MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

There is an ontological distinction between the natively digital and the digitized, that is, the objects, content, devices and environments that are “born” in the new medium, as opposed to those that have “migrated” to it. Should the current methods of study change, however slightly or wholesale, given the focus on objects and content of the medium? The research program put forward here thereby engages with “virtual methods” that import standard methods from the social sciences and the humanities. That is, the distinction between the natively digital and the digitized also could apply to current research methods. What kind of Internet research may be performed with methods that have been digitized (such as online surveys and directories) vis-á-vis those that are natively digital (such as recommendation systems and folksonomy)? Second, he will propose propose that Internet research may be put to new uses, given an emphasis on natively digital methods as opposed to the digitized. Rogers will strive to shift the attention from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits, and instead inquire into how research with the Internet may move beyond the study of online culture only. How to capture and analyze hyperlinks, tags, search engine results, archived Websites, and other digital objects? How may one learn from how online devices (e.g., engines and recommendation systems) make use of the objects, and how may such uses be repurposed for social and cultural research? Ultimately, he proposes a research practice that grounds claims about cultural change and societal conditions in online dynamics, introducing the term “online groundedness.” The overall aim is to rework method for Internet research, developing a novel strand of study, digital methods. Prof. Dr. Richard Rogers holds the Chair and is full University Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is Director of Govcom.org, the group responsible for the Issue Crawler and other info-political tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative, reworking method for Internet research. Among other works, Rogers is author of Information Politics on the Web (MIT Press, 2004), awarded the 2005 best book of the year by the American Society of Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T). His forthcoming book, Digital Methods, is also with MIT Press.

In the Age of Always Connect, are we witnessing a plague of oversharing? If so, are social networks its vectors of transmission? Does this much-discussed phenomenon mark the Death of Shame, perhaps even a return to pre-modern notions of public and private? What does it mean to live in a historical moment when the faces in our high-school yearbooks materialize, without warning, in our Facebook lives, Walking Dead eager to rekindle friendships we thought we’d buried long ago? In his illustrated lecture, “(Face)Book of the Dead,” cultural critic and media theorist Mark Dery, author of seminal essays on online subcultures, culture jamming, and Afrofuturism, will address these and other questions, from the posthuman psychology of disembodied friendship to our growing unwillingness to untether ourselves from our social networks or the media drip, even for an instant. What does it say about us, as a society, if we’re unable to be alone and unplugged without being bored or lonely? Is this, at root, a fear of the emptiness in our heads? Should we preserve some small space in our lives for solitude — a Walden of the mind, away from the Matrix? Mark Dery (www.markdery.com) is a cultural critic. He is best known for his writings on the politics of popular culture in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Cabinet, Bookforum, Rolling Stone, Elle, and Wired; on websites such as True/Slant and Thought Catalog; and in books such as The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century. Dery’s latest book is an anthology of his recent writings, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Essays on American Empire, Digital Culture, Posthuman Porn, and Lady Gaga’s Lesbian Phallus, published in Brazil by Editora Sulina. Dery is widely associated with “culture jamming,” the guerrilla media criticism movement he popularized through his 1993 essay “Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs,” and “Afrofuturism,” a term he coined in his 1994 essay “Black to the Future” (included in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, which he edited). He has been a professor of journalism at New York University, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He is at work on a biography of the artist Edward Gorey for Little, Brown.

Amaranth Borsuk discusses her poetic practice as a multi-media writer and artist, reading selections from recent work and showing images and performance footage from current projects. What is a poetics of materiality and how does it play out across print and digital media? What does a focus on the material of language do to our constructions of authorship? Borsuk will read from Between Page and Screen, a digital pop-up book of poems, Tonal Saw, a chapbook constructed from a religious tract, and Excess Exhibit, a flip-book of conjoined poems that mutate from constraint into rapturous abundance. She will also show digital work in progress and read selections from her recently completed manuscript Handiwork, whose poems explore the relationship between torture and writing, trauma and creativity through a combination of Oulipo constraint and surreal lyricism. A poet and scholar, Amaranth Borsuk’s work focuses on textual materiality–from the surface of the page to the surface of language. She is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies and Writing and Humanistic Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she works on and teaches digital poetry. She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where she co-founded The Loudest Voice cross-genre reading series and the Gold Line Press chapbook series. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in print and online. Poems have recently appeared in Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, FIELD, Eleven Eleven, and Denver Quarterly, among other journals. She is the author of a chapbook-length poem, Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010), and Excess Exhibit (ZG Press, forthcoming), a book of conjoined poems written collaboratively with poet and performance artist Kate Durbin, which includes drawings by Zach Kleyn. She has also collaboratively translated and transverted the work of Oulipo poet Paul Braffort together with Gabriela Jauregui and crafted an augmented-reality chapbook, Between Page and Screen, together with Brad Bouse. Recent collaborative work can be found in Black Warrior Review, Caketrain, New American Writing, and Action, Yes!. In addition to writing and studying poetry, Amaranth is also a letterpress printer and book artist whose fascination with printed matter informs her work on digital media.

