I've just gotten back from a fabulous trip to Philadelphia for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. I had the pleasure of speaking as part of the event and will post a full report of the panel I presented on, as well as my notes from a variety of other panels I had the privilege to attend. All I talked with everyone about, however, is the guilt I felt at the number of great panels I DIDN'T get to attend. With an event like SCMS that has so many stellar scholars on the agenda, it seems that every panel choice, lunch break, or coffee came at the exclusion of something interesting.
Perhaps best of all was the fact that a variety of C3 Consulting Researchers were there presenting some of their latest research, and most of us even got the chance to get together, share a breakfast, and talk about the type of research the Consortium is doing moving forward. Included in that breakfast was four of the Consortium's six newest consulting researchers. We'll be sure to run a post in the near future introducing you to those new folks.
Also, I wanted to note that we are working on getting comments back up and running for the blog. As many of you know, we've been struggling with new measures to cut down on the amount of spam we were receiving, and that has led to more than two months with irregular commenting availability. There are still some bugs to be worked out, but we have measures now in place that should allow you to comment once again. Although it's been great hearing from many of you via e-mail, this blog hasn't been the same without your regular comments.
If you do try to comment and have problems, please contact me at samford@mit.edu and let me know.
At the end of this late evening, I wanted to share with you all some of the latest work from our consulting researchers on their blogs. First, C3 Consulting Researcher Grant McCracken provides a thought piece driven by spending some time with a Coke machine here at MIT. He writes about sounds that occur naturally, saying, "And this is what I am proposing, that we make more things in the object world speak but signify nothing. Because as I say, consumers are tired of our best efforts in the area of meaning management. Part of the problem is the continued tyranny of KISS regime marketing (Keep It Simple, Stupid marketing). No meanings are always better than moronic ones."
C3 Consulting Researcher Aswin Punathambekar writes about "Elite TV" in India here, while our partners at GSD&M Idea City write about Mark Zuckerberg's keynote at South by Southwest at the Idea City blog.
Finally, new C3 Consulting Researcher Nancy Baym has a fascinating couple of posts on a friend's experiment on Facebook to name himself a fan of everything over at Online Fandom. She writes about it first here and provides a followup here. Seems Facebook removed many of Nick's fandoms after he had reached 150 or so, including removing his being a fan of Nancy's blog. I'm interested to find out more and hope this gets greater attention.
Sounds like you had a great time! I wish I could have made it. (And, yes, the new comment system is *almost* fully operational!)
SCMS was good times, Geoff, though you were at SXSW (no?), so I hope I don't hear you complaining too loudly. (I cannot wait for this comment system to be fully operational, and though we all know it will be no match for the power of the force, hopefully it will combat the spam)