2010 C3 Retreat Presentations
Video of the presentations recorded at the May 2010 C3 Retreat are available here. Each of the presentations is available in .mov format for your review.
Introduction by William Uricchio
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Closing Remarks by William Uricchio
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2009 C3 Retreat Presentations
Copies of the presentations given by the C3 team at the May 2009 C3 Retreat are available here. Each of the presentations is available in pdf format for your review.
Locating Value in Spreadable Media
May 2009 C3 Retreat Presentation by
C3 Graduate Student Researcher Xiaochang Li
File Size: 3.7 MB (pdf)
Value in a Bucket: The Construction of Social and Cultural Capital in Tecnobrega
May 2009 C3 Retreat Presentation by
C3 Graduate Student Researcher Ana Domb
File Size: 5.2 MB (pdf)
It’s (Not) the End of TV as We Know It: Understanding Online Television and Its Audience
May 2009 C3 Retreat Presentation by
C3 Graduate Student Researcher Sheila Seles
File Size: 5.8 MB (pdf) Click the Cover to Download
July 23, 2009
Convergence Culture and Web 2.0
Click here for the slides from a presentation I gave on July 23rd to a Turner team. The broad topic was an introduction to Convergence and Web 2.0.
July 19, 2008
2008 C3 Retreat Presentations
Copies of the slide shows that accompanied the presentations given by the C3 team at this year's may retreat can be downloaded below. Each of the presentations is available in pdf format for your viewing pleasure.
Spreadable Media: "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead"
Henry Jenkins, Xiaochang Li, Ana Domb
Spreadability is a new approach to the media business. This presentation lays out the principal underpinnings behind the Consortium's proposition spreadability is the condition of the media landscape we must now embrace.
Click the Cover to Download
Understanding YouTube
Joshua Green
YouTube seems easy to comprehend but difficult to understand, constantly shifting and fitting multiple definitions. This presentation presents results from recent work examining content on the site and thinking through the nature of the service and the implications this has for media.
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Hollywood Goes YouTube: Film Promotion, Online Video and Spreadable Media
Eleanor Baird
What impact, if any, can promotion on YouTube have on box office performance? This work looks for a relationship between the two, in turn exploring the function of a particular genre -- the movie trailer -- on YouTube. It considers the possible merits of using YouTube as a promotional platform for media product.
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January 14, 2008
Social Networks in Advertising and Marketing
C3 Alum Ivan Askwith and current graduate student researcher Eleanor Baird completed a research project on the intersection between social networking and the media industries, resulting not only in observations that have appeared in the C3 blog and in the C3 Weekly Update, but also in the attached piece. This essay in particular deals with the place of social networks in the realm of marketing and advertising, including a list of dos and don'ts for brands seeking to use social networks to increase their presence.
The report can be found here.
October 22, 2007
WWE Media Empire
This work complements the study presented last week from Sam Ford that is currently under review for publication. This piece was based on work originally conducted as part of Ford's honors thesis while obtaining his Bachelor's degree at Western Kentucky University and was presented as part of Ford's class on professional wrestling last spring here at MIT. This piece presents how World Wrestling Entertainment kept its bottom line up while ratings went down based on deepening the engagement of the existing fan base by providing an increasing number of ways in which fans can engage with the wrestling product and what Ford's thesis describes as an "immersive story world." For the full report, please look here.
October 18, 2007
Pinning Down Fan Involvement
The attached essay is work that Sam Ford began in 2004 while at Western Kentucky University. Initial results from his study of pro wrestling fandom from these interviews was presented in his honors thesis in 2005 when he completed his Bachelor's degree and was part of the curriculum of the Spring 2007 class he taught on pro wrestling at MIT. He has been going through various revisions of the piece while at MIT, and it is currently under review for publication with an academic journal. It is available here.
October 9, 2007
Girl Gamers as Political Lobbyists
Each January, MIT undergraduate and graduate students are given a month free from classes to pursue independent research projects, in a session known as the Independent Activities Period (IAP). During the 2007 IAP period, the Convergence Culture Consortium worked with a freshman at MIT, Matthew S. Cohen, to organize a research project testing out a hypothesis we had discussed at some of our meetings. We had discussed the ways in which fruitful observations may be found from comparing the activities of a fan community to that of a grassroots political action group.
Working with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Cohen set out to research a case study of this hypothesis, comparing girl gamer fan communities to political lobbyists, for his IAP research project. The results of that study are provided here to be shared exclusively with Consortium members.
The results of Cohen's work are presented here as Cohen completed it. As such, this is not meant to be a finished piece of work, but rather a thought piece that will hopefully stimulate further thoughts on how we might learn more about fan community behaviors from looking at them from a comparison with grassroots political organization and activity. The purpose of sharing this work with the Consortium is also to showcase the work of an MIT college freshman and the type of media studies research project that might be undertaken as one of several activities MIT students engage with in their IAP.
The piece is available here.
October 2, 2007
Shenja van der Graaf: The Mod Industries?