The eminent MIT professor, author most recently of Alone, Together, discusses her darkening view of our digitizing world, her sense of the culture of MIT and its students, and her own career with Communications Forum Director David Thorburn, a longtime colleague. Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Co-sponsor: Technology and Culture Forum at MIT

Digital filming has transformed documentary, offering new potentials to filmmakers and at the same time transforming audience attitudes. Filmmakers have been able to work more informally with their subjects, giving rise to the fusion format of reality TV as well as changing the nature of documentaries themselves. From the audience perspective, affordable digital platforms mean that almost everyone knows what it is like to film and be filmed. The result is a transformation of the documentary genre, where films are now seen as documents of interactions rather than expositions of fact. Ellis explores this new phase in documentary, using methods derived from Goffman as well as an intimate understanding of the technologies of filming. John Ellis is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London, and this semester’s visiting scholar at the Annenberg Institute, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Visible Fictions (1982), Seeing Things (2000) and TV FAQ (2007) and the co-author of Language and Materialism (1977). His Documentary: Witness and Self-Revelation will appear in 2012, and is based in part on his 19 years as an independent producer for British TV, making documentaries about cinema and the arts, the politics of media, and the food industry. He served on the editorial board of Screen magazine (1975-1985), was the vice-chair of the film producers’ association PACT (1988-1994), and now chairs the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC).

The computer’s creative involvement in the visual and literary arts is the topic of this panel discussion, held on the occasion of the Drawing with Code: Computer Art from the Anne and Michael Spalter Collection exhibit at the deCordova. The panelists include that exhibit’s curator George Fifield, exhibiting artist Mark Wilson, poet and Brown University professor John Cayley, and MIT Media Lab professor Leah Buechley. Held in collaboration with the deCordova Museum. About the Purple Blurb series: Run by Nick Montfort, authors read and discuss their “D1G1T4L WR1T1NG” at MIT. All events are free and open to the public.

The digital age has been heralded but also pilloried for its impact on journalism. As newspapers continue their mutation into digital formats and as news and information are available from a seeming infinity of websites, what do we actually know about the dynamics of news-consumption online? What does the public do with online news? How influential are traditional news outlets in framing the news we get online? Pablo Boczkowski is a Professor of Communications Studies at Northwestern Univeresity where he leads a research program that studies the transition from print to digital media. He is the author of Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (2004) and News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance (2010). Joshua Benton is the founding director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University — an effort to help the news business make the radical changes required by the Internet age. Before that, he was an investigative reporter, columnist, foreign correspondent and rock critic for two newspapers, The Dallas Morning News and The Toledo Blade. Moderator: Jason Spingarn-Koff, a 2010-11 Knight Journalism Fellow at MIT, is a documentary filmmaker specializing in the intersection of science, technology, and society. His feature documentary Life 2.0, about a group of people whose lives are transformed by the virtual world “Second Life,” premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and will be featured on Oprah Winfrey’s documentary film club in 2011. He served as producer of NOVA’s The Great Robot Race, and the development producer for PBS’s Emmy-winning Rx for Survival, as well as documentaries for Frontline and Time magazine. He is a graduate of Brown University and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

What do Shakespeare and videogames have in common? Clara Fernández-Vara, a Comparative Media Studies alumna, explains her journey from researching Shakespeare in performance to studying and developing videogames. Applying concepts from theatre in performance illuminates the relationship between the player and the game, as well as between game and narrative. Videogames are not theatre, but the comparison gives way to productive questions: What is the dramatic text of the game? How does this text shape the actions of the player? Who are the performers? Who is the audience? These questions will be addressed in the context of adventure games, a story-driven genre where the player solves puzzles that are integrated in the fictional world of the game. Clara Fernández-Vara is a post-doctoral researcher at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, where she teaches courses on videogame theory and game writing, as well as develop games with teams of students. Clara is a graduate from the Comparative Media Studies program, and holds a PhD in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research concentrates on adventure games, game playing as a performance activity, and the integration of stories in simulated environments. She has released two experimental adventure games, Rosemary (2009) and Symon (2010).

This lecture examines the impact of globalization on the urban imaginary in relation to a recent art exhibition, commissioned by the Dutch government in 2009, in which a group of contemporary New York artists were invited to photograph Amsterdam to mark the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s discovery of Manhattan. Registering a long history of transnational exchange between the two cities, the selected artists sought to produce work capable of defamiliarizing established images of Amsterdam. The claim of the exhibition was that seeing Amsterdam through the lens of New York photographers enabled new and surprising perspectives on four key aspects of the city: the street, the night, the water, and the outskirts. Interrogating this claim, the lecture will analyze individual artworks, the marketing and staging strategies of the exhibition, and — most importantly — the role that transnational exchange can play in both resisting and reinforcing dominant, globalized images of contemporary city spaces. Christoph Lindner is Professor of Literature and Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is also a Research Affiliate at the University of London Institute in Paris. His recent books include Globalization, Violence, and the Visual Culture of Cities (2010), Urban Space and Cityscapes (2006), and Fictions of Commodity Culture (2003).

Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella (Biella) Coleman examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. Between 2001-2003 she conducted ethnographic research on computer hackers primarily in San Francisco, the Netherlands, as well as those hackers who work on the largest free software project, Debian. She is completing a book manuscript “Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software.”