MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

The 2016 Presidential election brought issues of race and racism to the forefront of American politics and forced journalists to confront how to cover these topics without providing a platform for hate groups. Slate chief political correspondent and CBS News political analyst Jamelle Bouie joins MIT Communications Forum director Seth Mnookin to explore how race and ethnicity framed the election and how journalists and content creators can improve coverage of these issues moving forward.

Speakers:

Jamelle Bouie’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and The Nation. He is a former a staff writer at The Daily Beast and currently serves as a political analyst for CBS News and chief political correspondent for Slate.

Moderator: Seth Mnookin is the director of the MIT Communications Forum and director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the “Science in Society” award from the National Association of Science Writers.

This event was sponsored by Radius at MIT.

How will the role of data science in democracy be transformed as software expands the public’s ability to conduct our own experiments at scale? In the 1940s-70s, debates over authoritarian uses of statistics led to new paradigms in social psychology, management theory, and policy evaluation. Today, large-scale social experiments and predictive modeling are reviving these debates. Technology platforms now conduct hundreds of undisclosed experiments per day on pricing and advertising, and the algorithms that shape our social lives remain opaque to to the public. Democratic methods for data science may offer an alternative to this corporate libertarian paternalism.

In this talk, hear about the history and future of democratic social experimentation, from Kurt Lewin and Karl Popper to Donald Campbell. You’ll also hear about CivilServant, software that supports communities to conduct their own experiments on algorithms and social behavior online.

J. Nathan Matias is a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media, an affiliate at the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard, and founder of CivilServant. He conducts independent, public interest research on flourishing, fair, and safe participation online. These include research on harassment reporting, volunteer moderation online (PDF), behavior change toward equality (PDF), social movements (PDF), and networks of gratitude.

Nathan has extensive experience in tech startups, nonprofits, and corporate research, including SwiftKey, Microsoft Research, and the Ministry of Stories. Nathan’s creative work and research have been covered extensively by international press, and he has published data journalism and intellectual history in the Atlantic, Guardian, PBS, and Boston Magazine.

Slides: http://cmswm.it/cmsw-matias-slides

MIT professor Nick Montfort talks about his new book and how learning to explore code isn't just for the tech-inclined -- programming can be a way for arts and humanities scholars to discover answers...and questions...they've never seen before.

Music: Algorithmically generated with WolframTones: http://tones.wolfram.com/generate

Women of color have a variety of responses when employing digital technologies for empowerment. New communication technologies have expanded the opportunities and potential for marginalized communities to mobilize in this context counter to the dominant, mainstream media. This growth reflects the mobilization of marginalized communities within virtual and real spaces reflecting a systematic change in who controls the narrative. No longer are mainstream media the only disseminators of messages or producers of content. Women, in particular, are employing social media to highlight issues that are often ignored in dominant discourse. However, access itself neither ensures power nor guarantees a shift in the dominant ideology (as the use of #Misogynoir by Katy Perry reveals among other examples). Operating under the oppressive structures of masculinity, heterosexuality, and Whiteness that are sustained in digital spaces, marginalized women persevere and resist such hegemonic realities. Yet the conceptual frameworks intended to capture the digital lives of women cannot deconstruct the structural inequalities of these spaces.

Kishonna L. Gray (Ph.D., Arizona State University) is currently a MLK Visiting Scholar in Women & Gender Studies and Comparative Media Studies/Writing. She is also the Founder of the Critical Gaming Lab at Eastern Kentucky University. She is expanding on the work created here to develop new initiatives surrounding Equity in Gaming (www.equityingaming.com). Her work broadly intersects identity and new media although she has a particular focus on gaming. Her most recent book, Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014), provides a much-needed theoretical framework for examining deviant behavior and deviant bodies within that virtual gaming community.

Chris Sacca, activist investor, recently argued that Black Twitter IS Twitter. For example, African American usage of the service often dominates user metrics in the United States, despite their minority demographic numbers as computer users. This talk by André Brock unpacks Black Twitter use from two perspectives: analysis of the interface and associated practice alongside discourse analysis of Twitter’s utility and audience. Using examples of Black Twitter practice, Brock offers that Twitter’s feature set and ubiquity map closely onto Black discursive identity. Thus, Twitter’s outsized function as mechanism for cultural critique and political activism can be understood as the awakening of Black digital practice and an abridging of a digital divide.

