Yesterday was Patriots Day here in Boston, so I'm in the midst of a flurry of updates this morning, as you may be able to tell. As part of this, I wanted to point toward a couple of recent references to the Consortium, our blog, and our work here at MIT.
First off, I have been meaning for some time to direct everyone's attention to this piece written by Naked Communications' Faris Yakob, from the first vresion of The Next Issue, which lists itself as "16 loose-leaf pages of opinion, news and views on the Next Issues facing the communications and design industries."
Yakob, whose actual job title is "digital ninja" for Naked, participated in our Advertising and Convergence Culture panel at MIT Futures of Entertainment 2 last November. See more about that panel, including information about the podcast, here.
This piece, entitled "In the Future--You Are the Entertainment," focuses in part on the theme of our conference and Faris' experiences there, including a reference to Consortium Principal Investigator Henry Jenkins.
Faris also wrote about his experiences at FoE2 previously on his blog. See his posts here, here, and here, as well as this piece for Contagious.
The other reference I wanted to note was to thank longtime soap opera journalist Connie Passalacqua Hayman, also known as Marlena De Lacroix, for her reference to the class on soaps I'm teaching and blogging about this semester for the Program in Comparative Media Studies. For more of Marlena's insights, see her site.
Hey, Sam!
I hope you can also bring Mimi Torchin to your class. Marlena is wonderful and I don't know if it is true, but I heard she wrote several story bibles for several soaps. It is probably a rumour, but if you find it interesting, you can ask her!
I'm waiting for your post on WGA outing the writers who went Fi-Core during the strike. Have you heard about it? They're mostly daytime serials writers so it might be interesting for you to consider.
I have heard about it...I have been reading about it in some soap opera fan communities. Hopefully, it can transform into a post soon, John. :) Or perhaps I'll direct my students' thoughts toward the subject....But great to hear from you!
Oh, I read your posts regularly! I'm just waiting for one of those that are concerned with the theory of narrative, or those that consider the daytime business model.
You're doing great! :-)
P. S. I don't know if it's appropriate to ask here, but where is Lynn? I'm going to forget so I had to write this in here.
Fair enough. :) Figured you were lurking. As you know with blogs, many more people read than write back to you regularly. Plus, we had so many problems with comments for so long that they haven't really picked back up yet. As for Lynn, she's definitely still around. If you look a little while back, she even ran a post, here.
Lynn e-mailed me to say that she had had some trouble posting comments on the site but wanted to respond to you directly. I'm going to work with the tech folks here at MIT to try and resolve the problem...