MIT Graduate Program in Comparative Media Studies
Studying Media and Making Media
This year's conference will work to bring together the themes from last year -- media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution -- with the Consortium's new projects as we move towards an increasingly global understanding of media convergence and content flows.
In the Age of Always Connect, are we witnessing a plague of oversharing? Are social networks its vectors of transmission? Is this the "Death of Shame"?
Nancy Baym asks, "How does direct access to fans change what it means to be an artist? What rewards are there that weren't before?"
September 19th, hear from Hong Qu on Keepr, a tool that makes sense of social media news bursts with natural language processing and network analysis.
UNC's Zeynep Tufekci discusses social media-fueled protests and their boom and bust cycle, drawing on the Gezi protests, Arab Spring, Occupy, and others.
Kevin Driscoll presents how the history of bulletin-board systems reveals the popular origins of computer-mediated social life.
Jennifer Stromer-Galley describes the large-scale collection and machine learning techniques used to study how presidential candidates use social media.
Sean Cubitt asserts the value of anecdotal evidence against the rise of statistics, but at the same time wants to confront the difficulties in bringing about an encounter between readers (human or otherwise) and the mass image constructed by social media and search giants.
Media scholars Stuart Cunningham and David Craig propose challenging, revisionist accounts of the political economy of digital media, the precarious status of creative labor and media management, and the possibilities of progressive cultural politics in commercializing environments.
Desmond Upton Patton introduces a critical systematic approach for extracting culture, context and nuance in social media data. The Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) approach considers and critiques the gap between inadequacies in natural language processing tools and differences in geographic, cultural, and age-related variance of social media use and communication.
Jabari Evans explores the content and character of Drill rap artists' work on social media toward acquiring “clout”- a digital form of influence rooted in Hip-Hop that allows marginalized youth to leverage digital tools in building social status.
