Conferences


Media in Transition 9: POSTPONED
MiT9 has been postponed. New information will be shared when available.
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Media in Transition 8: public media, private media
May 3-5, 2013
MiT8 considers the ways in which specific media challenge or reinforce certain notions of the public or the private and especially the ways in which specific “texts” dramatize or imagine the public, the private and the boundary between them.

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Media in Transition 7 unstable platforms: the promise and peril of transition
May 13-15, 2011

Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called “a ceaseless spectacle of transition”? How are we coping with the instability of platforms?
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Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission
April 24-26, 2009
Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. We are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds. Such developments profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace. What are the implications of these trends for scholars, librarians, journalists and media makers who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture?  How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?
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Media in Transition 5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age

April 27-29, 2007
The fifth Media in Transition conference aims to compare historical forms of cultural expression with contemporary media practices. What ethical issues are posed when sounds, images, and stories move from one culture or subculture to another? Or when materials created by a community or religious or ethnic tradition are appropriated by technologically powerful outsiders?
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Media in Transition 4: the work of stories
May 6-8, 2005
The fourth Media in Transition conference explored storytelling as a cultural practice, a social and political activity as well as an art form.
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Media in Transition 3: television
May 2-4, 2003
What is the role of television in specific societies or regions today? How is this role changing? What part are digital technologies and new systems of communication playing in this transition? What are the likely outcomes of present trends? What are the darkest possibilities? What does the history of television in diverse countries and regions tell us about its possible futures? The third Media in Transition conference centers on television's political and cultural role at the dawn of our new millennium.
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Media in Transition 2: globalization and convergence

May 10-12, 2002
Will globalization reduce or expand the world's cultural diversity? How do we reconcile the competing forces of media convergence and media fragmentation that are shaping the current communications infrastructure? What patterns can we discern among convergent content and audiences across media forms and international borders? These are among the issues to be explored at the Media in Transition 2 international conference on globalization and convergence.

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Race in Digital Space: A National Conference on Race and New Media Technologies

April 27-29, 2001
The conference will serve as a touchstone for thinking critically about race in digital environments. The conference will also mark the launch of a year-long exploration continuing online and culminating in a second conference at the University of Southern California in 2002.
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We Wired the Classroom: Now What?

February 3-4, 2001
This conference aims to showcase innovative work of classroom teachers who are exploring such new media as the Internet, the web, CD Roms, digital photography, digital sound recording technologies, video recorders, streaming video and audio.
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Digital Cinema
November 3-5, 2000
This conference brings together filmmakers, critics, and media industry leaders to explore the nature of digital cinema and its cultural significance. The conference will combine screenings of significant works in digital cinema with panel discussions centered on such issues as the political consequence of broadening media access, the shifting status of amateur filmmaking, the aesthetics of this emerging media form, the economics of digital film production and distribution, the historical antecedents of digital cinema, and the ways in which digital cinema may influence our media future.
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Computer and Video Games Come of Age:
A National Conference to Explore the State of an Emerging Entertainment Medium

February 10-11, 2000
The time has come to take an inventory of today's game industry and envision tomorrow's technological innovations and creative implications, not only from industrial and professional perspectives but also from the perspective of cultural and media scholars. Just as industry leaders and academics worked together to establish a serious national conversation about the aesthetic and cultural importance of cinema in the 20th centry, we believe that academic and industry exchanges can promote the art of digital entertainment media for the 21st century.
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Media in Transition

An International Conference
October 8-10, 1999
To celebrate the launch of the graduate program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, this final event of the Media in Transition Project aims to establish a broad-gauged discussion of our emerging computer culture in the perspective of ancestor technologies and older media. The conference will include some 75 presentations on many aspects of this subject, a series of multi-media demonstrations and films offered in parallel with the presentations, and three plenary "conversations" in which distinguished panelists will speak briefly and then participate in extended dialogue with the audience. Among the panelists: Phil Agre, Robert Darnton, Henry Jenkins, Elaine Kamarck, Adam Powell, Mitchel Resnick, Paul Starr, Bob Stein, Maria Tatar, Sherry Turkle.
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Wiring the Classroom: Moving Beyond Access in K-12 Education

May 1, 1999
A conversation among researchers and Boston area teachers about new educational
technologies. Keynote lecture by Elliot Soloway of the University of Michigan, followed by discussions about educational principles and new media and by demonstrations of computer programs designed by MIT faculty and local teachers for studying foreign languages,
literature, history, writing and media studies.
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The Internet: Next Generation and Beyond

December 1-2, 1998
"The Internet is a fast moving phenomenon, generating lots of excitment, and also lots of confusion. On the one hand, it has the potential to change the way we work, play, communicate, and participate in society. On the other hand, it has the potential to topple the structure of major industries."
-- Dr. David D. Clark, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
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Digital Cities: Urban Environments and Interactive Technologies

Friday, Sept 25, 1998
How are new technologies representing urban spaces? How will these representations affect our notions of what cities are, how they look, how they might be designed or reimagined? This symposium includes commentary from urban planners and specialists in cultural geography as well as audio-visual demonstrations of a range of projects--pedagogical, documentary, games--that represent real or imagined urban environments.
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Democracy and Digital Media

May 8-9, 1998
A conversation among scholars, media professionals and political insiders about old and new media and the democratic process. Among the speakers: Benjamin Barber, Rutgers University; Lawrence Grossman, Former President, NBC News; Ira Magaziner, Presidential Advisor; Michael Schudson, University of California; Paul Starr, Princeton University.
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Transformations of the Book

October 24-25, 1997
A conference of scholars and media designers who have created hypertext or web-based projects on some of the landmark texts of humanist culture.
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Technologies of Freedom? Emerging Media in Modern Culture

May 9-10, 1997
This inaugural conference aimed to create a dialogue among historians, political scientists, media engineers, corporate and government figures.
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