http://mitworld.mit.edu/ MIT World media in category 'Media'. en-us Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:52:32 GMT Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/720 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/720 Six years after Darfur made its appearance on the world stage, the horrific crisis burns on, as these panelists vividly attest. In a forum companion to the traveling exhibit DARFUR/DARFUR, the speakers provide big picture political context, as well as actual images from the field.

Note: This lecture contains descriptions and images of horrific war crimes which may be difficult for some to view.

While the conflict may no longer be “hot news,” the “genocidal years are continuing,” says Robert Rotberg. Three million Darfuris are languishing in refugee camps on the border with Chad and in their own country. The leader of this desert nation, President Omar al-Bashir, has been accused by the International Court of war crimes, yet militias under his direction, including the feared Janjaweed, continue to rain death down on villages and refugee camps. Neither the world’s condemnation, nor a multilateral force, has stopped the violence. China’s support of Sudan (with its rich oil fields) presents another obstacle to peace. Rotberg worries about the appointment by President Obama of a special envoy, J. Scott Gration, who “has made welcoming noises to Bashir…offering carrots without carrying a big stick.” A plan for peace, says Rotberg, should include a ban on overflights; dismantling of the Janjaweed and all the militias, and their repatriation into village life; a mechanism for power-sharing at all levels; compensation for genocide; and support for reconstruction.

Susannah Sirkin and her investigators from Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) are among those who have documented the Sudanese government’s atrocities against the people of Darfur. People have been bombed, strafed and burnt out of their villages. Says Sirkin, “The government of Sudan knew full well what would happen when hundreds of thousands of people were forced out of their homes, knew they wouldn’t make it to a place where they could receive the basic necessities of survival.”

In spite of harrowing conditions, including the regime’s persecution of aid workers, PHR has collected ample evidence of “the crime of mass rape as a weapon in this war,” a crime that goes on even at the refugee camps. The peaceful pre-war existence of women, tending animals, family and farming, is brutally shattered when militias massacre their families, and assault them sexually. PHR doctors describe their suffering as “unimaginable.” Sirkin recounts the tragic story of one 18-year-old, whose experiences stand for the thousands who endure comparable horrors.

The finale of the panel is a slideshow by photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale of his 12 trips to Darfur in the past six years. He captures the fear -- entire communities huddled under trees for fear of detection by government planes – and the aftermath of Janjaweed attacks. There are charred villages, bodies left to rot in the sun and people burned by white phosphorus, dumped by helicopter. At the camps, there are child soldiers with amputated limbs, starving mothers and babies, and long lines for the plastic bottles of water provided by aid agencies. Says Bleasdale, “These aren’t singular stories; they’re happening thousands of times, in every village.” ]]> Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/718 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/718 The collapse of print and other traditional news and the rise of celebrity culture have contributed to the sharp decline of in-depth stories involving race and society, say these two speakers, in a discussion that’s replete with personal anecdote.

Juan Williams sets out detailing his childhood dreams to break into the newspaper business. He read all the New York papers for baseball coverage, “and noticed no people of color telling their stories … The absence struck me.” From prep school through college, Williams found internships at progressively larger papers, which had at most a handful of black reporters, and often denied those the right to bylines. But the turmoil of the ‘60s, recalls Williams, led to a wave of more militant black journalists who demanded respect and greater attention to their own communities.

In spite of some gains, Williams does not see signs of great progress over the years. President Obama’s election may have led to more African-American commentators, but Williams is the only regular person of color on Washington’s Sunday morning talk shows, which he describes as “conversations among elite white males.” Nor are there African-American anchors: “It always comes down to, ‘Is the audience going to relate to a black male as lead dog?’”

Williams deplores the “pandering” that big media institutions engage in with people of color. An executive at a black cable network, rejecting the idea of a news show, told Williams that the black men “who would identify with you like to watch sports and pornography…” Magazines like Ebony, Jet, and Essence focus on the “fabulously rich singer or superstar,” and avoid discussing the nation’s social and economic crises. There’s “no investment of money, or placing journalists in a position to tell you critical stories … to find the political power players who have their fingers on the levers causing distress in lower income communities. It doesn’t exist.”

J. Phillip Thompson believes that the waning of local newspapers like New York’s Amsterdam News marks the end of one of the last resources communities of color have to learn about issues affecting them. As a former public housing manager in New York, he knows the importance of reporters scrutinizing the words and actions of politicians. Now “I’ll read about a shooting in a mainstream newspaper. But the voice of community and debates I heard all the time I don’t read about.”

He traces a class divide in black America today that’s different from previous incarnations. For instance, black officials representing majority black districts “don’t want issues, don’t want people excited.” Elected leadership, he says, is not focused on addressing “fundamental problems like jobs, the fact that people can’t pay mortgages, raise families. Instead of dealing with that, officials move onto other issues like Skip Gates being arrested off of his porch. That’s unfortunate, but it’s just not a vital issue in black America.” ]]> Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/719 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/719 Paula Apsell, NOVA's senior executive producer laments the sad state of science journalism and discusses how NOVA is more essential than ever. In a world where the public understanding of science is diminishing, she makes a strong case for NOVA's tradition of depth and substance, tackling the most pressing issues in science, in a thoughtful and visually complex manner.

Apsell brings clips from some recent NOVA programs to illustrate the role of television's most prestigious science documentary series in the vast television and web content landscape. She provides insights into the editorial processes of topic selection, treatment, and production standards. In a world of decreasing attention spans, Apsell considers the challenges of providing meaningful science content, keeping it interesting, while not leaving the audience behind.

]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/688 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/688 At the end of the three-day Media in Transition conference, panelists swap impressions and reactions, offering some notional themes for future symposia.

Mary Bryson frames her comments as “a mash-up aggregation.” The conference’s “massive disagreements and sometimes awkward silences and gaps” were beneficial, “as we make our way in the present imperfect of media studies.” For Bryson, a key question arose: “What time is it here?” The past, present and future are now intertwined in media studies, and often in “incommensurable tension.” The next conference might wish to “mobilize and re-territorialize” itself across borders, making itself available in multiple host locations.

The traditional discourse around libraries and archives no longer serves us well, observes librarian Marlene Manoff, who calls for a “new terminology to describe or think about collections of digital objects, especially when they involve new services and functionalities.” She was “happy to hear a universal acknowledgment of the volatility and mutability of the digital record,” yet finds herself “still at a loss when it comes to questions about what should or should not be saved.” Colleagues in the profession have been “discussing the social and political implications of selection decisions for a long time,” and today, with so many people creating and collecting digital objects and files,” she perceives “a much broader conversation,” although there is yet “no cultural consensus” about these issues.

John Durham Peters offers three observations: He first addresses the difficulty of organizing knowledge in a field as diverse as media studies (or for that matter, in other modern scholarship). Peters likens media studies to “a 17th-century cabinet of curiosities.” He also gives “two cheers for breakdown,” for the ways that archives fail to conserve “all kinds of stuff.” He asks if we would regard Sappho as such a good poet “if we possessed all 12 of the books.” He’s not trying “to praise barbarians who want to burn libraries,” but to point out that “what counts as historical record is exceedingly malleable.” His last comment involves the “interesting reversibility” of transmission and storage. To “transcend time, we must use up space, just as to transcend space, we must use up time.”

Thomas Pettitt admits to an identity crisis of sorts -- that “those of us who do literature but who have lost faith in literature as a rounded concept are not quite certain what it is that we do.” Possibly as a result of the welcoming nature of the conference, he wonders if “over time, literature studies people will find our true identity within media studies.” Literature is a form of culture production whose scholars focus on aesthetics, particularly those in a verbal form. The conference was absorbed with questions of quantity (“megas and teras”), but asks Pettitt, “Have we neglected (aesthetic) quality as a factor?” And finally, he found confirmation in the notion that “advances in media technology are taking us back to conditions as they were before some of the mechanical inventions.” Is this “business of the future looking rather like the past?” ]]> Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/685 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/685 Nostalgia, anxiety and optimism mix in this panel devoted to imagining what lies ahead for the book, as publishing professionals and others discuss the impact of digital technology on the business.

