By Sam Ford
Finally, our afternoon last Friday at the C3 Spring Retreat was spent discussing how academia and industry might work together and putting that discussion into action through a series of breakout discussions built around topics of particular interest to some of those working with the Consortium: advertising and marketing, audience measurement and metrics, participatory culture, global media flow, and gaming.
The discussion started with a conversation led by a panel of C3 Consulting Researchers. I moderated the conversation, joined by Lee Harrington, Grant McCracken, Jason Mittell, and Kevin Sandler. Each talked about their own research and how it intersects with industry, and we had a conversation across the room about what academia has to offer to media industries companies, what type of insight they would like to have from media industries companies in return, and both the potentials and the difficulties in work between academia and industry, taking into account the differences in the approach and interests of each type of research.
This moved into a series of individual discussions that I think reached the pinnacle of what an event like this retreat can accomplish, fostering conversations across this industry/academia threshold. As I've said to many people in the past, it's what I found most energizing about Futures of Entertainment both of the past two years, and it's what I think an organization like C3 can help foster.
By Sam Ford
Our second panel discussion at the C3 Spring Retreat in our Friday session focused on the topic of media audiences and the worth of looking at media audiences as a community and as social beings. Moderating the panel was new C3 Consulting Researcher Nancy Baym, who previously wrote a book about U.S. soap opera fan communities online and who now works on "bandom."
The panel was launched by some thoughts from C3 Consulting Researcher Robert V. Kozinets, whose work has focused on the correlation between fan communities built around media content and "brand communities." In short, Kozinets has built his career researching community online and the intersection between community and consumerism.
Also joining the panel from the academic side was C3 Consulting Researcher Aswin Punathambekar, whose angle on the panel in part looked at the multiple communities that might develop around media content in a global context.
These three C3-affiliated academics were joined by two folks from the industry side, Brian Haven from Forrester Research and Judy Walklet from Communispace.
By Sam Ford
Friday's session at the C3 Spring Retreat featured a series of panels and breakout discussions amongst our consulting researchers, invited guests, and representatives from our partner companies. We mentioned back at MIT Futures of Entertainment 2 that we wanted to design that event to be a public place for industry and academic minds to come together and collaborate and brainstorm together. On a smaller scale, with those officially involved in the Consortium, we see our retreat as a chance to foster the same type of innovation and conversation among our partner companies, the academics we work with, and our core team here at the Program in Comparative Media Studies.
This got started on Friday morning with a conversation featuring C3 Consulting Researcher Jonathan Gray moderating a panel on transmedia, an issue C3 has been interested in since our launch at the beginning of 2006. Joining Jon was two more of our newest consulting researchers, Abigail Derecho and Derek Johnson, drawing on their respective work on fans and franchises to look at the phenomenon of transmedia. From the industry end, we invited two guests who are doing innovative work as transmedia practitioners: Keith Clarkson from Xenophile Media and Matt Wolf from Double Twenty Productions.
By Sam Ford
We're amidst several updates today, after a hiatus from blogging due to our annual C3 Spring Retreat and our continued work on a series of internal white papers within the Consortium, which we presented as part of the event last Thursday and Friday. As many regular readers might know, we have spent the past year working specifically on gaining a better understanding of video sharing sites like YouTube, the type of content that appears there, and how these sites work as potential places for promotion. We've also been exploring the "viral" media concept that has become part of our entertainment landscape.
In addition to the various blog posts we've written about these issues here on the C3 blog this past academic year, we've been working on three white papers that are due to be shared internally at the end of the academic year. We spent the first day of the retreat previewing and discussing that work with our corporate partners (see our partners listed on the left side of the page, along with Fidelity Investments) and our consulting researchers.
The event kicked off with an introduction from C3 Principal Investigator and Co-Director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies here at MIT, William Uricchio, who talked about how the work we do here in the Convergence Culture Consortium plugs into the history of media theory at MIT. William and Henry have been doing research on that connection for some time now, in light of the upcoming 150th anniversary of the Institute.
By Sam Ford
In my previous post, I highlighted what was the 10 post popular posts on our blog from the previous academic year. Looking at RSS feed data from Feedburner, I wanted to likewise highlight what was the 10 most popular posts from the past academic year through our feed.
