CMS Colloquium Podcast
CMS Colloquium Series Podcast
Visit Show Website http://cms.mit.edu/news/podcast/Recently Aired
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Podcast: "10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10"
The MIT Press book we affectionately call 10 PRINT -- ...
The MIT Press book we affectionately call 10 PRINT -- actually 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 -- was an unusual project in several respects. The book focuses on a single line of now-unfamiliar code, code of the sort that millions typed in and modified in the 1970s and 1980s. The book contributes to several threads of contemporary digital media scholarship, including critical code studies, software studies, and platform studies. Also somewhat oddly, the book was written in a single voice by ten people: Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter. At this CMS colloquium, co-authors will discuss the nature of their collaboration, which was organized by Montfort, designed as a book by Reas, and facilitated by structured conversations and writing done online (using a mailing list and a wiki) as well as (in a few cases) in person. The writing of 10 PRINT is offered as a new mode of scholarship, very suitable in digital media but capable of being applied throughout the humanities. It brings some of the benefits of laboratory work and collaborative design practice to the traditionally individual mode of scholarly research and argument. Download!
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Media in Transition 8: "Summing Up, Looking Ahead"
Roderick Coover, Temple University Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck Molly ...
Roderick Coover, Temple University Theo Hug, University of Innsbruck Molly Sauter, MIT Dan Whaley, hypothes.is Moderator: James Paradis, MIT Download!
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Media in Transition 8: "Oversharing: The End of Privacy?"
Amid disquiet over encroachments on privacy by government and corporations, ...
Amid disquiet over encroachments on privacy by government and corporations, another class of concerns has arisen: That some people (often young users of social media) are not respecting the traditional boundaries of privacy and are choosing to share "too much information." Do these people's technical skills outstrip their social skills? Are they unaware of how information can persist and potentially damage their reputation? Or are the stern adults who question this behavior clinging to an outmoded idea of privacy? Are the apps and algorithms and platforms of social media invisibly transforming norms of privacy and personal freedom? Feona Attwood, Middlesex University (UK) David Rosen, author Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard University Moderator: Nick Montfort, MIT Download!
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Media in Transition 8: "Surveillance: Big Data and Other Watchers"
It is a truth universally acknowledged that digital technologies have ...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that digital technologies have immensely enhanced existing means of surveillance by government and corporations and have created powerful new instruments to monitor individual behavior. Do the ramifying systems for observing and recording our routine activities fundamentally threaten our privacy and freedom, as many have argued? In an era of dating mining and smart algorithms, is our awareness that we are being monitored, converted to bits and distributed among databases, changing the way we behave as citizens and individuals? Should it do so? Or is this framing of the question too pessimistic, ignoring the fact that many of the world's data collectors are or claim to be improving our lives by expanded productivity, services tailored to individual users, advances not merely in shopping but in health, education and public safety. Goran Bolin, Sodertorn University (Sweden) Kelly Gates, University of California, San Diego Jose van Dijck, University of Amsterdam Moderator: Ethan Zuckerman, MIT Download!
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Media in Transition 8: "Counterpublics: Self-Fashioning and Alternate Communities"
Notions of a "public sphere" have always incited skepticism and ...
Notions of a "public sphere" have always incited skepticism and qualification, in particular the recognition of "counterpublics" that operate inside and at the margins of consensus discourse. Counterpublics can be spaces of political opposition - sites of resistance, civil disobedience, disruption - or spaces of play and self-fashioning, enabling the emergence of alt-, sub-, and fan cultures and alternative forms of community and identity. How is digital technology - and social media in particular - generating categories of identity and belonging that define themselves in opposition to established norms of personhood or community? How do the counterpublics of the digital age differ from those of the past? Cristobal Garcia, P. Universidad Catolica (Chile) Eric Gordon, Emerson College Henry Jenkins, USC Maria San Filippo, Harvard University Moderator: Noel Jackson, MIT Download!
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Podcast, Mary L. Gray: "Size Is Only Half the Story: Valuing the Dimensionality of BIG DATA"
Recent provocations (boyd and Crawford, 2011) about the role of ...
