MIT Comparative Media Studies: Booklife Podcast

Podcast: “Booklife: The Private and the Public in Transmedia Storytelling and Self-Promotion”

Fictional experiments in emerging media like Twitter and Facebook are influencing traditional printed novels and stories in interesting ways, but another intriguing new narrative is also emerging: the rise of “artifacts” that, although they support a writer’s career, have their own intrinsic creative value. What are the benefits and dangers of a confusion between the private creativity and the public career elements of a writer’s life caused by new media and a proliferation of “open channels”? What protective measures must a writer take to preserve his or her “self” in this environment? In addition to the guerilla tactics implicit in storytelling through social media and other unconventional platforms, in what ways is a writer’s life now itself a story irrespective of intentional fictive storytelling? Examining these issues leads naturally to a discussion on the tension and cross-pollination between the private and public lives of writers in our transmedia age, including the strategies and tactics that best serve those who want to survive and flourish in this new environment. What are we losing in the emerging new paradigm, and what do we stand to gain?

A writer for the New York Times Book Review, Huffington Post, and Washington Post, Jeff VanderMeer is also the award-winning author of the metafictional City of Saints & Madmen, the noir fantasy Finch, and Booklife: Strategies & Survival Tips for 21st-Century Writers. His website can be found at jeffvandermeer.com.

Kevin Smokler is the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books) which was a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2005. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Fast Company and on National Public Radio. He lives in San Francisco, blogs for the Huffington Post and at kevinsmokler.com, and is the CEO of BookTour.com.

Presented in conjunction with Futures of Entertainment 4

Download Here!

via cms.mit.edu

All the talk about e-books, e-readers and Apple’s rumored tablet (known until it is finally released as The Tablet) made me think about this podcast from last November. The lecture was part of the Futures of Entertainment 4 Conference. It touches on what it takes to be a writer in an age of e-readers, twitter, facebook and the web.

Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0 -- A Syllabus

Fandom, Participatory Culture and Web 2.0

Speaking at South by Southwest several years ago, I joked that “Web 2.0 was fandom without the stigma.” By this, I meant that sites like YouTube, Flickr, Second Life, and Wikipedia have made visible a set of cultural practices and logics that had been taking root within fandom over the past hundred-plus years, expanding their cultural influence by broadening and diversifying participation. In many ways, these practices have been encoded into the business models shaping so-called Web 2.0 companies, which have in turn made them far more mainstream, have increased their visibility, and have incorporated them into commercial production and marketing practices. The result has been a blurring between the grassroots practices I call participatory culture and the commercial practices being called Web 2.0.

Fans have become some of the sharpest critics of Web 2.0, asking a series of important questions about how these companies operate, how they generate value for their participants, and what expectations participants should have around the content they provide and the social networks they entrust to these companies. Given this trajectory, a familiarity with fandom may provide an important key for understanding many new forms of cultural production and participation and, more generally, the logic through which social networks operate.

So, to define our three terms, at least provisionally, fandom refers to the social structures and cultural practices created by the most passionately engaged consumers of mass media properties; participatory culture refers more broadly to any kind of cultural production which starts at the grassroots level and which is open to broad participation; and Web 2.0 is a business model that sustains many web-based projects that rely on principles such as user-creation and moderation, social networking, and “crowdsourcing.”

That said, the debates about Web 2.0 are only the most recent set of issues in cultural and media studies which have been shaped by the emergence of a field of research focused on fans and fandom. Fan studies:

• emerged from the Birmingham School’s investigations of subcultures and resistance


• became quickly entwined with debates in Third Wave Feminism and queer studies


• has been a key space for understanding how taste and cultural discrimination operates


• has increasingly been a site of investigation for researchers trying to understand informal learning or emergent conceptions of the citizen/consumer


• has shaped legal discussions around appropriation, transformative work, and remix culture


• has become a useful window for understanding how globalization is reshaping our everyday lives.
  
  
  • trace the history of fandom from the amateur press associations of the 19th Century to its modern manifestations
  
  
  • describe the evolution of fan studies from the Birmingham School work on subcultures and media audiences to contemporary work on digital media
  
  
  • discuss a range of theoretical framing and methodologies which have been used to explain the cultural, social, political, legal, and economic impact of fandom
  
  
  • arbitrate the most common critiques surrounding the Web 2.0 business model
  
  
  • situate fan practices in relation to broader trends toward social networks, online communities, and remix culture
  
  
  • develop their own distinctive contribution to the field of fan studies, one which reflects their own theoretical and methodological commitments



This course will be structured around an investigation of the contribution of fan studies to cultural theory, framing each class session around a key debate and mixing writing explicitly about fans with other work asking questions about cultural change and the politics of everyday life.

via henryjenkins.org

Henry Jenkins’ syllabus. Must read books for anyone interested in the evolution of digital media. Visit Professor Jenkin’s blog for the full text.

