CMS 10th Anniversary

Happy Birthday, CMS! Today is a celebration of the ten years of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, which I am very proud to have a bachelor of science in. http://cms.mit.edu/anniversary/

Last night began with an address from Henry Jenkins about his 20 years at MIT, given almost a year after he left for USC. I need to listen to it again to respond to it, it was too much and too emotional for me at the time. You can listen to it here: http://cot.ag/cnmfBX (CMS has started getting podcasts up so fast! Yay, CMS!) Sam Ford has already written about last night's talk here: http://bit.ly/aF0yQA

First panel today is "Applied Humanities: Transforming Humanities Education", which I don't really feel like liveblogging. I may or may not do some liveblogging or livetweeting of the rest of the panels today. I expect to be updating this post.

One quote for now: "When you say you do educational games, it's like saying you're the blind date with a nice personality" - Scot Osterweil

3: Participatory Culture: The Culture of Democracy and Education in a Hypermediated Society, moderated by Henry Jenkins
Panelists: Erin Reilly, Karen Schrier, Sangita Shresthova, Pilar Lacasa, and Mitch Resnick

It's nice to see a majority female panel. In my own MIT experience, CMS always had the best representation of women at a graduate+ level. MIT has many undergraduate women, but grad students, less so.

"this is the first thing I learned at MIT: theory is not valuable without practice" -Pilar.

Sangita came to MIT as a dancer and other things but not a gamer, and was put on the games to teach project, and now she's at USC with Henry again. She's glad to work with Henry a second time because CMS took awhile to digest. Was a person between worlds, dancing and development, Czech-Nepali. Worked on how undergrads at MIT used Bollywood dance to express diaspora identity, MIT CMS responsible for direction her dissertation went.

(discussing play as one of the new media literacy skills) Karen: Play with other people's values, other people's ethics, break down boundaries, play is powerful because it lets you be yourself or be someone else and reflect on the values that you have.

Mitch: Play as a stance towards the world, play is not just games. went to a conference with theme of play, they showed all these video games, last day he played hookey to go see the anne frank house, realized that anne frank in his mind had a very playful stance towards the world, experimenting, exploring, trying out new things, that's what play is about, links closely to issues around participatory culture.

Erin: Anne frank made a choice to deal with her environment in a different way. [I get very distracted and mindblank on some of what Erin says, because she starts talking about how popular one activity I wrote for New Media Literacies about play was. I'll have to listen to the podcast to remember what came right before and after that. http://newmedialiteracies.org/library/ "Fail and Fail Often", link is on the front page currently]

Remix:

Erin: James Gee and situated learning, DJs as hunters and gatherers of samples, teachers need to realize that they are also hunters and gatherers, providing people a vocabulary to identify themselves.

Mitch: Incomprehensible that we have this whole educational structure opposed to remixing. Has platform for kids to work on projects, some kids still get upset at other kids "stealing" their work when they remix it. Need to give technological and social support to remixing.

Sangita got some of us (including me) up and doing some bollywood dance. Now I feel all fired up! Evolution of Bollywood has complications of identity and authenticity? I actually missed it but would love to learn more, anyone have reading suggestions?


Note to self: check out the NML mapping guide.

henry: upset about "learning 2.0" because web 2.0 is a *business* model, been making fun of people tracing web history over 20 years and ignoring everything else, toy printing presses as web -10.0, people exchanged ideas, similar to web, men and women fought over women's rights, by 1870s african americans started expressing their voices.

karen: had to change how she thought about web 2.0 for her certification exam to be able to pass it, people talk about cms spoiling you for the rest of the world, but it also spoils you for other academic situations, not the same discourse.

Beth Coleman asks about participation and community and changing behaviors, some of it is wonderful.

Pilar says in Education, we really need to talk about who has the power, this is about democracy and citizenship, and technology is changes things, in some ways its making things more democractic, in other ways less. technology is empowering your mind.