Small Beer Press, Gavin Grant’s boutique Massachusetts publishing company, “is still in the business of producing paper objects.” But new technologies are transforming his work in several ways: He licenses some books via Creative Commons; releases others as downloads in a variety of ebook formats (generating these can be an expensive “hassle”); and deploys social media, in the form of blogs and Facebook-enabled communication, to publicize and attract passionate readers to the firm’s website. Grant sees Amazon and its Kindle as a bully driving readers toward best sellers, and is interested in the “hyperlocal” possibilities of the web for publishing: finding readers for his one-of-a-kind publications, and inviting them to peruse his non-mainstream book lists.

Agent Jennifer Jackson describes some intriguing direct marketing activities made possible by the web, including author-produced book trailers on YouTube, and an online media project undertaken by clients and other authors: a website consisting of episodes for a fictional TV show. Jackson also maintains blogs that she hopes provide “transparency” about her end of the business, a way to bridge “the great divide” between agents and authors. Her authors are concerned with digital piracy but Jackson feels wide distribution of an author’s work ends up generating more sales over time.

Robert Miller’s frustration with the trade publishing model-- in particular, astronomical advances to authors, and book return rates of 40% -- led to HarperStudio (a Harper Collins offshoot). His notion of “starting something from scratch” involves making digital and physical books available simultaneously to the reader. His first offering is a collection of previously unpublished pieces by Mark Twain that are available as individual books, or in discounted bundles with audio books and downloadable books. He celebrates the reduction in production costs in moving to digital, but he’s wary of the small but rapidly expanding ebook market, which he anticipates will impose a “downward pressure on prices,” a loss of revenue that will negatively impact his business.

Bob Stein envisions a wholesale evolution of the essence of books, from objects to “a place where readers and sometimes authors congregate.” His Institute on the Future of the Book hosts experiments in publishing, such as one where an author essentially blogs and moderates responses around a particular subject. Readers could someday collaborate with dead authors, adding chapters to finished books, for instance. He sees ebooks as transitional: “The experiments which have to do with increasing sales of book are interesting, and will prolong publishing but won’t invent the future of how humans work together to increase our knowledge, which is what publishing used to do.” These new expressive forms won’t emerge quickly. It took 300 years after the invention of the printing before the first novel was written, he notes, but inexorably, “we’re shifting the ways humans communicate with each other.” ]]> Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/681 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/681 European archivists grapple with the legal obligations, civic responsibilities and future prospects of their collections, which, thanks to the Internet and other new technologies, are increasingly awash in image and sound. As William Urichhio notes, “tradition-bound institutions know what we should be gathering: feature films, books, newspapers, political documents, but it’s much harder to know what to do with things like social media…say, networks of interactions.” Different organizations are evolving diverse strategies.

At France’s National Institute of the Audiovisual (INA), Claude Mussou describes managing “memory and heritage policies in the information age.” In the 16th century, she recounts, Francois 1 mandated that any book published would be first deposited in the royal library. The national collection law broadened over centuries to include new forms of knowledge production: documents, film, radio and TV, and beginning in 2006, websites, because of the migration of so many activities online, and because of the fleeting life of many websites. Says Mussou, “Twenty, 50 or 100 years from now, when scholars or academics look for evidence and testimony for what the 21st century was,…web archives will be a necessary and valuable source.” She pointedly notes that we can’t rely on Google or other commercial interests to maintain web archives, and therefore governments must not “surrender their role as gatekeepers to collective memory.”

Sweden’s national library recently merged with the national media archive, says Pelle Snickars, which includes seven million hours of media material. The legal deposit law mandates anything put out on tape, radio or TV must find its way into the state’s collections. This imposes an enormous burden, both curatorial and budgetary. As it transitions to digital, the library must maintain its analog collection. Snickars says the larger problem involves rights: researchers would love access via the web to the material that’s being transferred, but the material belongs to others. Snickars worries about the best methods for digital preservation, and whether quality concerns should be sacrificed to quantity demands, as more and more people assume access to information online.

The BBC boasts 100 kilometers of shelves for its A/V collection, says Richard Wright, from 1920s radio to videotape from the 1960s onward -- all of which must be digitized to be preserved. The BBC is converting 200 terabytes per week of current broadcast material -- an enormous commitment to digital. As Wright points out, “We’re putting a very big egg in that basket, and the basket is not perfect.” The risk of loss of data is proportional to the data stored, and since so much is pouring from analog to digital, “the risk is growing by Moore’s Law.” One way to mitigate this loss: avoid compressing data, and seek redundancy. As we’ve moved from stone, to paper, and onto disc, storage capacity gets denser and cheaper, he notes -- almost overwhelming: “It’s why our grandchildren are swimming in a sea of digital photos.” If we can’t tag all this material appropriately, it will be “struggling to survive” for future generations. ]]> Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/676 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/676 As old media die, new forms are emerging, but it’s not clear they will serve such vital civic functions as “helping people form publics,” as Pat Aufderheide puts it. These panelists point to promising experiments in “Public Media 2.0,” but caution that new media are not guaranteed to shore up democracy or invigorate public culture.

After two years of research, Jessica Clark has reframed the notion of public media as “outlets that provide context/content that allows publics to form around shared issues without political or corporate interference.” Instead of a centralized producer (old media), user-producers collaborate, forming networks with the use of digital tools. Some novel ventures that “break out of the old zones:” cell phone reporting in forbidden areas of war-torn Gaza, and streaming iPhone feeds of local news from U.S. cities.

Ellen Hume faults traditional journalism to some degree for its own demise, because it did not “connect the dots between news and action.” It stirred up emotions with stories but didn’t give people “a place to go” with their passion. In contrast, new civic medium SeeClickFix.com enables the public to report a problem in a community (from potholes to graffiti), spurring government response. HeroReports.org encourages people to report instances of kindness. Says Hume, “These new media offer enormous opportunity for creativity, and unleash the ability to participate in public.” But we haven’t yet entered the era of full media literacy, where people become “part of the public, rather than cruising through.”

Persephone Miel has been searching for “all that democracy we were supposed to get.” In spite of the proliferation of new types of reporting media, including news aggregator, author- and audience-driven web sites, Miel believes the “old media model still does unique things for us.” As traditional journalism fades, there’s no new media replacement yet for its “editorial intelligence,” its persistent, watchdog functions. Miel sees no evidence that “the volunteer energy of the blogosphere” will step into these roles. She notes several attempts at hybrid journalism forms: websites Spot.us, a nonprofit project for community-funded reporting; Global Voices, where correspondents in developing nations send out web dispatches; and Town Meeting 2009, a New Hampshire public radio web venture that reported on local governments’ budget process.

On the technology front, Dean Jansen has developed a free open source HD video player, Miro, so people don’t have to go through proprietary gateways or load specialized software to access web video content. He hopes to swell the ranks of user-producers in a more inclusive, participatory webspace.

Jake Shapiro’s public radio exchange, PRX.org, invites independent radio producers to connect with local public radio stations through his aggregating site. Citing the “current collapse of traditional forms,” particularly public television, Shapiro hopes to reconfigure public broadcasting. He says his marketplace enables content creators to find an audience, receive royalties from interested public radio buyers, create social networks, and potentially find alternative channels of distribution via podcasting. ]]> Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/674 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/674 Scholars of “dead tree technologies” feel increasingly uneasy in a culture overwhelmingly consumed with innovation. Although we may “live in a condition of perpetual flux,” David Thorburn hopes that “we won’t allow utopians and futurists to intimidate us.” Moderator Peter Walsh poses a series of questions to the archivists and historians on this panel, who reflect the anxiety and exhilaration of a digital age that is constantly transforming their disciplines.

After a thousand years and the extinction of many written literatures, John Miles Foley views the oral tradition (OT) as “alive and well in highly literate societies, even in the wired West, and multifunctional: it does many more things for societies than literature is able to do.” It has survived through its “ability to morph in support of morphing societies,” such as in South Africa as it dissolved apartheid. And OT and IT (Internet technology) are quite alike: both performer driven, involved in emergent activities, partaking in distributed authorship. Indeed, OT may find robust expression on the Internet, with new journals and multimedia e-companions encouraging wider audiences and interactive users for performances and events.

A switch from physical to digital archives “will change historical knowledge,” Lisa Gitelman says, because it means a change in the systems governing those archives. Whenever you open a Gmail account, says Gitelman, you’re urged not to delete: “new media have always prompted new archival sensibilities.” But, she warns, the emerging archive system “depends almost wholly on the alphanumeric character of objects and the metadata that describe them.” A historian searching through archives is like a miner whose helmet light can only illuminate narrowly defined areas.

