Continuing with some catch-up news from over the summer, I wanted to point toward a few interesting articles and posts that highlighted the Consortium's work and the work of our graduate students and alum.
First, we're honored to have Prof. Mark Deuze at Indiana University using the Consortium's blog as part of the material for his course this fall, entitled "Media Organizations." In addition to highlighting Henry Jenkins' work, he includes links to this blog as one of the resources for students to follow what's happening in the industry, according to his recent post about the class. I am elated that Mark has found a classroom use for the public side of the what the Consortium is doing, and I'd love to hear from his students in comments here along the way.
Meanwhile, while Consortium graduate student researcher Xiaochang Li was away from MIT this summer, she was busy at work for Brooklyn-based Big Spaceship. She even had a chance to write a few thought pieces for Spaceship's blog over the summer that might be of interest to C3 readers. See her posts "The 'Twebinar' Experience: Connectivity Versus Conversation", "Pirate's Dilemma: The Movie?", "Halo Kid the New Starwars Kid?", and Everything Old Is New Again: Transmedia Goes Traditional".
A couple of particularly relevant pieces Xiaochang wrote for Big Spaceship included her piece entitled "Is This a Conversation We Want To Be Having?".
C3 Consulting Researcher Jason Mittell spent some time in June a little out of his element, presenting at a conference in Madison, Wisconsin, for The Society for Cognitive Study of the Moving Image. Jason gives an outsider's perspective on the work being done in the field of cognitive film studies, as well as the slides from his own work, on his blog, Just TV.
His presentation was entitled "Previously On: Prime Time Serials & the Poetics of Memory," addressing questions of how American television storytelling has shifted in the past two decades and issues of "historical poetics." His slides bring up some intriguing points, one of which deals with how the longtime complex and serialized storytelling nature of daytime serial dramas (soap operas) intersect with primetime dramas. Jason and I have discussed these issues through the blogosphere in the past (Look here and here.)
Back in that prior post, I wrote about some discussion that broke out in the comments section of Jason's blog.
I said regarding redundancy in soaps that:
But people outside the genre often greatly overstate the amount of redundancy in soaps, I think. Reader StinkyLuLu makes this point, writing, "My basic feeling is that what you call redundancy is actually a pivotal soap pleasure--revisiting key moments from the recent and distant past--not unlike the narrative data mining you describe in contemporary prime time serial drama." I'd like to develop that thought a little further.
At their worst, soaps are recap-laden. I've seen Days of Our Lives have episodes a few years ago, for instance, that seemed more flashback to earlier in the week than current. That's not good soap, and we have to distinguish between good and bad practices in the genre. However, with five episodes a week and little in terms of reruns, the redundancy is necessary. That's why REaction is so important in soaps. The redundancy becomes a central part of the story. It matters not as much that X happens as it does seeing how everyone in town responds to finding out about X. In that case, the plot is a driver for character-driven stories. Anyone who missed X will find out about it during various scenes retelling and reaction to parts of it, but that retelling process IS the show; it's about interpersonal relationships, not the what. (By the way, my guess is that some of the fans who fast-forward are also some of the ones who archive; fans often pick out particular characters or stories they follow on a show that they actively consume, even while skipping others...)
C3's Joshua Green will be speaking this Friday, Sept. 05, at the Inverge Interactive Convergence Conference in Portland, Oregon. His presentation, entitled "Restructure Time? Two Years in Convergence Culture," will focus on the two years since the publication of Henry Jenkins' book that this Consortium launched around. During Green's time with the Consortium over the past two years, he has helped direct and push our thinking about "what comes next?"
Inverge is an annual conference from IndePlay. See more here. See more information on Joshua's appearance last year from the invergence blog and here at the C3 blog.
After light posting throughout the summer here on the Consortium's blog, we're going to be returning to daily posting once again now that a new academic year is upon us. The core C3 team will be organizing a new year of academic projects, and preparing for the big Futures of Entertainment 3 conference I posted the reminder about on Friday.
Although I'm no longer at MIT and participating in the core team's work, I look forward to returning to blogging on at least a weekly basis here at C3. To start that off, I wanted to draw your attention to some books, projects, thought pieces, and other projects the broader Consortium community has been working on over the summer, despite the gaps of silence here. Over the next few days, I'll be posting a few updates highlighting these projects.