C3 Consulting Researcher Shenja van der Graaf has co-authored a piece with David B. Nieborg at the University of Amsterdam for an upcoming edition of The European Journal of Cultural Studies. A preview of this piece, which is entitled "The Mod Industries: The Industrial Logic of Non-Market Game Production," appeared in the 29 September 2007 C3 Weekly Update Opening Note. The full essay is available here.
September 10, 2007
Ivan Askwith - Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium
Askwith, who now works with Big Spaceship since graduating from the Program in Comparative Media Studies here at MIT, has presented his work on better understanding engagement with television content on a variety of occasions before.
AbstractTelevision is in a period of dramatic change. As the mass audience continues to fragment into ever-smaller niche audiences and communities of interest, and new technologies shift control over the television viewing experience from network programmers into the hands of media consumers, television's traditional business models prove themselves increasingly untenable. In an attempt to preserve these models, television executives are attempting to shed television's long-standing reputation as a passive medium, which emphasized the viewer's role as a consumer of television content, and which critics often decried as vacuous and mindless.
The current discourse suggests that television's future now relies on the industry's success recasting it as an active medium, capable of capturing and holding the audience's attention, and effective at generating emotional investment. The single most important concept in this new industrial discourse is that of audience "engagement," a term that has generated a tremendous amount of debate and disagreement, with television and advertising executives alike struggling to understand what engagement is, how it works, and what its practical consequences will be.
This thesis argues that television's future as an engagement medium relies not on inventing new methodologies that define engagement in terms of quantifiable audience behaviors and attitudes, but instead in a new conceptual model of television, better suited to a multiplatform media environment and the emerging attention and experience economies, which focuses on the development of television programs that extend beyond the television set. Such a model must understand television not as a method for aggregating audiences that can be sold to advertisers, but as a medium that draws upon media platforms, content, products, activities and social spaces to provide audiences with a range of opportunities to engage with television content. Accordingly, this thesis offers a framework for thinking about viewer engagement as the range of opportunities and activities that become possible when drawing upon an expanded, multi-platform conception of the modern television text. Applying this framework to the innovative and experimental textual extensions developed around ABC's Lost, the thesis indicates both the challenges and opportunities that emerge as television becomes an engagement medium.
Research made available here is work provided by the Consortium but outside of our regular roster of research activity. If you wish to distribute any of this work further, please don't hesitate to contact us. Previous work published here can be found in the Resources Archive.
August 28, 2007
Sam Ford - As the World Turns in a Convergence Culture
Sam Ford's Master's work focused on the soap opera As the World Turns, looking at how one of television's oldest genres - the American daytime soap opera - is updating itself, or should be doing so, in today's media environment. This work points toward opportunities for the soap opera to extend beyond the daytime television industry, considering, for instance, how soap operas can and are taking advantage of their vast content archives.
AbstractThe American daytime serial drama is among the oldest television genres and remains a vital part of the television lineup for ABC and CBS as what this thesis calls an immersive story world. However, many within the television industry are now predicting that the genre will fade into obscurity after two decades of declining ratings. This study outlines how the soap opera industry is and could be further adapting to the technological and social changes of a convergence culture to maintain and revitalize the genre's relevance for viewers and advertisers alike.
CBS/Procter and Gamble Productions/TeleVest's As the World Turns will serve as a case study for these changes. This project examines how the existing fan base plays an active role in gaining and maintaining new fans by researching historical and contemporary examples of social relationships that fans form with other fans and the show itself. In addition to looking at how these fan communities operate, this thesis focuses on how soap operas have adapted and might adapt to alternate revenue models such as product placement, capitalize on their vast content archives, and tell stories through multiple media formats. The study concludes that soap operas should be managed as brands and not ephemeral television content because of their permanence in the television landscape, that fans outside the target advertising demographic should be empowered as proselytizers for the show, and that a transgenerational storytelling approach best utilizes the power of the genre to tell its stories.
Research made available here is work provided by the Consortium but outside of our regular roster of research activity. If you wish to distribute any of this work further, please don't hesitate to contact us. Previous work published here can be found in the Resources Archive.
August 21, 2007
Geoffrey Long - Transmedia Storytelling: Business, Aesthetics and Production at the Jim Henson Company
C3 alum Geoffrey Long is now the Communications Director for the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. His work on transmedia helped shape the Consortium's focus on the topic in both our research and the blog. Geoff's thesis examines Henson properties to further tease out the transmedia storytelling concepts he has written on before.
AbstractTransmedia narratives use a combination of Barthesian hermeneutic codes, negative capability and migratory cues to guide audiences across multiple media platforms. This thesis examines complex narratives from comics, novels, films and video games, but draws upon the transmedia franchises built around Jim Henson's Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal to provide two primary case studies in how these techniques can be deployed with varying results. By paying close attention to staying in canon, building an open world, maintaining a consistent tone across extensions, carefully deciding when to begin building a transmedia franchise, addressing open questions while posing new ones, and looking for ways to help audiences keep track of how each extension relates to each other, transmedia storytellers can weave complex narratives that will prove rewarding to audiences, academics and producers alike.
Research made available here is work provided by the Consortium but outside of our regular roster of research activity. If you wish to distribute any of this work further, please don't hesitate to contact us. Previous work published here can be found in the Resources Archive.
