MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Cosponsored by the MIT Cool Japan Project. Noise, an underground music made through an amalgam of feedback, distortion, and electronic effects, first emerged in the 1980s, circulating on cassette tapes traded between fans in Japan, Europe and North America. With its cultivated obscurity, ear-shattering sound, and over-the-top performances, Noise captured the imagination of a small but passionate transnational audience, despite remaining deeply underground. How did the submergent circulations of Noise become such a compelling metaphor for the complexities of globalization, intercultural exchange and participatory media at the turn of the millennium? In this talk, I trace the "cultural feedback" of Noise through the productive distortions of its mediated networks: its recorded forms, technologies of live performance, and into the lives and creative practices of musicians and listeners. David Novak teaches in the Music Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His work deals with the globalization of popular music, media technologies, experimental culture, and social practices of listening. He is the author of recent essays in Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, and Popular Music, as well as the book Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke University Press).

We often talk of video games as being "fun," but this is a mistake. When we play video games, our facial expressions are only occasionally those of of happiness, instead we frown and grimace when fail to achieve our goals. This is the paradox of failure: why do we play video games even though they make us unhappy? In video games, as in tragic works of art, literature, theater, and cinema, it seems that we want to experience unpleasantness even if we also dislike it. Yet failure in a game is unique in that when we fail in a game, it means that we (not a character) are in some way inadequate, and games then motivate us to play more, in order to escape that inadequacy. In this talk, based on his new book The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul will argue that the paradox of failure pervades games on many levels: in game design, in sports coaching, in strategy guides, in taunting, in the prejudices against sore losers. The issue of failure is also central to recurring controversies of what games can, or should be about: what does it mean to cause terrible events to happen in a fictional game world? Games, then are the Art of Failure: the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience it and experiment with it. Jesper Juul is an assistant professor at the New York University Game Center and a visiting assistant professor at Comparative Media Studies. He has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990's. His publications include Half-Real on video game theory, and A Casual Revolution on how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii brought video games to a new audience. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on "game research and other important things".

D.T. Max, staff writer at the New Yorker, looks at David Foster Wallace and irony, with an eye especially on his 1990's attacks on David Letterman and the novelist Mark Leyner, both in publications and in private correspondence. When did David Foster Wallace become obsessed with irony and why? What made him so sure it was corrosive to civil culture or initiative? Or was the unease he felt in its presence really more the product of his own personal history? Co-hosted with Literature at MIT.

Organized by Literature. Co-sponsored with CMS, the MIT HyperStudio for Digital Humanities, and Ancient and Medieval Studies. Millions of documents produced around the world over more than four thousand years are now available in digital form -- Google Books alone had scanned, by March 2012, more than 20 million books in more than 400 languages. Images of manuscripts, papyri, inscriptions and other non-print sources are also appearing in increasing numbers. But if we have addressed physical access to images of textual sources, we are a long way from providing the intellectual access necessary to understand the written sources that we see. This talk explores the challenges and opportunities as we refashion our study of the past from ethnocentric monolingual conversations into a hyperlingual dialogue among civilizations, where humans work with machines and with each other to communicate and where books do, as Marvin Minksy opined decades ago, talk to each other. Gregory Crane is Chair of the Department of Classics at Tufts University, as well as an Adjunct Professor in Tufts' Department of Computer Science. Since 1988, he has been Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Project, a long-running digital humanities effort focused on Greek, Latin, and Arabic Classics.

Co-sponsored by the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Hybrid forms of multimedia, combining aspects of newspapers, documentary film and digital video are a notable feature of today's on-line journalism. How is this access to the power of the visual changing our journalism? What current projects are particularly significant? What will this convergence mean in the future? Jason Spingarn-Koff is the series producer and curator of Op-Docs, a new initiative at the New York Times for short opinionated documentaries by independent filmmakers and artists. He directed the feature documentary "Life 2.0", which premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network's Documentary Club, and his work has appeared on PBS, BBC, MSNBC, Time.com and Wired News. In 2010-2011, he was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Alexandra Garcia is a multimedia journalist for The Washington Post. She reports, shoots and edits video stories on topics ranging from health care and immigration to fashion and education. Awarded an Edward R. Murrow award, eight regional Emmy awards and named 2011 Video Editor of the Year by the White House News Photographers Association, Garcia is currently a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Moderator: Sarah Wolozin, director of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, has produced documentaries and educational media for a variety of media outlets including PBS, History Channel, Learning Channel and NPR.

Young people born in 1980's and 1990's China are the focus of a great deal of scholarly attention as they are the country's first generation of only children. They are also the first generation to come of age with the Internet, and, for many, playing Internet games forms an integral part of the youth experience. This presentation will explore the affective dimensions of digital games from the perspective of urban Chinese youth. What is the significance of an e-sports event that attracts tens of thousands of twenty-somethings, many of whom experience it as a teary-eyed "farewell to their youth"? Or a viral video created by World of Warcraft gamers that urges millions of viewers to "raise their fists in solidarity" to show support for their "spiritual homeland"? What should we make of these phenomena that demonstrate, ever more clearly, the ways in which games are intertwined with people's spiritual and emotional lives? Are games the imagined utopia they are made out to be in these nostalgic accounts or might these affective attachments prove to be a form of what Lauren Berlant (2011) has called "cruel optimism," a relationship in which the very thing that is desired becomes an obstacle to flourishing? Marcella Szablewicz is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Duke University. Her research focuses on youth and digital media in urban China. She is currently working on a book based on her dissertation, provisionally entitled From Addicts to Athletes: Youth Mobilities and the Politics of Digital Gaming in Urban China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork supported by the Fulbright and National Science Foundations, the book will examine the precarious socio-economic futures of urban Chinese youth through the lens of digital gaming culture, while also considering how dominant discourse about digital leisure practice is shaped by larger cultural debates about patriotism and productivity, class and the crafting of the "ideal citizen". Her work can also be found in the Routledge volume Online Society in China and in the Chinese Journal of Communication. Co-sponsored by the Cool Japan Project.