Mitch thinks about de/centralization, new tech can be used for both, insidously things that seem decentralized arer actually just getting people to spread a centralized idea, need to have technology support and amplify individual and diverse voices. each new generation of technology this issue comes up again, need to rethink and refight these issues over and over again.

Henry: tea party involves a lot of what we talk about actively doesn't have a leader, people resist there being a leader, involves practices of remix. We've ignored conservative voices. now the tea party is a reactionary resistance movement and one of the most promiment things in the country and we CMS people don't understand them, we don't need to agree with them, but they are an embodiment of bottoms up grass roots energy whether we like it or not.

ricardo pitts-wiley's mobey dick remix was similar to fanfiction in how it takes the literary work and reimagines characters int he 21st century, makes whaling trade into drug trade.

Final Panel: International Media Flows: Global Media and Culture, moderated by Ian Condry
Panelists: Aswin Punathambekar, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb, Orit Kuritsky, Jing Wang

Aswin: Media Futures are being worked out all over the world, not just in LA and London. Need to understand in their own terms, local context, before you can really be comparative.

Xiaochang (who is a mercenary): Claims she took NyQuil instead of DayQ uil and may drift off. :-) Companies hire her when they have some questions about digital/media/something, and they hire her to do a quick and dirty job, and she's been pushing K-Pop all over, which doesn't surprise me at all, knowing Xiaochang. :-) What happens when communities of sentiment are full of people selecting and curating and subtitling and discoursing over and remixing the very source that brought them together. (paraphrasing a lot here, reminder!) cms takes you away from the idea that you have to prove your mastery over something before making an offering. you don't have to be fluent in korean to do _something_ with k-pop, and someone else can come pick it up with their resources, have it be very iterative.

Jing Wang: Wishes CMS happy birthday with a cute animation. Working on NGO 2.0, civic media project with a Chinese face, karmic connection to cms, 2 years ago a professor from China was brought in as a visiting scholar (flew in from China for today's event!) Many NGOs in China are using digital resources, but they don't know much about social media. Trying to introduce web 2.0 culture to NGOs so they can find each other and collaborate and brand and market themselves. non-profits are change agents, trying to help them push their creativity and social innovation to the next level. They do 4 day long training workshops twice a year, they hope they will take these skills home and spread them. The boundary between civic social media and entertainment social media is basically not there. If she has any suggestion, she would like to see a stronger CMS identity with civic media, and more intersection with the nonprofit sector. This project would not have happened if she hadn't been at MIT. Her tangential relationship with CMS has had a big effect on how she thinks and how she conceptualizes this project.

Orit: Script writer and content creator from Israel. Used time at MIT to explore the exotic of the US. Just handed in script treatment for Israeli tv while living in Somerville, MA. Media production has become very international, animation for a title sequence done across the world from the rest of the show.

wants to share two contradictory experiences. was involved with revamping/relaunching the parenting channel. Was watching show about potty training, little vignettes about how it has been done in different places in the past, woman from a kibbutz talking about how it was done in a socialist manner, all the kids in the same age group at once. Pediatrician gives advice, same advice you'd get in new zealand or england, stood out from other lifestyle channels which were mostly from the bbc and discovery and such, so most families and experts you see are american british and australian, and a lingua franca on parenting emerges for Israelis, things like terrible twos and timeouts have become fundamental part of the Israeli family experience.

first season of Israeli version of "Big Brother". It comes with a huge manual, the Dutch control how each version goes. Everyone was divided up between two contestants on the show, one eastern european jew, one north african jew, super fierce division. People watched and debated as cultural face of Israel. Was in a restaurant during semi-finals, place was empty. everyone was crowded around TVs. Is it a debate over ethnic camps? No, the camps consisted of people of different origins, many israelis are mixed between north african and eastern europe, there was an arab israeli woman in the friedman camp, format that's been run all around the world with strict rules, and out of it we get a meaningful discussion we couldn't get anywhere else in the world.

