bias in online ratings, the foundations of social advertising and the ability to generate cascades of behavior through peer to peer social influence in networks. The coming decades will likely see an emphasis on verified identities online. Aral argues that a new science of online identity could help guide our business, platform design and social policy decisions in light of the rising importance of online reputation and social influence.

Transcript: http://cmsw.mit.edu/eduardo-marisca-peru-creative-industries-prototyping-lab/

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 industry is diversifying, helping with queer visibility and acceptance of an LGBTQ presence. Philip Jones is a queer youth and activist, who began in the games industry with journalism and podcasting. He is now best known for his work in directing the video games documentary Gaming in Color which focuses on queer gamers. He also has a hand in other MidBoss projects, currently head of the expo hall and vendor relations for the second GaymerX convention, as well as assistant writer for upcoming adventure game Read Only Memories. When not working on these projects, he studies and wears too much flannel at his home in Texas.