Rick Prelinger views archives as “culturally emergent. …They’re going retail.” Once used mainly by specialists to produce books, TV shows, and exhibits, archives now attract ordinary users with home-based projects. YouTube -- which only resembles an archive -- has created unrealistic expectations of 24/7 archival access. But if archives rebuff users, “the social-cultural consensus that supports us and keeps archives open may fail.” Prelinger sees possibilities for changing the perception of archives “as the place where documents go to molder and die.” Archives could be “a point of departure … for historical intervention,” generating “opportunities for mainstreaming history and re-anchoring in the public sphere.”

“Stewardship responsibility in a digital environment is essential,” says Ann Wolpert, who believes “the odds that bits will survive in a shoebox in the attic are pretty small.” She also points to a “yawning gap emerging between institutional archives and records … and those archives (that are) a byproduct of normal human activities.” She shows an MIT photo of a 1935 drama club performance, where the “winsome damsel” would one day become the president’s wife. It’s the “incidental archives that create the flavor, richness and texture of life at a point in time.” What scrapbook items will people hold onto for future generations, as we record more and more “in media so ephemeral that we run the serious risk of losing …these experiences”? ]]> Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/672 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/672 Susan Hockfield states that science journalism “is now, and in the decades ahead, absolutely indispensable.” As we confront global warming and health pandemics, science reporting must be sustained, Hockfield says, “in its rightful place, at the top of the profession and in the thick of the national conversation.” But dismal economic times throw doubt on this aspiration, as these journalists attest.

At the nation’s flagship newspaper, The New York Times, there’s a relentless commitment to high-quality journalism, whether print or digital, Jill Abramson maintains. “The fact that people have come to expect news on the web to be free has certainly challenged journalism’s business model,” she acknowledges, but The Times is better positioned than other publications to weather the changes. Indeed, “decades from now, the quality newspapers left may not be on paper, but journalism will continue to thrive,” Abramson asserts. In particular, this means ramping up science coverage, whether examining climate science or common medical treatments and health policy.

Abramson draws a clear distinction between science blogs, which are “often for the deeply engaged,” and “coverage pitched to the intelligent general reader.” Penetrating reporting with great breadth comes at a steep price: the paper must support reporters who dig deep into protected government files, are on perilous assignments, or must take a year to glean all dimensions of a complex story. She asks, “How do we prevent the collective muscle of investigative journalism from being gutted?” Whatever the answer (and one solution may involve nonprofit funding), Abramson sees a robust, continuing appetite for “trustworthy information on the world we live in.”

Cristine Russell sees a “best of times, worst of times” scenario for science journalism, with a glut of opportunities beyond print to chat and blog about science, or more frequently, health and fitness, and deep cutbacks in print science departments. Andrew Revkin admits the days when The Times could bring in $1 billion a year in ad revenue are gone forever, and hopes its staff “won’t be in a museum of recently extinct journalists.” But holes in science coverage mean “scientists have a greater responsibility to take the bull by the horns…and engage more fully in a conversation with society.” Ivan Oransky characterizes some online science sites as a kind of “curation,” with “a lot of people covering single events periodically.” He cites Twitter as a positive example of “democratizing coverage,” getting a new generation “to get back into science.” Evan Hadingham suggests we might be “in a golden age of popular science communication on TV.” Yet, in a 500-channel world, public TV science producers face “the ghettoization of science,” worried about how to mix serious science with entertainment. ]]> Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/670 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/670 Just as digital technology has expanded the means of producing media, so has it increased the geographic range new media may travel. Locally generated content can zip around the world in a heartbeat. But, says moderator Henry Jenkins, “as a society we’re in a contradictory state in terms of having greater access to global content than ever before, but not having developed a conceptual framework to think about it very well.” These panelists attest to an unsettled time for global media.

At a recent Bombay conference celebrating the globalization of Indian film, Aswin Punathambekar saw international heavy-hitters, including Warner, Fox Searchlight, and Disney, all attempting to shape the future of the industry. Part of Indian film is still defined by the families that started the industry in the 1930s, but the last decade or so has seen dramatic changes, including attempts at fusing with Hollywood, and perhaps more dramatic, the explosion of new distribution channels through media piracy and imitation. Bollywood now exists outside of Bombay, says Punathambekar, in Karachi, Dubai, Beirut and Nigeria. The “culture of the copy” has come to define production and circulation of film and TV programs in these outlying hubs.

Two billion people watch Latin America’s telenovelas, long serial dramas featuring outsize villains and heroes. Carolina Acosta-Alzuru provides a tour through a global business that produces 12 thousand hours every year. Different regions feature different flavors. While Mexican telenovelas are “moralistic and melodramatic,” Venezuela’s programs appear suffocated by the censorship of the Chavez regime. Multinational broadcasters compete to distribute their products (distinguishable by differently accented Spanish) all over the world. They also fail to prevent bloggers and YouTube aficionados from placing episodes on the Internet. She laments the missed opportunity of telenovelas to teach and present the world in constructive ways.

Instead of movie theaters, Malawi features “video shows,” where men only watch pirated films on DVD, says Jonathan Gray. This impoverished nation produces neither original films nor TV programs, but people flock to see video copies of 20-year-old American action movies. Village music sellers neglect native musicians to hawk Dolly Parton CDs (she’s “as big as it gets,” says Gray). Country music is huge in Malawi due to American missionaries who passed through in the ‘70s. Gray believes it’s worth studying how media circulates not just spatially, but temporally, throughout the world.

Filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako acknowledges the appetite in Africa for western media. “It is a sad situation for my country, and in a larger way for the continent, because if images are a mirror, imagine you go every night to your home bathroom, and see somebody else in front of you.” He mourns the overwhelming “reculturization” of his countrymen via telenovelas and Bollywood, which prevent an actual appreciation of other cultures, and also obstruct an interest in authentic African life, including his own films. Sissako works out of France, and when he tries getting his native Mauritanian television to show one of his films, “they ask me to pay for it.” ]]> Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/663 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/663 In a panel that at times resembles a late-night ramble and conversation, three film music professionals discuss changes in their industry, with some no-holds-barred dishing and kvetching.

Martin Marks sets the scene historically, starting with the revolutionary introduction of sound to film. He plays a clip from the original 1933 film King Kong, which he describes as both a technological and aesthetic landmark of soundtrack production. Paul Chihara continues the story, explaining that the score’s creator, Max Steiner, was part of the first wave of film composers, classically trained musicians, fleeing Hitler’s Germany. Steiner drew on the music he knew best, the kind performed by the Vienna Staatsoper, for his King Kong score, so we get a movie that’s “wall to wall music, filled with leitmotifs,” played by a giant orchestra.

Cut to 2005, and the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong. In what he describes as “an electro-acoustic seminar on how digitally sound is enhanced,” Chihara plays several clips of the same scene that demonstrate the evolutionary leap in soundtrack scoring since 1933. The process involves the demo track, a score with digital sampling and no acoustic instruments intended to help the filmmaker imagine how music will work with the film; next an acoustic score; and the final dub version, where acoustic and digital music sources combine, and the rest of the sound elements are added in post production (dialogue and sound effects).

The new scoring process can prove dangerous to composers, as Dan Carlin reveals. “We have a term called ‘demo love,’ describing how the director gets attached to the very first track offered by the composer.” This is a digitally sampled score often drawn from other composers’ work. The editor and director become accustomed to it, and test audiences watch films with demo tracks. “So the composer comes in with a new approach, and often gets fired at this point.” This has led to composers fearful of originality. Carlin says starting in the ‘90s, generic romantic and action scores began to emerge: “Everything starts to sound alike.” He also describes how composer Georges Delerue went to see Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple, and heard one of his own themes, which had started as a temporary music cue but then was essentially plagiarized. This led to a very lucrative law suit. Marks notes that “one of America’s film music geniuses,” Elmer Bernstein, essentially dropped out of the business because of the insistence on demo tracks over original music.