Ana: Before coming to CMS, worked with producers, knew what content producers were, was basically who she worked for, put on festivals and performances, came to CMS to continue thinking about them, and then came to CMS and discovered the audience, and found herself coding youtube videos and trying to find what it meant to be a content producer these days. Was working in C3, got really lucky they got Brazilian partners and had to go to Carinval. :-) Found group of people from North Brazil who decided to forgo copyright cause they weren't making any money anyway. Techno Braga? (I can't guess at the spelling) They have giant parties. City of 5 million people and _three thousand_ parties a month? parties with 10k people every weekend, audience decided to be involved by forming teams, not quite fanclubs, not quite associated with the DJs. One example uses art from US justice league, called themselves "super amigos". ask them what you need to form a team "honesty, friendship, sense of adventure!" but the material object they would always have would be a bucket. the DJs can identify them "oh, super amigos are in the house" also to haul the beer around. We now _do_ media, it's not necessarily something we just consume. Upset about what was said about understanding media in its own terms, because it creates anxiety, not sure if she did or didn't or attempted to in this case. this is about globalization in the sense that they have inserted themselves in the world from a very empowered position and approrpiate content the way they want, but it's very local to north of brazil.

Ian Condry wants a keytar spewing flames.

Aswin: Get away from idea of "first here, then elsewhere", things are unfolding at the same time in different places, don't impose established timelines with all that baggage.

Jing: trying to get out of the frame of the global, think of practice not in discursive terms. To be frank about being on this panel, found out it was going to be an international theme, everyone can sit at that panel, us/uk media studies have come a long way with the so-called "international perspective", the rest of the world as you might call it, but thematizing the panel as international forced each panelist to work even harder. Being thematized makes it harder to draw in the mainstream. Thinks she could have been in the participatory panel and made the same presentation.

Orit: Never thought she'd do this, but refers the questioner to the third chapter of her thesis (re the original question about time that i totally failed to write down).

Xiaochang picks up on Jing, and being grouped as the outside group, the 5 people not born in the US, feels there may be some ghettoization with international stuff, every other panel was also global,

Ana: we're always aware of this with foe, don't want to have "international panel"

xiochang: what do we have instead, tokens on each panel?

william urrichio: these panels are based around what our ideas were of what we wanted to do 10 years ago, and the one glaring absence is the international. The point is not the "foreign" as in foreign languages, the international does permeate all we do

Ian: if we'd all been farmed out to different panels, we wouldn't be able to have this conversation.

Ian's worked on hip-hop going us-> global and anime going japan -> global, Hip hop was seen as stealing and not really music, anime was seen as for kids, neither pushed by big things, but have gone global none the less.

Jing: somehow we always come back to industry, i want to see us talk about games and non-profits, things like the berkman's center's free rice, want to draw us towards the non-profit sector, it's exciting and amusing

Ana: there are certain forms of fandom that just by participating they are inacting citizenship, that's important to remember, don't force our ideas on to them, a group gained a voiced through this music engagement.

Orit: with people in differnet parts of the world making media for other parts, new questions and issues about labor. Israeli tv show translated verbatim to english language version, israeli script writer doesn't see a dime.

I think I deleted the photos I was going to blog

I was about to post pictures from my trip and do a little travelogue thing, until my eyes went wide with horror realizing that I've deleted photos I want. Even since I lost almost everything single photo I took at Burning Man in 2006, I've been obsessive about trying to keep copies of my photos in two places until they were up on flickr, but due to not being able to get photos from my camera to ubuntu and a full harddrive on a mac... I totally screwed it up, and deleted awesome pictures that I thought were safe. I'm not entirely sure where the camera is, and I can't convince myself to go check and see how many I deleted. Elk! Bison! Moose! ARGH!

I recently hit over 15K photos in my flickr account. I want to take more photos on a better camera and I want them better organized. I want a personal assistant for my data needs.

I decided to start doing photo a day on april 1, but I missed last saturday and that failure, and the end of my vacation, has caused me to stop doing it. Need to get back on the horse, et cetera.

