The Convergence Culture Consortium, in conjunction with the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, will host their second annual MIT Futures of Entertainment conference on Friday, Nov. 16, and Saturday, Nov. 17, on the campus of MIT in Cambridge, Mass.
This year's conference will feature panels on advertising and branding in the current media environment, cult media, metrics and measurement of audiences and engagement, the value of cultural labor and how relationships with audiences are managed, and mobile platform development.
The preliminary list of speakers includes Heroes' Jesse Alexander, Yahoo!'s Mark Davis, Tina Wells from the Buzz Marketing Group, Mark Deuze from Indiana University, and Danny Bilson, a media creator renowned for his successes in multiple media platforms. More information on speakers and a full program for the conference will be forthcoming.
Registration has not yet opened, but many more details will be coming soon on the Futures of Entertainment site, so be sure to bookmark it and return for updates.
For those of you who did not attend or are not familiar with last year's FOE event, look at the 2006 FOE site, which includes information about the conference. Also, either audio and/or video podcasts of the various panels and presentations at last year's conference are available here:
Henry Jenkins' Opening Remarks: audio/video
Television Futures: audio
User-Generated Content: audio/video
Transmedia Properties: audio/video
Joshua Green on Viscerality and Web 2.0: audio/video
Not the Real World Anymore: audio/video
Also, see our posts on last year's event here.
sign me up.
and, dare i ask, are soaps going to be discussed during the cult media panel:)
We will have more registration information coming soon, but to address Lynn's question, you know that I would always love to have someone from daytime in on the conversation. I don't know that someone from soaps will be on the cult media panel, but I think it's the perfect place to bring them up, and I know there's going to be one speaker involved in the Futures of Entertainment festivities who knows soaps, at least.
But this reminds me of a situation I got to this week. I was asked to contribute to a book on cult media, which I may end up doing, and there was a list being generated of cult television shows. Since my work has largely been on pro wrestling and soaps, I pointed toward both as cult media, as well as something like The Colbert Report. I got a response re: Colbert and Daily Show but not anything yet regarding the other two. Don't know what that means, but I would certainly consider soaps to have elements that fit a discussion of cult media and to be empowered by their treatment as niche in many ways. (That's even more the case with wrestling, I would say.)