Panelists also bemoan the demise of orchestral recording sessions at production studios, as digital audio tools put the composer’s work in the hands of directors and editors, who play with increasingly authentic sounding software-based instruments. Companies are buying up the rights to the sounds of famous symphony orchestras, down to the staccato and legato notes of strings and horns in different keys and pitches. The craft involved in composing music, then conducting an orchestra through a movie scene, has become obsolete. Chihara concludes sadly, “It’s an unnecessary art.” ]]> Sat, 11 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/660 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/660 Bill Viola dims the lights in MIT’s Room 10-250, and begins to talk of life, death and all that lies between, leaving the realm of classroom and entering a place of potential enlightenment. Weaving together his video art, personal anecdotes, poetry and other writings from religious traditions spanning the globe and the ages, Viola illuminates his own spiritual journey and search for meaning. With a light touch, he manages to tap into reservoirs of deep feeling.

Viola imparts the vital interplay between his life experience, and the evolution of his vision. After his mother’s death, for instance, he ‘recovered’ her after finding a bowl she’d given him years earlier. Objects outlive us, Viola realized, and contain their own “spark of life.” This is true of technologically enabled things including Viola’s own video art. He admits that this medium makes him nervous. One of the world’s most dangerous weapons is the camera, whose “narrow focus, which is its strength, allows me to see inside a soul.” It can also “intentionally obscure an entire class or race.” Technology may be used to enrich or to harm, but its goal must be knowledge.

Viola recalls Buddha, who told his followers to treat his teachings like a raft, which should just be used “to get to the other side. From that point on, only an idiot would carry a boat around.” This is a good time for Buddhist ideas, suggests Viola. The world “seems like it’s deconstructing before our eyes.” Yet Viola says he’s “excited about this age. People who’ve been making money, doing stuff, must suddenly start living like artists.” He tells students they should be “very happy graduating into this emptiness,” because collapse brings opportunities for regeneration.

Viola recounts various other experiences and insights: a visit to an exhibit of Bodhisattva sculptures, which he regarded merely as ancient art, until an old lady adorned them with scarves, revering them as sacred objects; a Flemish painting of Mary that left him weeping, and made him realize that he “was using art, mourning his mother who was leaving this world.”

Only after years of training, says Viola, “could I see how my personal and professional life was not at odds, that it holds the whole edifice of the self up.” One profound expression of that interdependence is played in this talk: his 1992 Nantes Triptych, whose three ‘panels’ consist of videos of the live birth of a baby, the last moments of Viola’s mother’s life, and a clothed man drifting in an underwater pool “in currents between the poles of life.” ]]> Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/655 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/655 The 2008 presidential campaign may have fused politics and entertainment once and for all. Three panelists and moderator Henry Jenkins discuss the nature and implications of this convergence.

To Johanna Blakley, political candidates who understand the meaning of style “can communicate volumes,” and to her eye, Barack Obama “has amazing skill.” His campaign, dubbed “brand Obama,” engaged celebrities and pop music, utilized the internet, broadcast and cable TV, and “rarely made a misstep,” says Blakley. In fact, McCain “desperately tried to make Obama look bad for being in synch with popular culture…but it ended up biting him on the ass.” Blakley also discusses her survey work with Zogby International, which creates political “typologies” of the American public not simply by asking about political affiliation but examining the intersection of political beliefs and entertainment preferences. The partisan divides among Red, Blue and Purple hold up in people’s cultural affiliations. Whatever the ideology, the “entertainment experience… always ends up leaking into real lives.”

While at the Democratic Convention, David Carr was conversing with Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark and found “a kid to my right live blogging our conversation. I thought, it doesn’t get any more meta than this.” The “miracle” of the Obama campaign, Carr believes, was how it “organized itself,” through an “adhocracy self-assigned by geography and expertise.” People picked tools provided by the campaign that suited them. Blogging, videos, and mash-ups emerged without much campaign oversight. Says Carr, it “became kind of a style thing, an expression of who you are.” People didn’t call and ask for support so much as ask, “Have you seen this video by will.i.am. --let me send it to you.” Watching Saturday Night Live and Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin became an “expression of cultural identity which became a part of political identity. “ Citizen-generated content took over this campaign, and isn’t going away for the next election cycle. But, warns Carr, this “mass niche of like minds,” can be “a tool for marketing democracy and/or fascism.”

Stephen Duncombe recalls a brilliant move by Obama after a bruising debate with Hillary Clinton: he brushed the shoulder of his suit jacket, quoting a music video by rapper Jay-Z, “Dirt Off Your Shoulder.” He instantly distanced himself from Clinton on the cultural level, and was embraced by American youth, who remixed the Obama moment, and unleashed it on the Web. To Duncombe, this moment crystallized how politicos “can start to think about popular culture in a productive way.” Pop culture is a “unique laboratory of fantasy that can be explored, understood, mobilized and actualized through political practice.” Obama succeeded by imbibing a variety of pop culture icons and ideals and said, “I’m a mixed race, latte-sipping urban guy who likes basketball and hip hop.” Duncombe says that the conflation of politics and culture need not degrade politics, if people “do it with integrity, with honor.” ]]> Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/641 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/641 Ellen Hume predicts a “good news conversation” with her MIT Museum crowd about the future of news, but all participants end up working very hard to find a silver lining in the dire situation facing newspapers and other traditional forms of journalism.

The business model, Hume explains, is deeply broken for newspapers, big and small, and other mainstream media that people count on. Advertising -- the very idea of the classifieds -- is going extinct, vanquished by sites like Craigslist and Cars.com. The important work that journalists do, collecting, analyzing, contextualizing and disseminating information, and providing common frames of reference, has begun to migrate to the web and elsewhere.

This isn’t all bad, believes Hume, because instead of relying on experts who deliver information in a “top-down form,” we get participatory journalism, where users can respond to and exchange information. This “changes power relationships.” Agency has shifted from elites who create the flow of information, to citizen journalists. Users stirred by a news story have opportunities to react via social networks, videos, blogs, “creating a sense of community.” This, says Hume, enables “a new sense of public space.”

But there are dangers in relying exclusively on these new sources of information. Not all citizens have the expertise of a professional journalist, who’s spent years learning about subjects and sources. “We may lose verification....context….transparency….a sense of independence…and the big megaphone of mainstream media.” Yet we may also gain some things: authenticity, from eyewitnesses; continuity of attention to a story; and verification, via crowd sourcing. Hume thinks it’s possible to replace some of the functions of traditional journalism with the resources of new media, which can build massive online archives, collect from continuously expanding sources, visualize data in arresting ways, and engage its users.

Web journalists must accept the responsibility of “separating wheat from chaff, paying enough attention to know if something’s credible or not, when it’s awfully hard to tell.” It’s going to be essential, Hume says, to “figure out how to build media literacy skills into all curricula.” At the same time, there may be some hope for newspapers: Hume cites website Spot.Us that permits people to make micropayments to cover worthy community stories; ProPublica, a consortium of heavy-hitting print journalists funded by philanthropy; and The New York Times multimedia venture. Ultimately, we may have to pay a premium for a good newspaper, on or off the web, while “the dynamic and exciting future of news…moves to the internet, cellphones and mobile devices.” ]]> Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/638 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/638 New technology may have permanently changed U.S. politics and campaigning. These panelists, who have both observed and driven this change, attest to how truly transformative the 2008 presidential election turned out to be.

Four million more 18-29 year olds voted in 2008 than in 2004, says Ian Rowe, and nearly 70% of these voted for Obama. Rowe’s convinced this enormous leap in voters, and their sharp preference for one candidate, “is due to the use of new media.” He credits the Obama campaign’s extraordinary mastery of both message and delivery, citing a “centralized and decentralized process; the idea that everyone had part-ownership of the brand.” The campaign reached young people via cellphone, Twitter, and Facebook. He notes Obama’s website, FighttheSmears.com, which battled scurrilous internet rumors. Users “became an ally to preserve and protect his brand,” says Rowe. But none of this would have been effective if Obama had not purveyed such a “phenomenal and consistent message,” which involved drawing on his audience for ideas and direction. This represents “a new kind of governance about bringing you into the process.”

Marc Ambinder believes that the 2004 and 2008 campaigns were successful because “they both managed to use tried and tested old media marketing techniques and merge them with technology.” While lagging in resources and technique four years ago, the Democrats this time round were fueled by Obama’s massive $630 million war-chest. The end result was an email database of around 10 million people, which they put to use in social networks like Facebook. Ambinder also recalls a fascinating effort using old and new media in South Carolina, where the Obama campaign worried about gaining votes among older African- American women. Campaign staff recorded some of Michelle Obama’s speeches on the subject, and sent volunteers with DVDs and VHS tapes of her talks to beauty parlors. “Volunteers spent tens of thousands of hours…loosening resistance.” Then when polls opened, data warehouses on some of these voters allowed campaigners to determine who hadn’t yet voted, and target them with phone calls and offers of a ride.