The Requisite End-Of-Year Lists Continued

Continuing the end-of-year, end-of-decade list compilation started here, interspersed with some of the best creative work of the year. 

• The Awesome Brain Pickings Best Of 2009. 

•  Discovered in the Arjan Writes music blog, here is MPHO:
 

• The Big Picture, Christmas 2009.

• The Decade In Words.

• The New York Times The Year In Culture Slideshow.

• Inception Trailer:
 

• Wired’s The 15 Most Influential Games Of The Decade: Portal is still my favorite.

• BBH Labs’ A Quick Glance At 10 Of Their Best Blog Posts. 

• Milton Glaser’s Ten Things I’ve Learned: From 2001 but still relevant. 

• DJ Earworm’s United States Of Pop 2009: Amazing. Do you recognize all the references?
 

• Ten Gadgets That Defined The Decade.

• LA Times’ Top 10 Moments In Social Media In 2009.

• The Impossible Cool: A fantastic blog curating incredible images that are the essence of the impossibly cool.

• The Dieline: Another gorgeous blog curating the best in package design.

• Netflix’s Top Ten Most Rented Movies.

• The Year In Picture Shows.

• Vimeo’s 25 Favorite Videos Of 2009: Including this. 
 

• Fuel Your Creativity’s Best of 2009 In The Creative Industry.

• Danger Room’s Top Ten Stories From A World Gone Nuts.

• Epitaphs For Our Favorite Folded Magazines Of 2009.

• Honda’s Everything Ad: Let’s celebrate the brilliance of good editors.
 

• The Decade In Communications Technology.

• Charles Isherwood’s Best of 2009 Theater.

• Slate’s Troy Patterson Selects 26 Cultural Moments Of The Decade: From A to Z.

• Macworld’s Top Ten Tech Stories Of The Decade.

• Picturing The Past 10 Years. 

• 2009 NYC Holiday Window Displays.

• New Scientist’s Favorite Picture Galleries: Featuring a gallery of snapshots from an imploding star.

• Macworld’s 2009 Game Hall Of Fame.

• The Pogie Awards For The Year’s Best Tech Ideas.

• Top 10 Documentaries of 2009.

• Best Of The Decade’s Architecture.

• Fimoculous’ Year In Review: A mega list of eccentric lists, including a list of the worst renderings.

• Top Ten Book Cover Designs.

• The Decades 14 Biggest Design Moments.

• Ads We Hate, The Year’s Worst Commercials. 

• The Year For Creatives.

• The Best of Open Culture 2009.

• Flicker’s Your Best Shots of 2009, The Seasons.

• KCRW’s The Business: The Hollywood Year That Was [Podcast, iTunes Link]


And the predictions:

• JWT’s 100 To Watch in 2010.

• 50 Trends For 2010.

• 32 Of Our Most Anticipated 2010 Entertainments.


And lastly:

• Ringing The New Year With A Drink For Each Time Zone.


 

The Requisite End-Of-Year Lists

And not just end-of-year but also end-of-decade. Here are some of the most interesting lists I’ve seen, interspersed with some of the best work I’ve discovered this year and some suggestions for creative gifts.  


• Pixar’s Up: It delivered what is perhaps the most poignant animated sequence ever created. This heartwarming video shows the evolution of Carl and Ellie’s relationship from the first concept sketches to the final shots of the movie.

• Foreign Policy’s Top Ten Stories You Missed: Do you know about the hotline for China and India?

• The New York Times Year In Ideas 

• Pop Culture’s Finest Moments Of 2009 

• Newsweek’s The Decade In 7 Minutes:
 

• Amazon.com: Best Books Of 2009 

• The Best And Worse Tech Of The Decade 

• Milton Glaser Draws And Lectures:

• Creative Review Gunne Report 2009 And 2009 Epica Winners Featuring:  
 

 

• PaperSpecs Top Ten Tips Of 2009: For my fellow printing producers.

• Open Culture Compilation Of Free Audiobooks 

• 50 Of The World’s Best Design Blogs 

• Slings & Arrows is a brilliant comedy series about what it takes to run a Shakespeare festival. And what it takes to be creative. 
 

• The Buzzwords Of 2009: My favorite “crash blossom.” 

• The Best Films Of 2009 By Roger Ebert: You have not seen it yet, but you must watch The Hurt Locker.
  

