Futures of Entertainment
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.
Continue reading "Reminder: FoE3 This November" »
Amidst all the flurry of late spring here in the academic world, we just wanted to post to the blog to reiterate that our Futures of Entertainment 3 event will be coming up again this November. 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.
We are happy to announce that this year's event will be held in the Wong Auditorium in the Tang Center here at MIT, a larger venue from our first two events that we hope will even better accommodate the type of conversation we've sought to have at this event in previous years.
Continue reading "Reminder: MIT Futures of Entertainment 3 Date Set" »
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."
Continue reading "Faris Yakob on Futures of Entertainment; Marlena on Soaps Class" »
This year's Futures of Entertainment conference the Consortium holds every November at MIT is set for Friday, Nov. 21, and Saturday, Nov. 22. The event will be held this year in the Wong Auditorium in the Tang Center here at MIT.
Continue reading "Dates Set for Consortium's Futures of Entertainment 3" »
The Consortium and events related to our work has received great coverage in Brazil of late, thanks to the work of Maurício Mota, who attended our Futures of Entertainment 2 conference back in November. The most recent edition of Brazil's MeioDigital magazine, from Meio & Mensagem, featured a total of 12 pages dedicated to the Consortium, FoE2, and a related story on Heroes, based in part on our hosting a couple of members of the Heroes team here at MIT last November.
The MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, its Futures of Entertainment 2 event, and the Program in Comparative Media Studies were all featured in an article entitled "Os Alquimistas Estão Chengando!," including insights from myself, C3 Research Manager Joshua Green, as well as a focus on Consortium director Henry Jenkins. Mota's article highlights of all of the Program in Comparative Media Studies' research groups and Henry's recent publications and blog. See the piece here.
Continue reading "MeioDigital Articles on the Consortium" »
I wanted to start with a few stories and blog posts that are happening around the Convergence Culture Consortium this week.
First, Kevin Driscoll, a Comparative Media Studies graduate student here at MIT working with the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, ties some of the marketing rhetoric he heard from some industry folks at Futures of Entertainment 2 to the work of Lawrence Lessig.
Continue reading "Around the Consortium: FoE2, Ad Ubiquity, Tech News, Politics, and Social Issues" »
The final panel at our Futures of Entertainment 2 conference, on cult media, is now available fro download in audio form. The mobile panel from the first day will be made available in the coming weeks, and video on the rest of these panels will be available shortly.
The cult media panel, available here, features a conversation among Danny Bilson, Jesse Alexander of Heroes, Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner, and Gordon Tichell of Walden Media, moderated by Henry Jenkins.
Continue reading "FoE2 Podcast: Cult Media" »
The first full panel on the second day of our Futures of Entertainment 2 conference, on advertising, is now available for download in audio form.
This panel, available here, features a conversation among Bill Fox of Fidelity Investments, Mike Rubenstein of the Barbarian Group, Baba Shetty of Hill/Holliday, Tina Wells of Buzz Marketing Group, and Faris Yakob from Naked Communications, moderated by Joshua Green.
Continue reading "FoE2 Podcast: Advertising and Convergence Culture" »
The opening comments panel on the second day of our Futures of Entertainment 2 conference is now available for download in audio form.
This panel, available here, features a conversation among three academic speakers--C3 Consulting Resercher Jason Mittell of Middlebury College, Jonathan Gray of Fordham University, and Lee Harrington of Miami University, moderated by me.
Continue reading "FoE2 Podcast: Jason Mittell, Jonathan Gray, and Lee Harrington" »
I wanted to start Monday morning by rounding out a few new links coming out of the Futures of Entertainment 2 conference.
First, Kare Anderson over at Moving from Me to We wrote a piece on this year's Futures of Entertainment 2, which also includes excerpts from an interview she conducted with me regarding the event.
Meanwhile, Rik Hunter, a Ph.D. student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the composition and rhetoric program in the university's English department, provides a lot of notes from the conference on his site, Canned Goods.
Continue reading "FoE2 Links: Anderson Podcast and Rik Hunter" »
The final panel on the first day of our Futures of Entertainment 2 conference, on fan labor, is now available for download in audio and both high-res and low-res video form.