GOP technology guru Cyrus Krohn finds the amount of information his party has on voters kind of scary. He describes how third party data mining groups helped the Republican National Committee match information from a voter file with a voter’s “public profile on a social network.” This proved a “goldmine” for targeting purposes. But “technology is a commodity,” says Krohn, and “it’s the cachet and persona of a candidate that will drive the use of it.” Krohn was “daunted by the amount of user-generated content…in support of Obama.” The piece of media that created the most buzz around McCain was the video “McCain Girls,” which turned out to be the product of the liberal Huffington Post. Such is the impact of technology that Krohn has found himself helping every RNC division think about how to deploy it. Anyone looking for campaign work should be proficient in C++ and Java, recommends Krohn. ]]> Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/637 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/637 Friends, colleagues and fans unite in loving praise of a children’s author who, though renowned, never got his due. James Marshall was writer/illustrator of the George and Martha and The Cut-Ups book series (he also illustrated Miss Nelson and The Stupids series, among many others). He died at age 50 in 1992, never having received the coveted children’s picture book honor, The Caldecott Medal. These panelists do their best to redress the injustice.

Susan Meddaugh of Martha Speaks fame, remembers Marshall from her days as a book designer. She has fond memories of him “trying his stories out on us as he went from office to office” at Houghton Mifflin, and credits him with launching her freelance career when he found her an apartment in Charlestown, MA for an improbable $75 a month. Meddaugh celebrates Marshall’s ability to “establish characters instantly,” and the way in which “Jim didn’t have to find originality, he just was. Every part of his personality came through in his books.”

“My appreciation for his work leapt exponentially,” says David Wiesner (The Three Pigs, Tueday) “after I began reading his books to my kids.” There’d be “the big smile, laughing and total connection.” When Wiesner repeatedly paused to marvel at how Marshall’s words and pictures came together, his children would have to remind him to get on with the story. Wiesner finds much to admire in the George and Martha books: “They’re so concise; there’s nothing extraneous going on.” He enjoys their “beautifully minimalistic art,” as well as the “ornate, almost dense” illustrations of The Stupids. Says Wiesner, “He’s one of the few people I think about when I’m doing a book: How can I take what I’m doing and keep it to its essence and not fill it up?” The beauty of Jim’s work, he says, is that “it looks like it was created in the moment.”

Anita Silvey has been reading, editing and reviewing children’s books for years, and had the pleasure of accompanying Marshall on book tours. Silvey has recently been exploring Marshall’s notebooks and studying his working style. He often pursued several ideas at a time, and his beginning sketches and text have a lot of detail. “There’s a long evolutionary process, with thumbnail sketches” and rewriting “and all of a sudden, he circles one word, the perfect word...” Yet his final sketch had “a lightness of touch,” the appearance of spontaneity. Silvey recalls, “I once saw Jim sketch an entire book out on a cocktail napkin. He could do a quick, creative thing, then he went to work.” That’s why his books “are so timeless.”

Roger Sutton notes how Marshall respected his audience: he never talked down to kids, and trusted them to pick up on things. Even sarcastic adult humor was okay. Librarian Susan Moynihan says that the kids to whom she reads get Marshall’s humor without requiring adult filtering, and they also get his “message of kindness.” In Marshall’s books, “nobody was made fun of.” ]]> Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/635 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/635 The best way to help a community help itself, say Dayna Cunningham and Alexa Mills, is to enable its members to find their voices and talk to each other. In several projects in the U.S. and overseas, the two speakers are developing methodologies for enabling communities to express and define themselves, so they may become more engaged in a larger civic and political process.

Cunningham describes her particular focus on African-American civic engagement. She confesses she had “come to the conclusion that the infrastructure of black civic engagement was dead” -- and then the U.S. elected its first black president. However, in spite or because of this triumph, she feels there’s more reason than ever to find channels for African-American involvement in the civic process.

Alexa Mills recounts her efforts in two historically black Brooklyn neighborhoods to create community-based media projects. A large Baptist church, the cornerstone of the community, was challenged by various issues of gentrification, and asked Mills to conduct interviews with a diverse group of African- American community members to hear their perspectives. “Their goal is to hear one another before projecting their voice,” says Mills. Although she went into the enterprise imagining organizing the community around affordable housing, she found that instead, there was fierce concern about white people moving in and behaving in an uncivil way: New neighbors wouldn’t say hello as they passed on the street or in buildings. She hopes her interviews and an envisioned future website will help make connections among new and old community members, and ultimately inform the church’s future efforts.

In another project, Mills worked with people in an Eastern Kentucky town who felt oppressed by the destructive environmental behaviors of local coal companies. She helped make a movie about one local man’s fish pond -- his life’s work -- that was poisoned by mining runoff. The web site designed by a community group hosts lively conversations about this video, and other issues provoked by mining, and partly through this technology, the group is learning to “fight for what it wants,” says Mills. ]]> Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/625 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/625 In World of Warcraft, online ‘clans’ form whose members, while dispersed geographically, exhibit fierce loyalty toward each other -- reminiscent, says Henry Jenkins of neighborhood bowling leagues. He wonders whether new media platforms that encourage bonding over long distances might help move Americans back toward more personal and immediate civic engagement.

Forty years after Alvin Toffler noted that American society was fragmenting due to increased social mobility, digital technology permits us “to build strong friendships and carry them with us wherever we move,” says Jenkins. Social ties can exist without regard to geography, but how do new kinds of social organization play into our politics, especially at the local level? And as local newspapers fold, and media outlets morph into print/online/broadcast hybrids, where will people turn for information about their communities? Jenkins and MIT’s Knight Center for Future Civic Media hope to explore and test new technologies that might help invigorate public discourse and democracy within communities.

Jenkins discusses with an MIT Museum audience the proliferation of media platforms deployed in the recent presidential campaign. He likes the notion of “moving democracy from special event to a lifestyle,” and wonders if the on- and off-line networks built up around the Obama campaign, for instance, will survive the election and continue in other forms. “Is there a plebiscite version, a collective intelligence, where he (Obama) collects the insights of the public to go forward?” Jenkins would like new technologies to provide “a common space” to discuss civic good and community leadership. But he worries about excluding some groups. Most young people have online access, “but still face a participation gap to do with skills, knowledge, experience, a sense of entitlement or empowerment.”

The real trick will be connecting “the real and virtual world together so the consequences of one permeate the other.” Jenkins offers some interesting examples: Global Kids, a New York group linking teen leaders online worldwide, so they work on issues face to face in their own communities, from garbage pickups to volunteer projects. They also develop awareness of larger issues such as Darfur and child prostitution. There’s a new trend of “place blogging,” where individuals report on events on a hyper local level. And some Facebook users found a way of shaming unregistered voter acquaintances – a tactic with which Jenkins isn’t entirely comfortable. ]]> Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/622 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/622 Perhaps because he is a historian rather than librarian by training, Robert Darnton regards the vast ocean of digital information that civilization has begun accumulating with relish rather than anxiety. Darnton delves into European archives to find raw material, boxes of cast-off “ephemera,” for his stories of how people lived hundreds of years ago. No wonder he believes “it’s important to preserve as much as you can because you don’t know what will turn out to be significant.”

In conversation with David Thorburn and audience members, Darnton lays out why he finds more promise than peril in rapidly expanding digital collections. He first owns up to the tactile pleasures of archival history: the sensation of opening a box full of manuscripts, dirty hands, the smell of old paper, and literally coming “into contact with vanished humanity.” He cherishes the drama of such research, as well as the finished, weighty products of this kind of work: the book. While the “tactile quality of books” is very important -- and Darnton describes holding up leaves of 18th century books to see bits of ground-down petticoat thread -- there are also positive dimensions to digital versions. For instance, when the British Library digitized Beowulf, it discovered several new words. But “one medium of communication doesn’t displace another,” he reassures. “They coexist.” Darnton himself is hard at work on a large-scale electronic book about books in the 18th century, comprised of layers a user can navigate, from essays on various subjects, to selections of documents in English, to the original documents in French. There might even be songs performed as they were sung in the streets of Paris 250 years ago. “We are in an era of creating new kinds of books, new kinds of reading and authorship.”