André Brock is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. Brock is one of the preeminent scholars of Black cyberculture. His work bridges Science and Technology Studies and Critical Discourse Analysis, showing how the communicative affordances of online media align with those of Black communication practices. Through December 2016, he is a Visiting Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England.

Hear from four alums of the graduate program in Comparative Media Studies as they discuss their experience at MIT and what their careers have looked like in the fields a CMS degree prepared them for.

Panelists include:

Andres Lombana-Bermudez, ’08, a researcher and designer working at the intersection of digital technology, youth, and learning. Andres holds a Ph.D. in Media Studies from UT-Austin, an M.Sc. in Comparative Media Studies, and bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Literature from Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. He is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a Research Associate with the Connected Learning Research Network.

Colleen Kaman, ’10, is a user experience/experience design strategist and designer working at the intersection of digital technology, persuasive design, and content. Colleen holds an M.Sc. in Comparative Media Studies, and bachelor’s degrees in Anthropology from Bates College. She is a senior managing consultant at IBMiX, where she focuses on user-centric healthcare solutions and designing for aging users and helps lead the IBMiX department’s Accessibility practice area.

Abe Stein, ’13, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Kill Screen Media

Lily Bui, ’16, is currently a PhD student at MIT’s School of Architecture & Planning in the Department of Urban Studies & Planning. Her masters research focused on using sensors to support environmental monitoring, and communicating sensor-based data to different stakeholders.

In 2005, a little-known author was invited on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote his book, an almanac chronicling fake histories ranging from the story behind Theodore Roosevelt’s fictional lobster canal to the disappearing 51st US state Hohoq. Since then, humorist John Hodgman has parlayed his wit into New York Times best-selling books, a Daily Show correspondent position, a Netflix stand-up special, and his own podcast. Hodgman brings his razor-sharp wit to MIT for a moderated discussion on his career and the state of comedy today.

John Hodgman is host of the Judge John Hodgman podcast and a former resident expert for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Moderator: Seth Mnookin is associate director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and author of The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy.

The 2016 presidential election has been historic for the ways that social media has been used to drive the news agenda and rally supporters to the cause. Jennifer Stromer-Galley describes the large scale collection and machine learning techniques she and her team have used for the Illuminating 2016 project to study the ways the presidential candidates and the public have used social media. She provides some of the major trends they’ve seen this election cycle and talk about why this matters for journalism and for social media practitioners more broadly.

Stromer-Galley is a professor in Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies and Director for the Center for Computational and Data Sciences, and she is President of the Association of Internet Researchers. She has been studying “social media” since before it was called social media, studying online interaction and influence in a variety of contexts, including political forums and online games. Her award-winning book Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age provides a history of presidential campaigns as they have adopted and adapted to digital communication technologies.

Even though people age nine through twelve have always been with us, the same cannot be said for the category “tween.” When did this category emerge and why? How are “tweens” represented in popular culture, including music, television, and YA literature? And how does this relatively new age category intersect with–or elide–issues pertaining to race, class, and gender identity?

Speakers:

Tyler Bickford is an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is completing two book projects on music and childhood.

Meryl Alper worked at Nickelodeon and Disney before becoming an Assistant Professor of Communication at Northeastern University and publishing Digital Youth with Disabilities.

Moderator: Marah Gubar is an Associate Professor of Literature at MIT and author of Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (2009).

International best-selling author and science historian James Gleick discusses his career, the state of science journalism, and his newest book Time Travel: A History, which delves into the evolution of time travel in literature and science and the thin line between pulp fiction and modern physics. This Communications Forum event was moderated by author and physicist Alan Lightman, the first professor at MIT to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and the humanities.

Speakers

James Gleick, author of seven books, including Chaos, Genius, and Isaac Newton, all of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize

Moderator: Alan Lightman, Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT and author of 15 books