Al Filreis has taught his “ModPo” course at Penn for years; in Fall 2012 he offered a 10-week version of the course online, via Coursera, to more than 36,000 students. The course, as in its previous versions, does not include lectures, being based instead on discussion – the collaborative close readings of poems. The course grows out of Filreis’s work at the Kelly Writers House; he has been Faculty Director of this literary freespace since its founding in 1995. Filreis is also co-founder of PennSound, the Web’s main free archive of poetry readings, publisher of Jacket2 magazine, and producer and host of “PoemTalk,” a podcast/radio series of close readings of poems. In conversation with Nick Montfort, Filreis will discuss ModPo and his perspective on writing, teaching, and digital media. Filreis is Kelly Professor of English and Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, Modernism from Right to Left, Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modernism, 1945-60, and other works. He was chosen as Pennsylvania Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation in 2000. Part of the Purple Blurb series, and co-sponsored by the SHASS Dean’s Office and the Literature Section.

The Red Hen Lab is a distributed laboratory for the study of network news. In an earlier talk, Professor Francis Steen provided a technical overview of the activities of Red Hen and surveyed the study by Francis Steen and Mark Turner of international network news coverage of the Anders Bering Brevik event in Oslo, Norway, in July, 2011, with an emphasis on the way in which network news is occupied with the assessment of culpability, blame, and credit. This talk will discuss research on the cognitive underpinnings of network news, with an emphasis on blended joint attention, story-telling, counterfactuality, and hypotheticals. Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. He is the founding director of the Cognitive Science Network. His most recent book publications are Ten Lectures on Mind and Language and two edited volumes, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, and Meaning, Form, & Body, edited with Fey Parrill and Vera Tobin. His other publications include Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think about Politics, Economics, Law, and Society, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, and many more. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Advanced Study of Durham University. He is a fellow of the Institute for the Science of Origins, external research professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive Neuroscience, distinguished fellow at the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, and Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftsliches Zentrum. In 1996, the Académie française awarded him the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises. For 2011-2012, he is a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

This presentation develops a theoretical framework (rooted in Science and Technology Studies) for understanding how, generally, social media's technical feature-sets create a system of capture and conversion. Capture describes the persistent ways in which social web platforms record and fix online/offline social and technical practices. Conversion applies to the way in which technical architectures convert what is captured into value (both culturally contingent and economic). The notions of capture and conversion are developed in light of other work in the field that seeks to understand how social web platforms use technology to leverage user generated content (UGC). The framework bridges a focus on ongoing social practice within/through platforms with analysis of technology as a determinant of probable practice. Ultimately this work is part of a larger project that seeks to develop a way of critically engaging the political economy of the social web while at the same time not ignoring the subject positions of those whose lives on display make it compelling. Hector Postigo is Associate Professor in Media Studies and Production at Temple University's School of Media and Communication. He is the co-founder of the blog culturedigitally.org and most recently the author of The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright from MIT Press and co-editor of Managing Privacy Through Accountability from Palgrave Press. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the European Commission. He teaches and writes about video game culture, labor in digital networks, and privacy and copyright on the social web.

Despite many infrastructural and economic hurdles, entertainment media industries are burgeoning in West Africa. Today, the Nigerian cinema market–”Nollywood”–is the second largest in the world in terms of the annual volume of films distributed behind only the Indian film industry. And an era of digital distribution has empowered content created in Lagos, or Accra, to spread across geographic and cultural boundaries. New commercial models for distribution as well as international diasporic networks have driven the circulation of this material. But so has rampant piracy and the unofficial online circulation of this content. What innovations are emerging from West Africa? How has Nigerian cinema in particular influenced local television and film markets in other countries across West Africa, and across the continent? What does the increasing visibility of West African popular culture mean for this region–especially as content crosses various cultural contexts, within and outside the region? And what challenges does West Africa face in continuing to develop its entertainment industries? Derrick N. Ashong leads the band Soulfège, a group that produces an eclectic blend of hip-hop, reggae, funk, world beat and West African highlife music and has been featured in such major media as MTV Africa and NPR. Also known as DNA, which is the name of his blog, Ashong hosted Oprah Radio’s The Derrick Ashong Experience and Al-Jazeera English’s social media TV show The Stream. Colin M. Maclay is the managing director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Both as co-founder of Harvard’s International Technologies Group and at Berkman, Maclay’s research pairs hands-on multi-stakeholder collaborations with the generation of data that reveal trends, challenges and opportunities for the integration of communications technologies in developing communities. Fadzi Makanda is a business development manager in the New York office of iROKO Partners, a distributor of African–and particularly Nollywood–entertainment. Makanda leads the development and execution of U.S. advertising sales strategies for the company. Moderator: Ralph Simon is founder of the Mobilium Advisory Group, which studies innovation in mobile usage in such countries as Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. He has served as an executive at Capitol Records, Blue Note Records, and EMI Music, and he co-founded the Zomba Group with Clive Calder of South Africa. Simon earned the title “Father of the Ring Tone” when he created the first ring tone company in 1997.