This panel is available here in audio and video form. The video is intended for download, and some browsers may try to display text if you don't right-click the link to save to your computer. If your browser tries to download it as a ".txt," remove the ".txt" from the name, and the file should work as an "m4v."
The panel features a conversation among Mark Deuze of Indiana University, Jordan Greenhall of DivX, Raph Koster of Areae, Elizabeth Osder of Buzznet, and Catherine Tosenberger of the University of Florida, moderated by Henry Jenkins.
Continue reading "FoE2 Podcast: Fan Labor" »
The first panel from the conference, on mobile media, will be available shortly. However, we now have the metrics and measurement panel from FoE2 available for download in audio and video forms.
The metrics and measurement panel, available here, can be accessed in audio, 320x240 video, and 640x480 video. The video is intended for download, and some browsers may try to display text if you don't right-click the link to save to your computer. If your browser tries to download it as a ".txt," remove the ".txt" from the name, and the file should work as an "m4v."
here for download, features a conversation among Maury Giles of GSD&M Idea City, Bruce Leitchman of Leitchman Research Group, Jim Nail of Cymfony, and Stacey Lynn Schulman of Turner Broadcasting, and moderated by me.
Continue reading "FoE2 Podcast: Metrics and Measurement" »
We're excited to make the first of our events from the recent Futures of Entertainment 2 conference here at MIT available for download. Each of the panels from the conference are available in both video and audio form.
The panels are available here. Here is audio and video. The video is intended for download, and some browsers may try to display text if you don't right-click the link to save to your computer. If your browser tries to download it as a ".txt," remove the ".txt" from the name, and the file should work as an "m4v."
The opening comments features C3 Director Henry Jenkins and C3 Research Manager Joshua Green discussing some of the media industries trends in 2007. These opening comments helped set the agenda for what would be covered in the six panels to follow at FoE2.
Continue reading "FoE2 Podcast: Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green" »
A variety of folks wrote summaries of several different panels simultaneously or referenced the conference as a whole. Faris Yakob wrote about the conference here, here, and here. Faris also provided a piece on FoE2 for Contagious.
C3 Consulting Researcher Grant McCracken provides his take on FoE2 here and here. Meanwhile, see Jonathan Gray's take on the conference at The Extratextuals.
Darren Crawforth provided a report from FoE2 for PSFK.
Continue reading "Writing About FoE2: Around the Blogosphere (3 of 3)" »
Below is a list of the blogs and pieces that reflected on or recapped Friday afternoon and Saturday's panels from our Futures of Entertainment 2 conference here in mid-November. See the first post of links here.
The C3 team provided its live blogging for the metrics and measurement panel here, with further notes from John Eckman, Carina Enbody, Ian Fitzpatrick, Marissa Gallagher, and Rachel Clarke's writing at Behind the Buzz. Also, over at just another planner, Bogdana Butnar weighs in.
Continue reading "Writing About FoE2: Around the Blogosphere (2 of 3)" »
Between Futures of Entertainment 2 on Nov. 16 and 17 and Thanksgiving the next week, we've been in the process of trying to catch up on internal research projects and finish out what was really a fantastic conference, as far as we felt. Thanks to everyone who came, both panelists and audience members, for making it such a fantastic conversation. The plan is to have the audio and video from the conference made available, panel by panel, over the next few days, so be sure to come back here continuously for the latest.
In the meantime, I wanted to share with all of our readers many of the interesting accounts that have been posted around the blogosphere from FoE2. Over the next three posts, I'll link to a variety of these conversations, as a preview of those podcasts.
In this post, I'm linking to the posts for the pre-conference and some of the first day's events.
First, the MIT Communications Forum with Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshaw from Heroes was covered by C3 Graduate Researcher Lauren Silberman for this blog, here and here.
Continue reading "Writing About FoE2: Around the Blogosphere (1 of 3)" »
Panelists:
Danny Bilson,
Transmedia Creator
Jeff Gomez,
Starlight Runner
Jesse Alexander,
Heroes
Gordon Tichell,
Walden Media
Panel moderated by Henry Jenkins, MIT
The live-blogging effort comes from current CMS Graduate Students Kevin Driscoll, Joshua Diaz, and Debora Lui.
