MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

== Vicky Zeamer: "Internet Killed the Michelin Star: The Motives of Narrative and Style in Food Text Creation on Social Media" == Food porn has become mainstream content on social media sites and digital streaming sites. With this comes a change in status—from expert to everyone. As a result, the role of authority figures, in particular chefs, has changed. This thesis illustrates the convergences and divergences in the creation and consumption of food texts today.

From the earliest days of networked computing, music fans were there, shaping the technologies and cultures that emerged online. By the time musicians and industry figures realized they could use the internet to reach audiences directly, those audiences had already established their presences and social norms online, putting them in unprecedented positions of power. Even widely-hailed innovators like David Bowie, Prince, and Trent Reznor were late to the game. This talk traces the intertwined histories of music fandom and online culture, unpacking the fundamental disruption and its broader implications for interacting with audiences. Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Research Affiliate in CMS/W at MIT. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Illinois in 1994 and joined Microsoft in 2012 after 18 years as a Communication professor. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity Press), now in its second edition, Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage Press), and co-editor of Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method (Sage Press) with Annette Markham. Her bookPlaying to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection will be published in July by NYU Press. More information, most of her articles, and some of her talks are available at nancybaym.com.

Iconic developments in the artistic and intellectual ethos known as Afrofuturism are closely linked to music: Sun Ra’s experimental jazz, Parliament Funkadelic’s Mothership, John Akomfrah’s film Last Angel of History. What else is on the soundtrack to a livable future? How do we pursue further innovation in the human sensorium without reproducing an “audiovisual litany” that conflates rationality with the colonial gaze and isolates Black creativity to moments of sonic disruption? andré carrington’s present research on the cultural politics of race in science fiction radio drama aims to expand the repertoire of literary adaptation studies by reintegrating critical perspectives from marginal and popular sectors of the media landscape into the advancing agendas of Afrofuturism and decolonization. andré carrington is a scholar of race, gender, and genre in Black and American cultural production. He is currently Assistant Professor of African American literature at Drexel University. His first book, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minnesota, 2016) interrogates the cultural politics of race in the fantastic genres through studies of science fiction fanzines, comics, film and television, and other speculative fiction texts.

An MIT Communications Forum: https://commforum.mit.edu/neurodiversity-at-mit-and-design-for-everyone-march-1-2018-f7886ba92b61 The world is a neurologically diverse place, but the resources, workspaces and technologies we use often don’t reflect that. Sometimes simple changes can significantly expand accessibility to people who have neurological differences like autism, dyslexia, ADHD, or epilepsy, but designers and policymakers frequently aren’t aware of issues affecting this neurodiverse community. Rosalind Picard, director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, joins neuroscientist Ned Sahin, Empowered Brain Institute CEO Rafiq Abdus-Sabur, computer scientist Karthik Dinakar, and disability advocate Finn Gardiner to explore what it means to be non-neurotypical, barriers to inclusion, and how creators can make their work more accessible. Rafiq Abdus-Sabur is president and CEO of The Empowered Brain Institute, a nonprofit disability advocacy and support organization for individuals with autism and their families. Rafiq is a board member for Brain Power LLC and founder of the education technology firm, Edgewise Education. Finn Gardiner is a disability advocate and policy analyst specializing in intersectional disability justice and accessible technology. He is a research assistant at the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University where his work focuses on public policies for autistic individuals. Karthik Dinakar is a computer scientist and the founder of C3PO, or the Cambridge Computational Clinical Psychology Org, a group of interdisciplinary researchers focused on bringing together machine learning, causal inference and clinical psychology. Moderator: Rosalind Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at MIT, co-director of the Media Lab’s Advancing Wellbeing Initiative, and faculty chair of MIT’s MindHandHeart Initiative. She co-founded the technology companies Empatica, Inc., which creates wearable sensors and analytics to improve health, and Affectiva, Inc., which delivers technology to help measure and communicate emotion. This event is sponsored by The MindHandHeart Innovation Fund and Radius at MIT. All Communications Forum events are free and open to the general public.