Darnton advocates “a total history of communication … by internet, by songs, jokes, graffiti -- by all of the media of any period...”and a corresponding expansion of libraries’ duties. But he admits concern about the preservation of digital documents: “We migrate them through various formats, and they’re not like books. They could disappear due to inadequate metadata, or “lose a few 0s and 1s, and the whole document disintegrates.” He advocates keeping card catalogs, and making sure that all conceivable editions of books, manuscripts and research papers get digitized. He even supports preserving email. The “ephemera” of our times may serve as an entry point for historians of the future, and we should let the next generation find in the vast world of preserved data what they deem most significant.

]]> Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/616 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/616 Don’t forsake The New York Times for online media, instructs Ethan Zuckerman, because newspapers provide opportunities for learning about the world largely unavailable in the digital kingdom. Zuckerman points in particular to the “serendipity box” -- that intensely local or exotic piece that often grabs attention at the bottom of the front page. This “juicy bait on a hook,” as he calls it, often leads to an in-depth, fascinating report about a culture or perspective far removed from most Americans’. At a time when the world has become connected by infrastructure of all kinds, it behooves Americans to take a closer look at our neighbors, especially those in developing nations. But capturing people’s attention on these matters, says Zuckerman, turns out to be a “surprisingly difficult problem.”

In the age of the web, traditional gatekeepers such as broadcast anchors and newspaper editors wield less clout. The internet, increasingly the primary source of information for millions, doesn’t maintain gatekeepers as much as self-publishing bloggers or user groups that clump together around specific interests. Useful search technology, such as the collaborative filtering employed by Netflix, helps you find the kinds of things you’re interested in, based on previously expressed preferences. But these kinds of prediction systems won’t surprise you, and, says Zuckerman, “are more likely to trap (you) in a circle of recommendations.”

Current web searches encourage homophily, says Zuckerman, the tendency to flock together. While this clustering by like-minded people is part of human nature, it becomes problematic when it guides our exposure to media and information. “In a global world, we’ve gotten much better at moving stuff around than ideas and perspectives. Moving stuff around can be incredibly dangerous,” says Zuckerman. “We isolate ourselves in political cocoons, and nationalist cocoons” at our peril.

To break out of these “echo chambers,” Zuckerman has developed a method called “bridging,” which he employs in his Global Voices web project. He finds people from around the world to act as filters for what’s happening in their country, and as translators of both language and context. These bridge bloggers are “people with feet in two worlds.” One blogger Zuckerman mentions works to explain Bahrain to the rest of the world, “trying to dispel the image Muslims and Arabs suffer from.” While this is a start, Zuckerman wonders how he can better “engineer serendipity” to help us “resist homophily,” lest we get stuck in the digital age wearing blinders. ]]> Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/612 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/612 There’s anxiety, outrage, and some wistfulness in this panel devoted to weighing the strengths and weaknesses of political reporting during the 2008 campaign season. In the age of the internet and cable news, “enormously courageous journalism…is lost in the clutter,” notes moderator Ellen Hume. Basic tenets of journalism fall under assault.

From his research, Tom Rosenstiel quantifies what’s changing and what’s not in political journalism. One enduring pattern: 65% of the news hole is dedicated to covering the campaign as horse-race (tactics, strategy), and only 20% concerns policy. This has been true for two generations, he says. Today, cable news dominates political coverage, devoting 62% of its time to the presidential election. This might be a good thing, except that “cable news has abdicated much of the time to campaign operatives and spin doctors communicating talking points,” says Rosenstiel. It doesn’t break stories, but supports “a conversation…live, unedited, unvetted, unscripted.” Talk show culture has replaced “the culture of fact,” says Rosenstiel, burying original sources and documentation. This culture invites political operatives “to game the system.” The press used to play the role of filter, “saying that’s a lie, that’s not true.” Now, news consumers become their own editors, getting facts from online and traditional sources, but “Bill O’Reilly or the Daily Show tells you how to think about them.”

Cable networks offer “projectile punditry,” says John Carroll. “They’re in sort of a verbal dance to show that ‘we’re still in this tribe, aren’t you in our tribe, too?’” So Carroll doesn’t think cable networks “change anyone’s minds in the least; they just reinforce attitudes.” Print journalism continues to deliver real political stories, but their impact is lost in the 16-hour news cycle, which every campaign attempts to win. This means “whatever hits has immediate but no lasting impact. The news media to me is a like a self-cleaning oven: something comes along, you bake it, serve it, clean the oven, bring in the next recipe and serve that.” Candidates can take advantage of this, bypassing or discrediting media entirely. The assignment desk for national political discourse used to be The New York Times or The Washington Post. Now, says Carroll, it’s just as likely to be YouTube, Politico or Jon Stewart.

Cable stations engage in the equivalent of food fights, says Ellen Goodman. Just as European newspapers have established distinct political leanings, cable channels are developing political identities, so “Republicans go to Fox, committed Democrats go to MSNBC....” With this campaign, race and gender are driving the narrative, “framing the stories of this campaign -- literally.” In the past, women have not been news consumers to the degree men have, notes Goodman, but “when women are running, women pay more attention.” The affinity groups and tribalism generate a lot of heat, as Goodman attests: “People email stuff you wouldn’t believe, that they’d never say to you -- but it’s OK to email.” ]]> Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/592 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/592 This exploration/homage arrives in the form of a lecture/conversation, breaking some conventions, not unlike the object/subject of the event, Chantal Akerman, filmmaker and video artist. Two Akerman experts discuss her work in the kick-off event to an exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center.

First, Giuliana Bruno offers history and perspective on Akerman’s oeuvre, starting with her pathbreaking 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which “changed the way we looked at film, and opened up ideas for feminist thinking, theory and filmmaking.” Bruno discusses Akerman’s unique way of breaking down barriers between documentary and fiction film, and more recently between film and museum installations. Akerman fascinates, says Bruno, for her “movement of space and time,” particularly long duration shots “showing the unfolding of everyday life, and especially flowing temporality, and women’s time.” Akerman uses faces like landscapes in a painting, and takes grand journeys through history, including personal history. Bruno is particularly captivated by the way Akerman “veils something,” using the camera to reveal psychic, inner life. In what Bruno describes as “intimate distance,” Akerman uses long, tracking shots from afar, maintaining “a kind of reserve…we need to get very close.”

In her conversation with Terrie Sultan, Akerman says she doesn’t see herself as an artist – “I’m working,” she says simply. Her journey from filmmaking to museum installations happened “by accident,” the convergence of friends, money and a few suggestions. She embraces this kind of serendipity, which fuels the process of discovery she most loves in whatever she’s working on. “I hate when it’s predictable,” she says. “If in a movie or installation you don’t discover something, it’s not worthwhile doing it.”

Akerman discusses her documentary journey into the lives of illegal migrants crossing into the U.S., and her 78-minute film about a short stay in a Tel Aviv apartment that is comprised of just a few shots of long duration and voice-over. She also describes the process of creating some of the installations that appear in the current museum tour.

Her father, who enjoyed her critically acclaimed work while he was alive, asked repeatedly when she would enter the commercial film world. While Akerman admits “one part of me wants to make a big commercial film and have money,” she finds the entire fiction film process cumbersome. Writing “is annoying when you have to make a fiction film –sometimes it is destroying the film or experience of the film…and everyone putting money in it has to read the script…” She prefers projects that permit many interpretations, rather than the “one chosen by producer, writer, director…who don’t want anything to escape from their unconscious. That’s why it’s so boring.” ]]> Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/590 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/590 Greg Mitchell has found both comedy and tragedy in the shameless and near-universal complicity between the American press and the Bush Administration around the Iraq war and occupation. Mitchell’s amply documented account of the run-up to the invasion through the recent surge forms the basis of his new book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq, and this talk.

The nation’s mainstream media flunked a basic test of journalism, according to Mitchell: displaying a healthy skepticism. “Even if you’re reporting for a tiny newspaper in Topeka, and interviewing the local garbage department official, don’t take what he says as gospel. Check it out with other people.” From the multiple rationales offered by the Bush Administration for the invasion, to their progress reports on the occupation, the news media gobbled up the official line, hook and sinker, as Mitchell recounts in detail.