I wish we'd had digital cameras when I was in high school, I'd have thousands of photos, and I'd cherish them... I need to digitize all the ones I do have, and to decide what to do with all the boxes of prints of photos that I never touch or look at in hardcopy. Oh, storage locker, you contain so many challenges to deal with.

Musings from San Francisco

Hello, blog. I'm in California, about to go to sleep in my friends' attic. I am really glad I'm on this trip. I lived out here in San Francisco last summer, for three months right after graduation. I hadn't realized how much I'd forgotten, but it's been delightful to have memories come flooding back. While getting fabulous drinks at Berretta earlier tonight, I wondered out loud if I'd adore SF less if I wasn't always on here on vacation. To me, SF is a magical place where I get enough sleep, wander around, and see my friends. Because I'm always here for a limited period of time, my friends tend to prioritize spending time with me while I'm here, and can be more easily convinced to go out to nice or interesting places. And the weather's not so bad.

I've never been on a trip this long without having an SO or a group of a friends who were also traveling. It's a bit weird. I've had a cold most of the time here, and getting sick while traveling alone really sucks. I was only truly miserable for a few hours, and thankfully that was one of the nights when I had a room to myself that I could be in as long as I wanted without being in anyone's way.

I hate that so many of my friends live so very far away, but it's nice to have a city I can go to and have a solid friend base in. Vacations here are very non-threatening, and rather cheap without any hotel costs. It's almost like... a refuge I can retreat to? An oasis? I last came here right after graduating from MIT. I came here my last two Spring Breaks at MIT, which always needs to be some concentrated relaxation and rejuvenation in the middle of the hell of MIT. I also came here right before I began my final year at MIT, right after leaving a job that I'd wished had ended differently. Now I'm here because I got laid off. I didn't realize until I started writing this that I'd never come here except to get a respite from MIT stress. Someday I'll come here entirely randomly, I hope. The night before I got laid off, a friend emailed me and told me to come visit SF soon. I told her I'd be here as soon as my job ended, one way or another, thinking this would likely be a (somewhat longer) trip in August after my contract ended. Instead, I got laid off, and pretty quickly started looking at travel options. Because I was coming out to Seattle anyway, it seemed quite obvious to attach a SF trip as well.

I did not explicitly set out for this trip to be a time of reflection, but I was always open to it. I definitely have started some trains of thought that I think will be good for me. One of the few things that upset me about getting laid off was having to bump up the timeline on deciding what to do next in my career. I'm feeling much more secure in that regard now. I still don't know what I want to do next, but I'm much more confident in my own abilities and in the existence of interesting jobs. I went to a series of talks last night under the general theme of Art, AI, and Algorithms ("Do Androids Paint Electric Sheep?") and two of the talks left me feeling excited about things in my field for the first time in awhile. I took notes of things to read and investigate. I've been having really excellent small group or one on one conversations with old friends about life. I feel like my intellectual curiosity is starting to return to me, having been stifled by that job that left me with so little time or energy to think about anything. I realize that I need to give myself more time to recover from MIT. It was the most significant experience of my life, and it affected me in ways I don't even know yet. It's been less than a year, I don't need to know what I'm doing with the rest of my life yet.

It'll be more than a week before I get back to MIT. Ha! I wrote MIT! Boston, I mean. Boston. See how it dominated me still? ;-) I hope the thoughts rumbling in my head continue during the rest of my west coast travels. We'll see.

Oh, and by the way, Iron Bloggers, I talked about IB today and I think a west coast league wants to form up. :-)

Nobody reads this blog, and that's okay.

Perhaps someone has been reading, but I really have no idea. I haven't gotten any comments and no one has mentioned reading it to me. I'm in this whole Iron Blogger thing, and maybe that causes people to read the other posts in it, but there are, what, 40 of us? And most of the rest of the blogs are about version control and other things that make me feel like they probably are not super interested in my blog.