The two most popular posts were also one of our Top 10 posts in terms of page views, and--as you will see--most of the most popular topics through our feed dealt with the Futures of Entertainment event.
FoE2: Advertising and Convergence Culture. This post recaps some of the comments from the participants in last November's Futures of Entertainment 2 panel on Advertising and Convergence Culture, featuring Mike Rubenstein, Bill Fox, Faris Yakob, Tina Wells, and Baba Shetty.
FoE2: Opening Remarks. C3 Principal Investigator Henry Jenkins and C3 Research Director Joshua Green open Futures of Entertainment 2 with a discussion on the future of television, interactivity, engagement, and fan labor.
Looking Back at FoE: Not the Real World Anymore. The last panel at the first Futures of Entertainment featured John Lester from Linden Labs, Ron Meiners from Mplayer.com, and Todd Cunningham and Eric Gruber from MTV Networks, talking about virtual worlds.
Hey! Nielsen--Whats the Metric? C3 Graduate Student Researcher Eleanor Baird looks at Nielsen's newest attempts to take into account engagement and fan activities as part of their measurement, through the development of an online community looking at these issues.
By Sam Ford
As we near the end of the academic year, I thought readers might be interested in seeing what the Top 10 most popular posts have been over the previous nine months or so. First, according to page views through Google Analytics, our Top 10 posts have been:
Hustling 2.0: Soulja Boy and the Crank Dat Phenomenon. C3 graduate researcher Xiaochang Li looks at the rise of Soulja Boy and the energy the artist has created on YouTube with the latest dance phenomenon, complete with the Program in Comparative Media Studies' own attempt to "crank that."
"Meet me at my crib...": Reading the official "Crank That" video. C3 graduate researcher Xiaochang Li provides a reading of the text of the "Crank That" video from a "convergence culture" perspective.
Porn 2.0. Henry Jenkins provides a post from his blog that looks at the historical and current place pornography has in media transition.
Kentucky Weatherman Controversy Raises Issues About Privacy, Copyright, Context, and Information Traces. Sam Ford looks at the fallout after a weatherman who he grew up watching having controversial outtakes released online, and what issues this situation raises.
Surplus Audiences, ATWT, and the Luke/Noah Kiss. As the World Turns had a milestone moment last September--the first "serious" kiss between gay male characters in American daytime. Sam Ford asks how producers of the show can use the kiss' popularity on YouTube, and in online gay communities?
This is the final portion of the interview I recently ran on my blog with Queensland University of Technology's Axel Bruns.
Is it appropriate to apply the same concepts to talk about our new roles as consumers/producers of culture and our shifting roles as citizens?
I think so, yes. It's not far to go from active cultural to active political participation, and we're seeing more examples of using the tools of produsage for political effect every day. Building in part on Pierre Levy's discussion of "molecular politics" in his Collective Intelligence, I've tried to develop a first rough sketch of this produsage politics - or perhaps produsage of politics - in my paper at the MiT5 conference last year, and extended this further for one of the later chapters in the book.
One thing, I think, is certain in this context: a produsage-based approach to politics would look significantly different from the current mass media-driven and ultimately industrial model of politics as it exists in the US, Australia, and many other developed nations. To bear any resemblance to produsage as it exists in other domains, to begin with, it would have to operate on a much more deliberative, open, and inclusive basis than political processes have operated during the height of the mass media age - and groups such as MoveOn in the US, and a href="http://getup.org.au/">GetUp in Australia may be early indications that such shifts are now being attempted by interested parties, if haltingly and uneasily.
One of the major obstacles to moving further along that road, however, are the mainstream media, who have oversimplified our understanding of politics to an eternal contest between left and right - this is politics as a sport, scored in opinion polls and delegate counts, and analysed from the sidelines by pundits and commentators. This leaves little room for nuance, for broad, constructive, and open-ended deliberation; such deliberation may take place (we hope) in parliamentary committees and party rooms, and (we know) in grassroots political communities from MoveOn to the central hubs of the political blogosphere, but the media play a very effective spoiler role that prevents these two sides from connecting successfully.
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