Speaker’s Series/Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Media
at USC Annenberg Center for Communication
As part of the USC Annenberg Center Speaker’s Series, once a month speakers will discuss issues and practices associated with Do-It-Yourself (DIY) media. These DIY Media seminars will focus on the shifting relations between cultural producers and consumers and the rise of participatory media cultures across various industry sectors due to the growing prevalence of digital tools and networks.
In line with the participatory ethos, the seminars are meant to be highly interactive. Short presentations will be followed by discussion, and throughout the session there will be a backchannel for text-based chat. If you would like to participate in the backchannel, please attend with your laptop and be sure to have an IRC client that you can use. Our backchannel will be #diymedia on irc.freenode.net.
During the week following the seminar USC Annenberg Center Fellow Howard Rheingold will post blog entries and invite other participants to join in an asynchronous discussion at http://weblogs.annenberg.edu/diy/, and to post photos with the Flickr tag "diymedia." This online space will serve as a resource and networking site for the key players in this emergent area.
Both the seminars and the online forum are a prelude to the Fall 2007 DIY Media Festival, organized by Mimi Ito, Adrienne Russell, and a committee of USC Annenberg Center staff members and researchers.
Continue reading after the jump for the Fall semester schedule for the USC Annenberg Center Speaker’s Series/DIY Media seminars:
September 14
Speakers: Mimi Ito and Howard Rheingold
Mimi Ito’s talk is entitled "Amateur Cultural Production in the New Networked Age." She is a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people in Japan and the US. She is currently co-leading a multi-year project on Digital Kids and Informal Learning, with support from the MacArthur Foundation. As part of this project she is conducting case studies of anime fandoms in Japan and the English-speaking online world. She is a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication.
Howard Rheingold’s talk is entitled "Participatory Media Literacy and Civic Engagement." His 2002 book Smart Mobs, was widely acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. The weblog associated with the book (http://www.smartmobs.com/) has become one of the top 200 of the 8 million blogs tracked by Technorati, and won Utne Magazine's Independent in 2003. In 2005, he taught a course at Stanford University on "A Literacy of Cooperation," as part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action, undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future. He teaches Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley's School of Information, and Digital Journalism at Stanford University. He is a Nonresident Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication, and a visiting Professor at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.
October 19
Speakers: Bob Stein and Todd Richmond
The topic of Bob Stein’s talk is open source academic publishing. He is Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book-- a project designed to explore, understand, and influence the shift from the printed book to digital publishing. Stein is currently working on SOPHIE-- a new software program that will allow artists, scholars, writers and others create digital documents incorporating audio and visual elements, along with text. The underlying goal of this project is to develop software that allows users to create their publications without having to hire a specialized programmer or learn complicated programming techniques. Upon completion in 2006, SOPHIE will be distributed on an open-source basis via the Institute for the Future of the Book.
The topic of Todd Richmond’s talk is open source courseware. He is currently a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and the Center for Creative Technologies at USC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinema-Television. He specializes in basic and applied research in the broad field of digital networked media, social networks, and social software. He is currently working on a Hewlett Foundation-funded research project titled "Viral University Education" which seeks to better understand and facilitate the uptake of freely available open educational content on the Internet by using a variety of social software tools and technologies to create viral learning communities and content.
November 16
Speakers: danah boyd and Justin Hall
Danah boyd’s [sic] talk is entitled "Creating Culture Through Collective Identity Performance: MySpace, Youth, and DIY Publics." Danah is a PhD candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Graduate Fellow at the USc Annenberg Center. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, her dissertation focuses on how youth engage in networked publics like MySpace. In particular, she investigates how youth formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts where the audience is often unknown. Prior to Berkeley, danah received an AB in computer science from Brown University and an MS in sociable media from MIT Media Lab. She has worked as an ethnographer and social media researcher for various corporations, including Intel, Tribe.net, Google and, currently, Yahoo! She also created and managed a large online community for V-Day, a non-profit organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide. She actively blogs about social media at Apophenia (www.zephoria.org/thoughts/)
Justin Hall will speak about "Passively Multiplayer Online Games." He is a Graduate Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a graduate student in the USC Interactive Media Division where he explores alternatives to text publishing online. He is currently developing surveillance-based gameplay online and on mobile phones called "Passively Multiplayer Online Gaming." He has taught classes and workshops at USC School of Cinema-Television encouraging the creation and distribution of short videos online. He started "Justin’s Links from the Underground" (www.links.net) in January 1994 eventually writing 4,800 pages of hypertexted personal journalism before stepping back in January 2005. In December, 2004, New York Times Magazine referred to him as "the founding father of personal blogging."
December 14
Speakers: Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow is co-editor for the popular technology blog "Boing Boing."He is also a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and is currently the first to hold USC's Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Diplomacy. He actively supports liberalizing copyright laws in order to increase the amount of creative work available to share, remix, and develop. A proponent of Creative Commons, his work emphasizes digital rights management, file-sharing, Disney, and post-scarcity economics.
Jennifer Urban is a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at USC. She teaches Intellectual Property and classes related to Technology Law and Policy. She also is the Director of the USC Intellectual Property Clinic, where students learn intellectual property law through hands-on work with cutting-edge, real-world projects. She is a faculty member of the USC Center for Communication Law and Policy.
For more information on these talks or speakers, go to www.annenberg.edu, or call 213-743-2520.