To start off with, here are a few summer blog entries of note:
Another Member of the C3 Community Weighs in on Twitter. The "Twebinar" earlier this summer generated reactions from C3 Graduate Student Researcher Xiaochang Li, and I wrote a piece on Twitter here. Now, Geoffrey Long is the latest to weigh in. He writes:
Granted, one of the charming elements of businesses like The Minnesota Press on Twitter is the idea that there's an actual warm body writing those tweets out there somewhere; Twitter is such a still-indie enterprise that it still conveys, to me at least, a sense of personal connection with those whom I'm following. However, given the number of spam follow notifications I receive, I'm not sure that will stay that way much longer. It's this hat trick of corporate tweeting, a primed space for a tiered Pro package and the emergence of Twitter as a spam delivery system that makes me suspect that Twitter is right at the tipping point of some form of major reinvention.
See more here.
Since several people have e-mailed me of late to inquire again about the dates of this year's Futures of Entertainment 3 conference, I wanted to remind everyone of the information here through the blog. Be sure to make your travel plans soon! More information about guest speakers, panel topics, and specific times will be forthcoming soon.
As has been the case in previous years, the event is scheduled the Friday and Saturday before Thanksgiving. This year, that will be Friday, Nov. 21, and Saturday, Nov. 22.
This year's event will be held in the Wong Auditorium in the Tang Center here at MIT, which will be a larger venue than the conference room that housed the first two iterations of this event.
I posted this recently on my blog and thought it would likewise be of interest to C3 blog readers.
One of the most powerful tools in the Karl Rove arsenal was a form of political Judo: take your opponent's strengths and turn them into vulnerabilities. For example, coming into the 2004 convention, Democrats had seen war hero John Kerry as pretty much unassailable on issues of patriotism and they made it a central theme of their event. Within a week or two, the Swift Boat Campaign made Kerry's service record an uncomfortable topic to discuss, flipping Kerry's advantage (that he had served in Vietnam and neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney had done so) on its head. This added the phrase, "Swiftboating," to the language of American politics.
Coming into the Primary season, several things stood out about Barack Obama: First, he had developed a reputation as the Democrat who was most comfortable talking about his faith in the public arena; many Democrats felt that he gave them a shot at attracting some more independent-minded evangelical Christians, especially given the emergence of more progressive voices that linked Christianity to serving the poor, combating AIDS, and protecting the environment. (Indeed, we saw signs of that pitch during Obama's appearance at the Saddleback Church Forum last week, when he clearly knew and deployed evangelical language better than McCain). Yet, the circulation of the Rev. Wright videos -- not to mention the whisper campaigns charging that he is secretly Islamic -- blunted his ability to use faith as a primary part of his pitch to voters. Similarly, the Obama campaign showed an early comfort with talking about American traditions in lofty and inspirational values, so he has been confronted with attacks from reactionary talk radio questioning his patriotism.
Over the past three weeks, we've seen the McCain campaign take aim at a third of Obama's strengths -- the so-called "enthusiasm gap." Basically, pundits have been talking a good deal about the lack of enthusiasm for the Republican nominee among his rank and file in comparison with the extraordinary passion Obama has generated, especially among young and minority voters. To confront this "enthusiasm gap," the McCain campaign has clearly decided that it needs to pathologize enthusiasm itself, suggesting that emotional investments in candidates are dangerous, and thus positioning himself as the only "rational" choice. In doing so, he has tapped deeply rooted anxieties about popular culture and its fans.
This is not the old culture war rhetoric where candidates accused each other of being soft on "popular culture," a tactic which Joseph Lieberman has turned into an art form. No, this time, the attack is on politics as popular culture. Both tactics strike me as profoundly anti-democratic. After all, how do you found a democratic society on the assumption that the public is stupid and has bad judgment?
Many of you who follow the C3 blog regularly might also be interested in next year's Media in Transition 6 conference. MiT6, subtitled "Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission," will be held on MIT's campus from April 24-26, 2009. The call for papers was recently released, and researchers are accepted both from traditional academic positions, as well as independent researchers, industry voices, and anyone else interested in participating.
See information on the last iteration of the Media in Transition conference, MiT5, on the C3 blog here.
The call for papers is inside, and the conference Web site is here.
Abstracts of no more than 500 words or full papers should be sent to Brad Seawell at seawell@mit.edu no later than Friday, Jan. 9, 2009. We will evaluate abstracts and full papers on a rolling basis and early submission is highly encouraged. All submissions should be sent as attachments in a Word format. Submitted material will be subject to editing by conference organizers.
Email is preferred, but submissions can be mailed to:
Brad Seawell
MIT 14N-430
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
Please include a biographical statement of no more than 100 words. If your paper is accepted, this statement will be used on the conference Web site.
Please monitor the conference Web site at for registration information, travel information and conference updates.
Abstracts will be accepted on a rolling basis until Jan. 9, 2009.
The full text of your paper must be submitted no later than Friday, April 17. Conference papers will be posted to the conference Web site.
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