Continue reading "FoE2: Cult Media" »
The second panel of the day was on Advertising and Convergence Culture. Speakers included Mike Rubenstein of the Barbarian Group, Baba Shetty of Hill/Holliday, Tina Wells of Buzz Marketing Group, Faris Yakob from Naked Communications, and Bill Fox of Fidelity Investments.
The panelists talked about the challenges and successes that they have encountered as marketers and advertisers in a convergent media environment, the problem of relinquishing total control over brands, user generated content and social media.
Live blogging for this session are Kevin Driscoll, Xiaochang Li, and Eleanor Baird.
Continue reading "FoE2: Advertising and Convergence Culture" »
Day two of the Futures of Entertainment began this chilly Cambridge morning with opening remarks by Jason Mittell, Middlebury College; Jonathan Gray, Fordham University; Lee Harrington, Miami University. Sam Ford, C3's Project Manager moderated.
In this session, the panelists talked about the "holy trinity" of media studies scholarship, tensions between industry and academia, qualitative versus quantitative understandings of audiences, and improving the connections between academics and insdustry in the future.
Live blogging the session were Xiaochang Li, Josh Diaz and Eleanor Baird.
Continue reading "FoE2: Opening Comments for Day Two" »
Fan Labor was the topic for the third and final panel of the first day of FoE2.
The speakers were Mark Deuze, Jordan Greenhall, Catherine Tosenberger, Elizabeth Osder, Raph Koster.
Taking over live blogging duties were Lauren Silberman, Lan Le, and Lana Swartz.
Continue reading "FoE2: Fan Labor" »
The second panel at FOE2 is focused on metrics and audience measurement.
Sam Ford is moderating, and participating in the panel are:
- Bruce Leichtman (Leichtman Research Group)
- Stacey Lynn Schulman(Turner Broadcasting)
- Maury Giles (GSD&M Idea City)
- Jim Nail (TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony)
As with the last panel, two hours of typing notes is tasking enough by itself -- so these entries might be a little bit disjointed, and have more typos than our usual posts. Sorry about that.
And: taking over live-blogging duties for this panel are CMS graduate students Lana Swartz and Deb Lui.
Continue reading "FoE2: Metrics & Measurement" »
The first panel at FoE2 is focused on mobile media.
Participating in the panel are:
- Marc Davis (Yahoo)
- Bob Schukai (Turner Broadcasting)
- Alice Kim (MTV Networks)
- Anmol Madan: Madan (MIT Media Lab)
And, joining the live-blogging effort are current C3 researchers Xiaochang Li and Lauren Silberman.
Continue reading "FoE2: Mobile Media" »
The opening remarks at this year's FUTURES OF ENTERTAINMENT conference are being made by Henry Jenkins, director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies, and Joshua Green, research manager for C3.
Participate in the backchannel in real-time at backchan.nl.
Continue reading "FoE2: Opening Remarks" »
Strange to be writing in the C3 blog again, now that I'm no longer a researcher-in-residence, but the Futures of Entertainment conference -- now in its second year -- is beginning to serve a secondary function as a sort of C3 homecoming. And, since most of the C3 team are working in overdrive just to keep the conference moving at an even keel, I'll be helping out with the live-blogging duties, in case any of you at home want to keep up with what's happening here.
Helping out in this task are Derek Johnson, a doctoral student and kindred soul from U. Wisconsin-Madison, and Lan Le, a first year grad student in CMS -- both of whom, at the moment, are too busy taking notes to introduce themselves.
So, keep checking back. We'll try to refresh and update the posts several times during each panel, in case those of you following along here want to pass along questions or comments as part of the proceedings. (Think of it as a transmedia conference.)
Up next: opening remarks from Henry Jenkins, director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies, and Joshua Green, research manager for C3.
Today is the launch of Futures of Entertainment 2. It's the wee hours of the morning now, and we're trying to get everything prepared for what we hope is a stimulating conference for academics and industry execs alike. We have a variety of folks coming in from around the country, and internationally, and from what looks to be about an even split of academic and industry registrants. We're hoping that it will lead to some stimulating conversation, on par with the energy developed around last year's event.
