Mit Cms/w

Thomas Allen Harris is a critically acclaimed, interdisciplinary artist who explores conceptions of family, identity, environmentalism, and spirituality in a participatory practice. Graduate of Harvard College with a degree in Biology and the Whitney Independent Study Program, member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and published writer/curator, Harris lectures widely on the use of media as a tool for social change with a keen recognition for its potential to organize social movements and impact the biological body. He currently holds a position at Yale University as a Senior Lecturer in African American and Film & Media Studies, where he is teaching courses titled “Family Narratives/Cultural Shifts” and “Archive Aesthetics and Community Storytelling”. He is also working on a new television show, Family Pictures USA, which takes a radical look at neighborhoods and cities of the United States through the lens of family photographs, collaborative performances, and personal testimony sourced

== Co-hosted with the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology == Erik Loyer‘s award-winning work explores new blends of game dynamics, poetic expression and interactive visual storytelling. From his best-selling Strange Rain story-playing iPad/iPhone app, to his visually stunning digital fiction The Lair of the Marrow Monkey (powered by Shockwave software animation), and his interactive explorations of post-Katrina racial politics in Blue Velvet, Loyer’s interactive artistic hybridizations of music, new narratives and algorithmic play have won numerous awards, been exhibited widely, and found their way into permanent museum collections. The Civic Arts Series, which is part of the CMS graduate program Colloquium, features talks by four artists and activists who are making innovative uses of media to reshape the possibilities of art as a source of civic imagination, experience and advocacy. Using a variety of contemporary media technologies–film, web platforms, game engines, drones–the series presenters h

This talk by Kimberly Juanita Brown considers the prominence of graphic photographic images during the decades of apartheid in South Africa. Specifically, she is interested in an archive of indifference that permeates the era and orchestrates the viewer’s relationship to black subjectivity. For the talk she focuses on US news media coverage of apartheid in the last year of its existence, and the images that anchored viewers’ interpretation of the event. Kimberly Juanita Brown is Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Assistant Professor for 2017-2018, hosted by MIT Literature and MIT Women’s & Gender Studies. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Mount Holyoke College and author of The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary.

Before fake news dominated headlines, Kevin Young was tracking down its roots. The author of 13 books of poetry and prose, poetry editor for The New Yorker and director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Young has spent the past six years tracing the history of news-worthy fraudulence all the way back to the 18th century. Young’s latest book Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News chronicles the racially prejudiced path that brought fake news to where it is to today. Longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award, Bunk dives into hoaxes big and small that permeate American history and the cultural attitudes that drive them. Young joins Carole Bell, an assistant professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University whose research explores the connections between media and politics, for a broad-ranging discussion on the current state and political consequences of fake news. A book signing will follow. Speakers: Kevin

Closed-circuit television (CCTV) has become synonymous with surveillance society and the widespread use of media technologies for contemporary regimes of power and control. Considered from the perspective of television’s long history, however, closed-circuit systems are multifaceted, and include, but are not limited to sorting and surveillance. During the media’s experimental phase in the 1920s and 1930s, closed-circuit systems were an essential feature of its public display, shaping its identity as a new technology for instantaneous communication. With the emergence of activist video practices in the 1970s, closed-circuit TV became a core feature for alternative experiments such as the Videofreex’ Lanesville TV, where it offered access to community-based media making. This use of CCTV as a tool for participatory media took place simultaneously with the rise of CCTV as a surveillance technology, which had been promoted under the label of “industrial television” already from the early 1950s on. Based on war-dr

Stuart Stevens believes Republicans are in a “GOP apocalypse,” and he’s urging Republicans to resist. Stevens is a Republican political consultant who’s worked on presidential campaigns for Bob Dole and George W. Bush, served as the lead strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, and helped elect more governors and US Senators than any other GOP consultant working today. He’s also an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, starting from the earliest days of Trump’s candidacy. Jennifer Nassour, founder of Conservative Women for a Better Future, and Dr. Daniel Barkhuff, president of Veterans for Responsible Leadership, a group promoting “integrity, sobriety, and civility” in government, joined Stevens to discuss the future of the GOP, how Donald Trump has influenced the American political system, and predictions for the 2018 midterm and the 2020 presidential elections.

As attention spans shrink and the representation of factual information is under scrutiny by the public, news organizations need clear, engaging storytelling that reaches readers where they are. In this talk, Emily Rueb, a reporter for The New York Times, shares insights gained in bursting boundaries of traditional storytelling for The New York Times’s Metro desk. Weaving video, audio, illustrations and text across multiple platforms, she chronicled aspects of New York’s complex but rarely seen infrastructure, like the power grid and the water system, and also its overlooked neighbors, like red-tailed hawks. Her talk also looks at what’s next for an organization that cherished its customs but has come to realize that its most important legacy values cannot survive without steady, rapid integration of new techniques. Ms. Rueb writes and produces New York 101, a multimedia column explaining infrastructure. At the Times, she pioneered new approaches to storytelling for the breaking news blog, City Room, where s

== Mariel García Montes: "Youth and Privacy in the Americas" == How do youth allies promote young people’s critical thinking on privacy, in informal learning contexts in the Americas? This thesis look at ways that educators and allies work to think about, critique, engage with, and circulate ideas about youth online privacy.

== Kaelan Doyle-Myerscough: "Intimate Worlds: Reading for Intimate Affects in Contemporary Video Games" == Leveraging affect theory and video game studies, I examine Overwatch, The Last Guardian and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for intimate affects. I read for intimacy as a way to understand how sensations of vulnerability, the loss of control and precarity can become pleasurable in contemporary video games. == Sara Rafsky: "The Print that Binds: Local Media, Civic Life and the Public Sphere" == == Aziria Rodríguez Arce: "Seizing the Memes of Production: Political Memes in Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican Diaspora" == == Mariel García Montes: "Youth and Privacy in the Americas" == How do youth allies promote young people’s critical thinking on privacy, in informal learning contexts in the Americas? This thesis look at ways that educators and allies work to think about, critique, engage with, and circulate ideas about youth online privacy.

== 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.

== Aashka Dave: "When to Start Freaking Out: Audience Engagement on Social Media During Disease Outbreaks" == How do perceptions of risk contribute to sensationalized social media spectacles, and how might social media practices further such a practice? This thesis will explore sensationalism and gatekeeping through an examination of how news and public health organizations used social media during the most recent Ebola and Zika outbreaks.

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

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 B

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

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 prelimina

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 Informati

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

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

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 g

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