Some examples from the early days: newspaper pieces about Colin Powell’s “slam dunk” case at the U.N. establishing Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions, which proved to be a complete sham. Mitchell says, “If the press is still around 200 years from now, this will be in the text books.” And there’s The New York Times’ Judy Miller searching with the military to find weapons of mass destruction, which also “turned out to be bogus.” Americans bought, and according to polls, continue to believe, the Bush Administration’s linkage of Iraq to 9/11, and to Al Qaeda. “Whether this is the media’s fault, or the American people’s lack of interest…the media didn’t push the truth strongly enough,” says Mitchell.

In the five years following “mission accomplished” Mitchell finds a recurring theme of media self-censorship around using graphic images of war and documenting the grisly details, whether of Americans flown home in coffins, veterans suffering from physical and mental injuries, or civilian deaths in Iraq. He notes that in spite of mounting evidence that war efforts were foundering, no major newspaper came out for a change of course in Iraq.

This hasn’t ended, even with a majority of Americans against the war. The “media went sleepwalking into an abyss” when Bush enacted his plan for the surge. What’s worse, there’s a new absence of coverage, with attention focused on the economy and elections, and the threat of Iran. With the media neglecting the pursuit of truth, Mitchell worries that the relevance of mainstream journalism is fading, replaced by opinion-based blogs and partisan websites. ]]> Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/584 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/584 With the right tools and backing, children of the 21st century are set to make their mark on the world. These panelists want to ensure that young people passionately engage with the world, using new media to “shape changes around them,” as Mitchel Resnick puts it.

For Lance Bennett, “the future of democracy seems to be at stake.” Typically, schools fail to teach children politics, and civic education turns kids off. This is happening as modern society “falls apart in important ways,” with social hierarchies and authorities fading in importance, and membership organizations that confer status losing clout. But new forms are emerging such as social networks and participatory media. Young people born into the digital age have a different take on citizenship, and are “predisposed for interacting, sharing knowledge across peer networks,” for creating content and assessing the credibility of people and ideas in an egalitarian, collaborative enterprise.

Civic learning can take place online. Bennett cites Your Revolution on Facebook, an online voting registration tool available in some states. He describes regional teens developing digital media skills to communicate about local issues, learning digital storytelling and advocacy strategies. In Puget Sound Off, Seattle teens use a website to express themselves with art, poetry and music, and discuss important issues like abusive relationships, and misogyny.

In more than 100 Computer Clubhouses in 21 countries around the world, under-served 10 to 18-year-olds work with high end computers, mentored by adults to create, collaborate and enrich their communities in turn. As Ingeborg Endter tells it, they “use equipment without a lot of caveats – ‘No’ is not a word used often in Clubhouses.” A Sao Paolo Clubhouse decided to beautify its neighborhood by painting murals in an alley. In an Arizona Clubhouse, Native American children engaged elders in recording traditional songs, and in Dublin, young people invited candidates for local council offices to come to their Clubhouse to discuss the issues. “They wanted their voices heard by candidates, even if they couldn’t vote, “says Endter.

The co-founder of City Year says it’s time for a “new public philosophy, a new approach to solving problems.” Alan Khazei wants massive citizen engagement via a universal voluntary service program, with lifelong opportunities starting as early as kindergarten. He envisions a new system for social entrepreneurship, so that when a good idea pops up, like Teach for America, it receives the resources to scale up rapidly. And novel public and private partnerships must be forged to enable these new enterprises.

We’ll need the active participation of millions of young people to tackle the gigantic issues defining our times, such as climate change and the war on terrorism, says Khazei. He proposes a Meta action tank, where social entrepreneurs can put ideas into action, engaging “grass tops and grass roots” locally and globally. Through this new type of action, “we can help create an America in which every person holds the highest office in the land, that of citizen.” ]]> Mon, 14 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/575 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/575 In conversation with Henry Jenkins, these speakers don’t so much square off as share their hopes and fears for the emergence of online democracy.

The first order of business, instructs Jenkins, is taking stock of the current “communication space” to assess whether current practices encourage the growth of digital democracy.
Cass Sunstein gives the Internet a C-, for its “babble and excellence…brilliant insight and cruelty, that are not from the standpoint of self-government…what we deserve.”
Yochai Benkler, describing the “good public sphere,” focuses less on sheer freedom of expression, and more on how people participate in “production of an agenda,” and how they are enabled to “investigate, pursue, differ, err, correct and discuss.”

Sunstein bemoans the common opinion in the “geek world” that if you’re sovereign over your own options, you can “declare victory and go home.” In Sunstein’s version of a well-functioning system of communication, “you don’t construct a daily me, your communications cocoon, your little information chamber,” but embrace “unanticipated exposure and shared experience.” Such moments energize people, shifting them from passivity to active citizenship, declares Sunstein.

Benkler sees the Internet as couched in the larger framework of power and elites, where government or commercially directed mass media typically produce our common experiences. But now, with the Web, “instead of having a few hundred or a few thousand people with a genuine ability to set the agenda, we instead have two to three million people who believe they can affect the agenda without kidding themselves too badly. That seems like a larger population that can push on power.” This is a “significant change in citizenship from the idea of sitting in front of the TV.” He finds particularly attractive organizations like Netroots, which prod traditional political parties in certain directions.

But there’s a possibility for fragmentation, and even dangerous polarization, Sunstein worries, with online communities clustering around similar interests and erecting bulwarks against contrary thinking. “The notion that freedom of choice, the ability to self-select and produce our own information content is a full cure for what ails us, runs into obstacles,” he says. Benkler, though, believes the tendency to “tell each other how great and right we are and how wrong they are” is a plausible description “of how we’ve always been.” He is happily observing a new generation of children grow up deeply imbedded in new technologies that help them develop an “attitude of seeking and being able to find.”

Sunstein summons his muse, Jane Jacobs, to describe his ideal: an Internet metropolis that mirrors the best an American city offers. “Walking along some street, you see a person, interaction, building that stuns you…If you really look, the fertility and surprise of that will alter what you’re interested in, what you care about, your aesthetic and even political sense.” Sunstein dreams of a digital world designed for serendipity, as well as norms of interaction, (such as on Wikipedia) that promote collaboration, self-correction and the prevention of lies and cruelty. ]]> Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/563 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/563 There’s a lot that seems familiar on TV in other countries, and indeed, as these panelists recount, there’s been a flow across borders of TV content and style nearly as long as the medium’s been around.

William Uricchio tells us that although TV technology developed “as a genuinely global phenomenon,” in Stalin’s Russia, Nazi Germany and in the USA, after World War II, TV became synonymous with American culture. This was no accident, says Uricchio, since it was pushed by the USIA as an American invention “to combat Communism and to help civilize and conquer the world, make it an American marketplace.”

Over time, this influence has broadened as a result of direct program sales (Germans went crazy for Dallas); the model of American production techniques and job categories; copying and then licensing actual TV formats; and the pressure on the more public-minded European broadcast networks to make a space for fast-paced, hard-driving, American-style programming. Uricchio finds it fascinating when formats “work across cultures,” because they become “a real metric for trying to understand culture specificity.”

Roberta Pearson has followed the impact of U.S. television in Britain. At first, the BBC was the only game in town, but commercial television jumped into the game in 1955, full of American content that was perceived as dumbed down and vulgar. Today, that perception has largely been reversed, and U.S. shows are widely admired in Britain. They’ve “gone from a situation where American TV used to represent the worst in popular culture to where it now represents the best, and the Brits know they can’t compete,” says Pearson. So central is American content that two major organizations, Sky TV and Virgin Media, have been waging mortal combat around the rights to American shows like Lost.

Many of this country’s most familiar programs, ones we might identify as uniquely American, derive from much older European versions, says Eggo Muller. In the case of America’s Most Wanted for example, pride of origin goes not to the U.S., nor even to the U.K. but to Germany for a show that first appeared in 1967. Muller makes the case that for the first time, the U.S. faces serious competition from Europe in TV production, specifically the export of reality TV formats, in Muller’s words, “the pornography of everyday life.” He describes the increasingly sophisticated trade in these formats – actual brands – which often involves copyrighted production elements (like computer graphics) and a senior producer who assures that the program is reproduced according to a series bible.