One thing I wanted to note before the conference begins is that we have had a couple of late additions to the program. Francesco Cara from Nokia will no longer be able to make it here for the mobile media panel this morning, so we will be joined by Anmol Madan of the Media Lab here at MIT.
Also, Jim Nail from Cymfony has been added to the list of speakers for the metrics and measurement panel this afternoon.
Continue reading "Madan and Nail Join FoE2 Line-Up" »
This is the second part of my recap of the MIT Communications Forum event with Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshaw from Heroes earlier this evening. For some other interesting takes on this, see this piece on TheoLib, and C3 Consulting Researcher Jason Mittell's piece.
Adapting to the Audience
Both Jesse and Mark spoke about the realities that exist with their Internet enabled audience and how they are trying to adapt to the realities that exist with how their audience views the show. They understand that experiencing shows at one's own pace is a much more enjoyable experience then live may be. Week-to-week, there is a lot to remember, and the online space is a great way to add narrative and help fill in the blanks. Having to remember specific narratives from specific episodes is difficult because it means viewers have to be keeping close track. From a creative side, they are trying to help people catch up and keep viewers who have been watching live be engaged week to week.
Continue reading "A Precursor to FoE2: NBC's Heroes: Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshaw Speak to MIT Community (2 of 2)" »
First, here is the official information on the event:
The fragmenting audiences and proliferating channels of contemporary television are changing how programs are made and how they appeal to viewers and advertisers. Some media and advertising spokesmen are arguing that smaller, more engaged audiences are more valuable than the passive viewers of the Broadcast Era. They focus on the number of viewers who engage with the program and its extensions -- web sites, podcasts, digital comics, games, and so forth. What steps are networks taking to prolong and enlarge the viewer's experience of a weekly series? How are networks and production companies adapting to and deploying digital technologies and the Internet? And what challenges are involved in creating a series in which individual episodes are only part of an imagined world that can be accessed on a range of devices and that appeals to gamers, fans of comics, lovers of message boards or threaded discussions, digital surfers of all sorts? In this forum, producers from the NBC series Heroes discussed their hit show as well as the nature of network programming, the ways in which audiences are measured, the extension of television content across multiple media channels, and the value that producers place on the most active segments of their audiences.
Continue reading "A Precursor to FoE2: NBC's Heroes: Jesse Alexander and Mark Warshaw Speak to MIT Community (1 of 2)" »
The final panel at last year's Futures of Entertainment 2, like the mobile media panel this year, focused on a particular media outlet, in this case virtual worlds. The discussion included John Lester from Linden Labs, Ron Meiners from Mplayer.com, and Todd Cunningham from MTV Networks, who we work with closely, as well as Eric Gruber from MTVN.
Todd will be able to join us again this year as a conference attendee, and we're glad to have Alice Kim from MTVN on our panel discussing mobile media.
The panel, called "Not the Real World Anymore," is available in audio here and in video here.
Continue reading "Looking back at FoE: Not the Real World Anymore" »
Last year's panel on fan cultures was one of the greatest precursors to the direction this year's conference has taken. Our discussions on fan labor, cult media, and even the audience measurement panel will deal with issues that were first raised in last year's fan cultures panel, which we live-blogged here.
The audio from last year's panel is available here, and the video is available here.
Continue reading "Looking back at FoE: Fan Cultures" »
The second day of Futures of Entertainment last year began with a discussion led by Dr. Joshua Green, C3's Research Manager. Green will be helping to lead the opening comments of the conference with Dr. Henry Jenkins on Friday morning and will be moderating two of the panels at the conference.
Last year's presentation from Green focused on viscerality in a convergence culture. The audio of the presentation is available here, and the video is available here.
Green, whose bio is available here, has helped direct several exciting new strands of research at the Consortium this year, and the panels planned for the conference this year are indicators of the types of issues we've been tackling in our internal work that Joshua directs and what I've written here on the blog, along with our graduate students.
Continue reading "Looking back at FoE: Dr. Joshua Green on Viscerality" »
The final panel on Friday of last year's Futures of Entertainment focused on transmedia properties, in what is a precursor to a couple of the discussions taking place this year, perhaps most notably the conversation on cult media properties, which might be particularly ripe for transmedia storytelling.
The audio from this panel is available here, and the video is available here.