In late 2017, Twitter and Facebook revealed that agents backed by the Russian government had infiltrated American political conversations for years. Posing as concerned citizens from across the ideological spectrum, these agents surreptitiously spread propaganda disguised as home-grown political chatter. Two challenges, one theoretical and the other methodological, confront researchers interested in studying this campaign of information warfare. First, the fields of communication and political science offer little theoretical guidance about how to study such tactics, which are known as influence operations in military studies and dezinformatsiya in Russian and Slavic studies. Second, Twitter and Facebook removed all such propagandistic content from public view upon confirming their existence, which makes obtaining the data difficult (but not impossible). In this talk, the University of North Carolina’s Deen Freelon explains how he and his collaborators are addressing these challenges and present key preliminary findings from their ongoing project focused on this campaign. Deen Freelon is an associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism. His research covers two major areas of scholarship: 1) political expression through digital media and 2) data science and computational methods for analyzing large digital datasets. He has authored or co-authored more than 30 journal articles, book chapters and public reports, in addition to co-editing one scholarly book. He has served as principal investigator on grants from the Knight Foundation, the Spencer Foundation and the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has written research-grade software to calculate intercoder reliability for content analysis (ReCal), analyze large-scale network data from social media (TSM), and collect data from Facebook (fb_scrape_public). He formerly taught at American University in Washington, D.C.

Expanding use of information and communication technology (ICT) together with the humanitarian reform agenda are changing both the experience of being a refugee as well as humanitarian response. These forces are giving rise to the digital refugee and a new form of humanitarian operations, digital humanitarian brokerage. In this talk, Carleen Maitland presents these two concepts, evidence of their emergence and differences in the role information plays in each. The concepts emerge from a synthesis of scholarship from international law, information and organization science, GIS, computer and data science as presented in her upcoming edited volume Digital Lifeline? ICTs for Refugees and Displaced Persons. The talk culminates in an analysis of the implications of these trends for information policy as well as the research necessary to insure both technologies and policies evolve to mitigate potential harms and amplify potential benefits for refugees. Carleen Maitland is co-Director of the Institute for Information Policy and Associate Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University. Her expertise includes analyses of ICT use in international organizations, particularly those involved in fostering economic and social development as well as humanitarian relief. Her work, reported in over 100 refereed journal articles, conference proceedings, and presentations, has influenced scholarship in the fields of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD), communications, information systems and human computer interaction fields. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation, USAID, the U.S. Department of Commerce, and IBM, among others. She has held several leadership positions in both the ICTD and policy communities, currently serves as Associate Editor of the open access journal Information Technology & International Development (USC Annenberg Press). Also, from 2010-2012 she served as a Program Manager in the U.S. National Science Foundation, both in the Office of International Science and Engineering and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.

Mixed realities that combine digital and real experiences are now becoming a true reality. These experiences are being delivered over smartphones as well as increasingly accessible and practical head mounted displays. This ubiquity of devices is in turn making mixed reality the next digital frontier in entertainment, education and the workplace. But what do we know about where these technologies have value? Where do they add to the learning experience? And what theories and evidence can we generate and build upon to provide a foundation for using these technologies productively for learning? We have been working on mixed realities in education for over a decade and have started to learn about where, when and for whom they can add value. Part of this understanding stems from differentiating the wide variety of mixed realities and focusing on affordances. Landscape based augmented realities, popularized by Pokemon Go, have fundamentally different affordances than smartphone based virtual realities like Google Cardboard, which in turn are different than immersive experiences delivered by headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. The core of our work has been doing research and development to identify these affordances that match with key learning challenges, particular in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). In this talk, Eric Klopfer draws upon work in location-based augmented reality games, as well as work in virtual reality. In the realm of augmented reality, he discusses a long series of design experiments through which we have learned about where these technologies play an important role in learning, primarily around socio-scientific issues. In the space of virtual reality our newest designs and experiments focus on the concept of scale, and how we can use virtual realities to teach about STEM systems at radically different scales. This talk provides a history and overview of these experiences, including iterations of design research experiments. Eric Klopfer is Professor and Director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at MIT. Klopfer’s research focuses on the development and use of computer games and simulations for building understanding of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Silicon Valley innovations have given rise to a class of tech titans wielding immense economic and political influence and has paved the way for a cultural shift towards individualism. Has this resulted in historically marginalized groups being left behind once again? Noam Cohen, a former New York Times technology columnist and author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, argues that the disruption touted by Silicon Valley occurs at the expense of empathy, civility, and even democracy itself. The result? Everything from fake news to the growing divide between the haves and have-nots. Cohen joins technology critic Sara M. Watson and Northeastern University journalism professor Jeff Howe, who coined the term “crowdsourcing” in a 2006 Wired article, to discuss the ethical push and pull between the drive for innovation and preserving our own humanity and moral codes. Speakers: Noam Cohen covered the influence of the Internet on the larger culture for the New York Times, where he wrote the “Link by Link” column beginning in 2007. His first book, The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, was published in October, 2017. Sara M. Watson is a technology critic who writes and speaks about emerging issues in the intersection of technology, culture, and society. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, The Washington Post, Slate, and Motherboard. She is an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and author of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s report on the current state of technology coverage. Jeff Howe is an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a contributing editor at Wired Magazine. He is the author of Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business and co-author of Whiplash, How to Survive Our Faster Future. This event is sponsored by Radius at MIT and is free for the MIT community and the general public.