Recent provocations (boyd and Crawford, 2011) about the role of "big data" in human communication research and technology studies deserve an outline of the value of anthropology, as a particular kind of "big data". Mary L. Gray, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, will walk through the different dimensions of social inquiry that fall under the rubric of "big data". She argues for attending to different dimensions rather than scales of data, more collaborative approaches to how we arrive at what we (think we) know, and critical analysis of the cultural assumptions embedded in the data we collect. By moving from the "snapshot" of quantitative work to the "time-lapse photography" of ethnography, she suggests that researchers must imagine "big data" as an on-going process of modeling, triangulation, and critique. Gray's current research includes work on ethnographically-informed social media research, compliance cyberinfrastructures in universities and their impact on emerging media research, online labour, and the importance of location and place in the context of mobile technologies. Her book Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America examined how youth in rural parts of the United States fashioned "queer" senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media--particularly internet access--played in their lives and political work. Download!
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Video, "News or Entertainment? The Press in Modern Political Campaigns"
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mark McKinnon In the 2012 presidential campaign, ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mark McKinnon In the 2012 presidential campaign, a handful of media outlets deployed "fact-checking" divisions which reported the lies and distortions of the candidates. Some commentators have argued that these truth-squads exposed the inadequacy of standard print and broadcast coverage, much of which seems more like entertainment than news. This forum will examine the changing role of the political media in the U.S. Is our political journalism serving democratic and civic ideals? What do emerging technologies and the proliferation of news sources mean for the future? Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. Mark McKinnon is a senior advisor of Hill & Knowlton Strategies, an international communications consultancy, a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast and The London Telegraph, and is a co-founder of the bipartisan group No Labels. As a political advisor, he has worked for many causes, companies and candidates including former President George W. Bush, 2008 Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, late former Texas Governor Ann Richards and Congressman Charlie Wilson. Download, or watch below.
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Podcast, "News or Entertainment? The Press in Modern Political Campaigns"
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mark McKinnon In the 2012 presidential campaign, ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Mark McKinnon In the 2012 presidential campaign, a handful of media outlets deployed "fact-checking" divisions which reported the lies and distortions of the candidates. Some commentators have argued that these truth-squads exposed the inadequacy of standard print and broadcast coverage, much of which seems more like entertainment than news. This forum will examine the changing role of the political media in the U.S. Is our political journalism serving democratic and civic ideals? What do emerging technologies and the proliferation of news sources mean for the future? Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. Mark McKinnon is a senior advisor of Hill & Knowlton Strategies, an international communications consultancy, a weekly columnist for The Daily Beast and The London Telegraph, and is a co-founder of the bipartisan group No Labels. As a political advisor, he has worked for many causes, companies and candidates including former President George W. Bush, 2008 Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain, late former Texas Governor Ann Richards and Congressman Charlie Wilson. Download!
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Podcast, David Novak: "The Cultural Feedback of Noise"
Cosponsored by the MIT Cool Japan Project. Noise, an underground ...
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). Download! (50mb, mp3)
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Video: "MOOCs and the Emerging Digital Classroom"
MOOCs and other forms of online learning have the potential ...
MOOCs and other forms of online learning have the potential to disrupt traditional classroom education -- or to help us better understand how to exploit the many learning spaces students now inhabit. This forum examines the ongoing migration of our analog practices into digital forms, looking at the ways in which digital technologies are transforming teaching and learning both on and off campus. What gaps in our curricula, or in our students' experience, can be filled through technology? What elements of teaching practice can be effectively translated into new media, and what aspects of "teaching" must be redefined? Anant Agarwal the president of edX, a worldwide, online learning initiative of MIT and Harvard University, and a professor in MIT's electrical engineering and computer science department. Alison Byerly holds an interdisciplinary appointment as College Professor at Middlebury College and, during 2012-2013, she is a visiting scholar in the Literature Section at MIT. Daphne Koller is the Rajeev Motwani Professor in the computer science department at Stanford University. Koller will join the conversation live from the west coast. Download!
