We're having a busy week launching a new academic year here in the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Since we haven't had any new updates since Monday, I wanted to point out a few interesting things going on around the larger Convergence Culture Consortium community this week.
First of all, we have three new and enterprising graduate students joining our research team: Ana Domb Krauskopf, Xiaochang Li, and Lauren Silberman. We will introduce each of these three students with a note both about their backgrounds and the issues they are most interested in over the next few days here on the C3 blog.
In the meantime, I wanted to point out the latest round of discussion in the ongoing Gender and Fan Culture series over on Henry Jenkins' blog this weekend. This discussion, which has been occurring throughout the summer, pairs a male and female scholar interested in fan culture in one way or another to discuss various issues of gender both within fan communities and within the study of fan communities. This week's discussion is yet another to feature a member of the C3 community. C3 Consulting Researcher Rob Kozinets joins Francesca Coppa in the 14th round of the series, discussing issues like affect, poetics, the Long Tail, "wikimedia," and a variety of other issues. The first part of the series is here, and the second round is here.
Meanwhile, over at Kozinets' own blog, Brandthroposophy, Rob has been covering this year's Burning Man. Amidst that coverage, though, he has written a followup piece to his original piece on consumption studies, called The Philosophical Basis of Consumption Studies. For those who were interested in the first post, this is an interesting followup delving further into his suggestions of how to reconceptualize how we look at consumer research.
C3 Alum Ilya Vedrashko has a quick take on the AdBlock software here, showing what it does to the New York Times' own page and putting his own site to the test.
Finally, another former member of the C3 team here at MIT who is now working for Xbox Live Arcade, David Edery, has decided to put the concept of collective intelligence to the test while working on a proposal for the 2008 Game Developers Conference, asking the readers of his blog, Game Tycoon, to help give suggestions of areas they would like to see him present on at the conference.