Hear from four alums of the graduate program in Comparative Media Studies as they discuss their experience at MIT and what their careers have looked like in the fields a CMS degree prepared them for. Panelists include: Matthew Weise, ’04, a game designer and educator whose work spans industry and academia. He is the CEO of Empathy Box, a company that specializes in narrative design for games and across media. He was the Narrative Designer at Harmonix Music Systems on Fantasia: Music Evolved, the Game Design Director of the GAMBIT Game Lab at MIT, and a consultant for Warner Bros., Microsoft, PBS, The National Ballet of Spain, and others on storytelling and game design. His work, both creatively and critically, focuses on transmedia adaptation with an emphasis on the challenges of adapting cinema into video games. Matt has given lectures and workshops on film-to-game adaptation all over the world, and has published work on how franchises like Alien, James Bond, and horror cinema in general are adapted into games. Links to his writing and game design work, including his IGF nominated The Snowfield, can be found at www.matthewweise.com. Karen Schrier, ’05, an educator, innovator, and creative researcher who is always looking for collaborators and new connections. She is an Associate Professor at Marist College and Director of the Games and Emerging Media program. She also runs the Play Innovation Lab, where she researches and creates games that support learning, ethical reflection, and compassion. Her recent book, Knowledge Games, was published last year (Johns Hopkins University Press), and was covered by Forbes, New Scientist, Times Higher Education, and SiriusXM. Dr. Schrier also edits the book series, Learning, Education & Games, which is published by ETC Press (Carnegie Mellon), and she is the president of the Learning, Education & Games group of the IGDA (International Game Developers Association). She holds a doctorate from Columbia University, master’s from MIT, and a bachelor’s from Amherst College. In addition, Karen and her family (husband, cats, 5 year old and 2 year old) currently live in the Hudson Valley but are hoping to move to Pound Ridge, NY in the winter. Ainsley Sutherland, ’15, a media technologist and researcher working in immersive computing and human-computer interaction design. Her project Voxhop, a tool for voice collaboration in virtual reality, is a 2017 j360 Challenge winner funded by the Knight Foundation and Google News Lab. She was a 2016 fellow at the BuzzFeed Open Lab, as well as a researcher in the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Lab at MIT. She has cofounded Mediate, an MIT DesignX-backed company that enables collaboration in and analysis of 3D environments. She has an M.S. from MIT in Comparative Media Studies, and a B.A. from the University of Chicago, in Economics. Beyza Boyacioglu, ’17, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and artist. Her work has been presented at MoMA Doc Fortnight, IDFA DocLab, Morelia International Film Festival, RIDM, Anthology Film Archives amongst other venues and festivals. She has received grants and fellowships from LEF Foundation, MIT Council for the Arts, Flaherty Seminar, SALT Research and Greenhouse Seminar. She was an artist in residence at UnionDocs in 2012 where she co-directed “Toñita’s” — a documentary portrait of the last Puerto Rican social club in Williamsburg. She is currently producing a cross-platform documentary about Turkey’s gender-bending pop legend Zeki Müren. The project is comprised of a feature film “A Prince from Outer Space: Zeki Müren”, a hotline and a web experience. Currently, Boyacioglu works as a Producer at the MIT Open Documentary Lab.

Jennifer Holt examines the legal and cultural crises surrounding the regulation of data in “the cloud.” The complex landscape of laws and policies governing digital data are currently rife with unresolvable conflicts. The challenges of distributing and protecting digital data in a policy landscape that is simultaneously local, national, and global have created problems that often defy legal paradigms, national boundaries, and traditional geographies of control. She examines these challenges with an eye towards their shared histories with obscene phone calls, wiretapping organized crime figures, the PATRIOT Act, Facebook, and the battles over net neutrality. Ultimately, these intertwined histories of policies related to privacy, data security, and digital freedoms become most instructive when they are brought to bear on the current regulatory crisis, revealing the growing stakes for the digital futures of culture, information, and citizenship. Jennifer Holt is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Empires of Entertainment and co-editor of Distribution Revolution; Connected Viewing; and Media Industries: History, Theory, Method. She is currently writing a monograph about the history of US digital media policies. She is also a co-founder of the Media Industries journal.