For those who haven't seen it, our panel on cult media this year will feature a variety of people steeped in knowledge of transmedia storytelling: Danny Bilson, who has written for a variety of media platforms; Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner; Gordon Tichell with Walden Media; and Jesse Alexander with Heroes.
Continue reading "Looking back at FoE: Transmedia Properties" »
The second panel on the first day of Futures of Entertainment last year was focused particularly on user-generated content. The panel provides a good precursor to a lot of the issues to be discussed this year in the "fan labor" panel.
For those who have not seen it, the description of our "Fan Labor" panel this year reads, "There is growing anxiety about the way labor is compensated in Web 2.0. The accepted model -- trading content in exchange for connectivity or experience -- is starting to strain, particularly as the commodity culture of user-generated content confronts the gift economy which has long characterized the participatory fan cultures of the web." The full description is available on the program, here.
Last year's "User-Generated Content" panel was live blogged here on the C3 site, available here. The conversation included Rob Tercek, who is president and co-founder of MultiMedia Networks; Caterina Fake, Tech Development at Yahoo!/Flickr; Bubble Project founder Ji Lee; and BioWare Director of Design Kevin Barrett.
Audio is available here, and video is available here.
Continue reading "Looking back at FoE: User-Generated Content" »
The first panel at last year's Futures of Entertainment focused on "Television Futures," featuring a variety of interesting speakers who discussed where the television industry was headed from a variety of perspectives. While there is no video available from the panel, audio can be found here.
The panel was live-blogged on the C3 blog here. We wrote about their discussion on issues such as "What Has Caused This Period of Increased Experimentation?," "The Shifting Relationship of Television in the Media Industry," "Television in a VOD and Netflix World," and "Bypassing the Networks."
Continue reading "Looking back at FoE: Television Futures" »
Now that the week of Futures of Entertainment 2 is upon us, much of our mindspace and time are being dedicated to planning for the conference. In light of that, we thought it might be good to look back at each of last year's events, since this year's panels look to build off the conversations we started at the initial Futures of Entertainment last November. Over the next several posts, we are going to link back to discussions from each of the panels in hopes of providing some starting points of discussion for this year's registrants, many of whom we hope are keeping up with the C3 blog.
For those of you who won't be able to join us this year, we hope these resources from last year's conference gives you some idea of what will be happening here this weekend and serve as a precursor to the live-blogging that will be taking place here on our site and hopefully across many of this year's registrants.
We're going to start out by looking at Henry Jenkins' opening address from last year.
Continue reading "Looking back at FoE: Henry Jenkins' Opening Comments" »
This past week, registration opened for our second annual Convergence Culture Consortium and Program in Comparative Media Studies (CMS) co-sponsored conference, Futures of Entertainment 2. More updates will be forthcoming over at the FoE2 Web site.
We will be including full speaker bios and headshots over the next few days for all the speakers on our various panels, among other things.
For more, see our last few posts, including our announcement of the conference, Henry Jenkins' notes on the conference, and a look back at the first event last year. However, word about FoE2 has been popping up elsewhere across the Web as well.
Continue reading "Spreading the Word about FoE2" »
For those of you who may have been hearing recently about this year's Futures of Entertainment 2 conference (see the site here), but who may not have been able to attend last year's event, I wanted to go back into the archives and share more information about last year's event.
The site is still up, available here. As I noted back in August, there are audio and/or video podcasts up from the panels last year.
Continue reading "Looking Back at Futures of Entertainment 2006" »
I ran this announcement about Futures of Entertainment 2 over at my blog, but I wanted to crosspost it here as well, for those who might be interested in more details about the communication forum that will appear before FoE2 and more information on the panels and last year's conference.
Many readers attended last year's Futures of Entertainment conference, which brought together leading figures from film, television, games and virtual worlds, advertising, comics, and other media industries for an indepth discussion of some of the trends impacting our contemporary mediascape. If you missed this event,you can check out the podcasts here and read a report on it written by Jesse Walker for Reason online here.
Well, we were so excited by the quality of last year's event that we decided to host a second Futures of Entertainment conference with new topics and a new cast of characters. The event is sponsored by the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Convergence Culture Consortium.
Continue reading "Announcing Futures of Entertainment" »
Today brings with it the official open |