I don't have an audience I'm writing for, and that's fascinating. I haven't kept a personal diary in years, and all other writing has been for some audience, whether it's a personal email, a paper for a professor, a zephyr(*) for unknown numbers of MIT people, tweets for potentially the entire world... and that always strongly shapes what I say. With this blog, my only real goal is to write a bit more seriously and formally than I do in other fora, and to be accessible to a wider audience. I suppose that means I do have an audience I am writing for, but it is defined by what it is not, instead of what it is. My audience did not go to MIT, and does not have a degree in Comparative Media Studies. My audience is not a fangirl, but is generally aware that American media exists. My audience does not play LARPs or go to Burning Man. My audience is not sexually or socially deviant. My audience does not live in Boston. My audience basically has nothing in common with me, I suppose. I want to be able to write for people who little to nothing in common with. I would like to able to take all the things that are important to me and explain them clearly and compelling to people who are unaware and uninterested. I'd really love to have a book published someday, and this blog aspires to be practice for that, though I haven't really lived up to that potential yet. "Maybe Next Week". Is that a motto of Iron Blogger? It should be.

* MIT's internal IM/IRC-like chat system. It has the strange evolved property that people constantly have group conversations where they have no idea who might be listening it, and any one of thousands of people affiliated with MIT could be.

Oscar Spoilers!

Kathryn Bigelow just won an Oscar for Best Director! I AM SO EXCITED! It is *incredibly* hard for women to make it as directors, or in much of the high-powered parts of Hollywood. In 2008, 9% of the top 250 films were directed by women! And NPR says that was a lot! Check out this story, which I heard when it first aired last summer. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106402458 It contains great lines such as: "It's like jumping into an orgy while you're still shaving your legs."

Within five minutes of Bigelow's win, I was editing wikipedia because the page for "The Hurt Locker" had been defaced by someone upset that Tarantino didn't win. The vandalism was claiming that Bigelow had only won due to performing sexual favors on men! Ha ha ha isn't that funny! I mean, whatever, random wikipedia vandalism, but it got my attention. I am just so excited. I really, really hope this means something! Right now I feel like running off to film school. :-)

"Precious" looked just so heart rending, I haven't seen it. I heard a lengthy interview with the director, and just listening to him talk about the cycles of violence and suffering was enough for me. He did open calls looking for an actor for "Precious", and found lots of random fat girls in stores and the like, and gave them a chance, and in the end was concerned about being exploitative, and actually here's the link. I haven't listened to it since it aired, but I remember it being painful and good. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120092180

Still on "Precious", I'd really like for Gabourey Sidibe to get more roles! She got a nomination for Best Actress in her first role! I really want to see more fat women in non-comic roles on screen. Male actors are allowed to be fat, women aren't, and it's just another thing that irritates me about Hollywood.

And finally, I enjoyed the dancing, and I don't understand why so many people react to modern dancing with "ugh people flailing on stage". It irks me.

(I'm teaching science and I'm) Still Alive

Hello there, blog. I'm still here. I am painfully busy at my job, and I haven't updated you in a month, but I'm not quitting Iron Blogger. Even when I don't update here, I always think about trying to do so, and I like how it organizes my thoughts, even if I don't write them down. I wonder how many bloggers would have people "Great People of Letters" in a previous generation, and if being a great blogger will ever have the same connotations, or if we'll move past blogging to something else before it can become that respectable.

I've been working for just about two months now, and the one thing I am sure of is that I don't know what I want. How long is it going to take me to be able to make decisions without MIT coloring everything I think? Will that ever happen? I suppose I just want it to happen less so. I feel like I'm rebounding after the end of a long and troubled relationship. I've been swearing for months that I will never go to graduate school, except maaaaaybe a master's, but now I'm officially moving my answer to "I have no idea." A Ph.D is probably unlikely if only because I'm so old, but never say never, I suppose. I don't know if I even want a career! I knew what I wanted for a whole decade, and that was to graduate MIT. Now I have no idea. It's not really scary, just irritating. Oh well.