Nevertheless, versions of Survivor and Big Brother among others, manage to soak up a specific country’s ambience. The stories in the shows are totally different from one culture to the next, says Muller, as are the kinds of hosts, languages, “national sense of humor, national sense of how you should address those who are voted out, and how to care about them.” ]]> Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/562 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/562 Fear not, fans of character-based TV fiction: reality shows will not obliterate tales featuring “transactions between human beings – the Jane Austen end of things,” as John Romano puts it. This veteran of some of TV’s finest cop dramas (including Hill Street Blues and Monk) sees wrenching changes in his business, but reassures his audience that “TV will always be a place for storytelling.”

It comes as no surprise that this Yale English major prefers writing for and watching programs that deal in “human fallibility and doubt,” even or especially when the characters are super sleuths armed with the latest (or fantastic) technology. In the series 24, Romano is most interested in human dilemmas that are not comfortably solved. There are real political threats, evils that the series protagonist Jack faces, at his moral peril. The question is how Jack can retain his own humanity through it all. Romano confesses being bored by the “techno side” of 24, that “somehow we’ll invent the right widget to solve whatever problem is being faced.”

The events of 9/11 provoked some television writers to portray an even darker world, believes Romano. He cites Lost as an example of such programming, where there’s “a sense that we are an island threatened by strange alien creatures, and can only depend on each other, and who knows if we can depend on each other.” 9/11, says Romano, “fed a lot of impulses, not all of which are admirable.”

He believes the police drama has an enduring appeal for audiences. “I think the obsession with cops and robbers is hardwired into human beings,” says Romano. “ Sophocles’ Antigone is centrally about that; that’s the first cop show in my imagination.” Some of the great writers of narrative fiction, such as Balzac, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky “found cops very interesting,” because it allowed them to “explore the social contract, our deepest issues,” says Romano.

Romano believes there will probably always be “a terrific appetite” for such stories on TV, although these days the ones that succeed tend to be “aggressive and crazier,” because that’s what thrills studio executives. Nevertheless, this humanist writer looks forward to “what TV might be –and movies.” He finds special promise in a budding group of filmmakers who are more “John Sayles than David Milch,” and whose smallest movies are “about something.” In Hollywood, there will “always be a lot of crap,” predicts Romano, but “expect great storytelling and narrative truth.” ]]> Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/549 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/549 In this heartfelt address, Tom Brokaw characterizes the transformation of the world by digital technology as a second “Big Bang,” a time of great possibility, but also of danger.

This revolution is being advanced not by “a small collection of monkish wonks working in a secret lab” but by a vast and ever larger population ranging from inventive teenagers to military analysts in the Pentagon, says Brokaw, who feel “power at their fingertips and in the bowels of their servers.” They believe that the world is limited only by their imagination. Yet, cautions Brokaw, “life is not a virtual experience. If we develop capacity and leave out compassion, what is the reward? What are the consequences if speed overruns reason?”

The most memorable people Brokaw has met during 45 years in journalism are not world leaders and movie stars, but “brave young, black and white civil rights workers” determined to end the "moral hypocrisy” of the segregated south; a doctor saving a young girl’s life in Somalia; a fireman searching for lost comrades in the wreckage of the Twin Towers. For Brokaw, greatness is defined by unrecognized and modest heroes “who put their hands in the dirt and spend nights in scary places to make this precious planet a better place for us all.”

The technology revolution must serve a larger purpose, Brokaw believes. He describes American aid workers using the internet to help victims of an earthquake in Pakistan, both to speed rebuilding and “to make a lasting impression on those poor souls who believe the world has forgotten them, especially the Western world.” Brokaw states, “These are new tools that require a human face as we attempt to diminish and lower the temperature of Islamic rage.” Brokaw has written of the “defining generation” who fought in World War II. He suggests an analogy with those in our own time who meet our greatest challenges with powerful new technologies: the growing divide between haves and have-nots; disappearing ice caps and rainforests; and increasingly scarce and expensive energy.

The generation that rises to answer these challenges must have “an attention span and patience longer than the conventional post on YouTube.” They must also search for truth amid “distortion, fraud and anarchy.” Brokaw ends by asking the privileged generation that wields new technological tools, his listeners, to make “a moral and intellectual commitment to leave this precious planet a better place than we found it.” ]]> Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/541 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/541 His latest book, Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher, came about quite accidentally, Irving Singer recounts. Singer was writing a book about several filmmakers, and discovered, when starting on the Bergman chapter, that the filmmaker had directed dozens of movies. Singer set out to explore this oeuvre – no easy task, since only the most recognizable titles are to be found at Netflix or the public library.

Thus began Singer’s ardent exploration of Bergman, and his appreciation of Bergman’s genius. “He created a new art form by combining his talents as a man of the theater, cinema and TV,” says Singer. In this lecture, he discusses how Bergman used philosophical ideas “in an extended sense” -- not by including philosophical discussions in his films, but through his masterful use of cinematic technique to examine the particularities of human experience.

Singer describes how Bergman wove aspects of his own life’s story into his films, in intense and vivid ways. A son of a harsh Lutheran priest, Bergman was nearly paralyzed by his fear of death. Singer recounts how Bergman worked through a series of movies with religious significance (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Seventh Seal), and was finally “cured of his fear of death.” He also became an atheist, but may have returned to some kind of religious faith at his life’s end.

Singer quotes Bergman denying that his “movies are full of symbols.” Rather, Bergman used close-ups of faces and hands (relying on a repertory company of 18 actor-friends), and created bleak landscapes and silences, to convey feelings like fear, isolation and oppression, in contrast to the comedic and optimistic elements in many of his films. Singer reads a selection from his book that deals with the film, From the Life of the Marionettes, which is “the most consummate expression of Bergman’s pessimistic vision.” Singer draws analogies to Hitchcock’s Psycho, but believes Bergman goes much farther, examining political evil, and how contemporary capitalist society “dehumanizes, and turns people into emotional illiterates.” ]]> Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/538 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/538 Two progenitors of broadcast TV’s rapid expansion into the digital world provide narrative and back story for the development of NBC’s crossover series, Heroes.

As moderator Henry Jenkins notes, in the last few years, there’s been a fundamental shift in the habits of TV viewers, from watching shows broadcast at a specific time, to consuming those shows and related content through a variety of media at any time of day. Jesse Alexander helped usher in this transformation. He says Heroes was “conceived to take advantage of every possible media platform to tell stories, to make the brand viable and important in the world.” Nowadays, to generate such “AAA franchise content,” creators must incorporate “transmedia into the DNA of (their) concept.” With Heroes, this has meant spinning off DVDs, greeting cards, comic books and webisodes with distinct narrative threads, and providing spaces online where core enthusiasts can opine on plot and character.

The networks have recently jumped on the transmedia bandwagon, after watching fans, especially the youth demographic advertisers covet, flock to websites dedicated to serialized shows like on Heroes. “NBC used to say, just do a promo,” says Mark Warshaw. But now, eager to wring profit from this phenomenon, NBC has set up a department to develop the series’ online presence and other ancillary features. Network involvement in transmedia has pros and cons. “They’re applying the same production standards to transmedia as to a $120 million dollar series. We need to move at the speed of the Internet, but they’re moving at the speed of network TV.” Warshaw, who’s responsible in large part for originating these non-broadcast features, cleaves close to the series “bible” while creating “a network of channels for every kind of Heroes fan.” Certain minor broadcast characters play central roles in webisodes, and are “used online to plant the seeds for future developments in the TV program.”

Because the series is available online (via both legal and illegal downloads), Warshaw reports with delight that Heroes is “a huge international hit.” Before the program appeared in France, producers arranged a pre-broadcast event, and drew an audience that filled the largest theater in Europe. Show creators are trying to tap that global excitement and “create an anthology show based on heroes from around the world, in different time periods.” Ultimately, Alexander and Warshaw hope to plumb the deep emotions and interests of a widespread fan community, and somehow “glean the most important information” from them to help shape offline and online content in a broad sense. Look for a mobile game and a novel down the road, but don’t expect crass merchandising, say these panelists. Alexander notes, “As soon as a brand looks like it’s selling out, it can crash and burn. With all the new potential revenue from internet and ancillary exploitation, there has to be oversight by our team to make sure it has the Heroes stamp of approval.” ]]>