• The Decade In Culture 

• Google Wave continues to confound most everyone. And then you see this:
 

• GE Plug Into The Smart Grid: This is the first example I encountered of Augmented Reality actually implemented. A whole creative department stood huddled around a computer, mouths open, uttering small cries of disbelief.


• YouTube, The Most Searched, The Most Viewed

• Life’s Pictures Of The Year

• MoMA’s Tim Burton Exhibition Website, and The Making Of

• The Hollywood Reporter: Top Ten Techs Tormenting Hollywood

• Johnnie Walker’s Walk: Perfectly produced, it is an astonishing blend of branding, filmmaking, performance, advertising and above all storytelling.


• Amelia: If you love dance this piece will make you reconsider what dance can be. It is ballet mashed up with urban in the matrix. Gorgeous.
 

• Brand New’s The Best And Worst Of Identities 2009: Have you seen the new AOL logo? What do you think?

• Tarsem’s The Fall: For the visual artist in you. Produced by David Fincher and Spike Jones. Incredibly rich visuals used to tell a simple, universal story. Exquisite. 
 

• Top 60 Japanese Phrases/Words Of 2009 

• Chanel No. 5’s Night Train: Staring Audrey Tautou. Watch the full length video. Even the behind the scenes is beautiful.  

• Ataque de Pánico! recently got Fede Alvarez, the director and animator, a big budget Hollywood deal, which reminds me of…


• …Alive in Joburg, which led Neill Blomkamp to direct District 9. Which in turn gave us the innovative transmedia marketing campaign for the movie. Here Henry Jenkins discusses the “Humans Only” campaign. 


• And speaking of Henry Jenkins, his book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide is a must read.

• Google Zeitgeist 2009

• Digg Labs 365

• The Year In Media Errors And Corrections: The internet never forgets.

• I love dance. I watch this on tv and realize that I may be witnessing the evolution of the dance form:
 
And then I learn there is more.

• The LXD is launching an online, episodic series, with hints of graphic novel myth-making all told through dance. This is a creative endeavor that is practically custom made for me.


• The 50 Most Interesting Articles In Wikipedia

• The Best Films Of The Decade By AV Club

• UNESCO and Google partner to deliver virtual access to World Heritage sites.
 

• The Noughtie List, the 00’s in Review. A comprehensive list of lists by kottke.org. 

• Rolling Stone’s Best Of The Decade

• Top Ten China Myths Of 2009

• In The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession Chandler Burr renders the complex science of fragrances into compelling poetry.

• The Top 10 Flash Mobs Of 2009: If we are ever together in a crowded public space and music starts playing, people start dancing, there is a very big possibility I’ll be joining in.

• Time Magazine’s The Top 10 Of Everything 2009

• Vaporware 2009: Inhale the Fail: Technologies unfulfilled promises.

• The Big Picture, The Decade In News Photographs: These reiterate how challenging this decade has been. 

• The Big Picture, The Year In Pictures: What a crazy year it has been.

• The Major Works Of Counterintuitive Thought Of The Past Decade 

• Paloma Faith is the latest eclectic British singer to do the soul thing. A former magician’s assistant, she delivers a great record that feels a bit like the anti Amy Winehouse’s Rehab. Do You Want the Truth Or Something Beautiful


• National Geographic Visions of Earth 2009: Marvel at the variety of images and experiences that our planet creates.

• See Puerto Rico: Yes, I am biased, but the new tourism campaign for Puerto Rico is rich in history and beauty.  

• The Ten Best Films You Won’t See This Year 

• The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson will inspire you.

• The 10 Most Innovative Viral Video Ads 

• Top 40 iPhone Apps Of 2009 

• 50 Most Influential Bloggers Of 2009: Have you met Gary Vaynerchuk?

• Adweek Media Best Of The 2000s: Gawker is the blog of the decade?

• Jill Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight recounts a neuroscientist’s experience with a stroke and her recovery. It is an inspiring exploration of human consciousness.

• Best New Blogs Of 2009 

• 50 Ultimate Travel Experiences 

• The Best TV Series Of The 00’s

• 40 Things That Were Popular At The Beginning Of The Decade That Are Not Popular Now: Remember Pepsi Twist? Exactly.

• The Millions: A Year in Reading

And of course, the predictions:

• Trendsspotting’s 2010 Social Media Predictions In 140 Characters

• CNN Tech’s 10 Web Trends For 2010

• Trendwatching’s 10 Crucial Consumer Trends Of 2010


Lastly, 

• 100 Ways To Live A Better Life

 

What is transmedia?

A follow up to the Futures of Entertainment post from earlier this week. Attendees of the conference were asked “what is transmedia?” and here are some of the answers.