Festivids Reveal!

January 2010 has been a wonderful month in the vidding world! First, a few links for those of you who aren't familiar with vidding.

• How To Watch A Fanvid, a blog entry from Henry Jenkins all the way back in 2006, when a certain Star Trek vid to Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" hit it big. Now I've actually met many of the people in this entry or the comments!
• 
  


• New York Magazine: The Vidder, a 2007 profile of Luminosity, one of the best vidders around.


• Fan Vidding: A Labor Of Love, another Henry Jenkins blog post from 2008 about videos about fanvidding that were created by vidders (many of whom I have since met) and Project New Media Literacies (which I worked for, but was not involved in this project).


• Organization of Transformative Works page on vidding, with all the vidding NML videos.
  

I love vidding. It's beautiful and fun and transformative. It makes me laugh, it makes me cry, it turns me on to new music and makes me see things in new lights. I've heard lots of people say they don't watch vids because they "don't get them". Please don't let that keep you away! Lots of vids are just meant to be enjoyed on a relatively shallow level, and even if there are many levels, you don't need to see them all! Don' stress, just watch.

There is a whole lot to be said about vidding. The history of vidding, the copyright aspects, the social aspects, the transition to digital, the rest of the world discovering vidding... but I'm just going to talk about some recent events and my own participation.

This month was Festivids! I mentioned it here: http://lauraboylan.blogspot.com/2010/01/ive-been-considering-just-defaulting.html Festivids is a brand new event where fanvidders come up with a list of movies and TV shows and the like that are rarely vidded and make requests of something they want to see. Everyone also makes a list of what they are willing to make, and it gets put into a database and people are assigned someone to vid for, which the do anonymously. The vids were put up anonymously two weeks ago, and today all the vidders were revealed. While waiting for the reveals, vidders (including myself) have been hanging out on IRC and trying to guess who made what.

I've been aware of fandom for a very long time, and involved in various ways for over a decade. Since I graduated in June, I have made a concerted effort to get involved in fandom, and I am extremely happy with the results. Fandom is full of amazing, clever, creative, talented, kind people. I didn't realize until recently how much giving and gifting there is in fandom, how many exchanges like festivids and Yuletide there are. On some level, all fanworks are for other people to enjoy, but there is something just lovely about crafting something specifically for someone else, who probably isn't even your friend. For me, it was a great kickstart into writing fanfiction and making vids, it provides a deadline (and I work best under deadlines) and it gives me something to work with, which mskes it easier to get started. Also, it gives you a very clear audience, which is one the standard tricks of creative work, knowing your audience. For instance, for my yuletide story I worked in a green energy plotline because I thought my recipient would like it based on what I read in her blog. I think one problem I have with this blog is that I have no idea what audience I am writing for besides "not my usual audience". I assume you don't have the same background as my normal audience to make myself explain things. Honestly, I have no idea if anyone even reads this. I've never told anyone about it, and maybe everyone else in Iron Blogger skips it for not being about version control or AI.

There is tons more to say, but it's gotten late so I'm going to wrap up here and show you the vid I made and the vid I got.

I got "Enchantment", a vid about the Japanese film "Kamikaze Girls", about a lolita girl and a biker girl living in rural Japan. It was fairly obscure among vidders -- my vidder didn't even get matched on it, she picked it out and watched it based on my requests! Many people have said they plan to watch the film because of this vid, and one group already reported in that they loved it! I am very excited for other people to fall in love with this film! Here it is! Watch it!. I don't know this vidder, but we know at least one person in common in real life, and we live in the same state. The vid she got is also awesome, from a Bollywood film about India's first female field hockey team that I just put on my netflix queue. (And the person who made that vid is someone I talk to online, who gave money to Haiti relief for me to make her a rum cake. The circle of fannish giving!)

And now, my own vid! My very first! It is to "The Princess Bride", which means it got a lot of views, being such a well known source.

Hanuman from Laura 47 on Vimeo.