[Air-L] CFP: MIT's Media in Transition - Conference

[Michael Zimmer]

[Of interest to many, I'm sure... -mz]



Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission

International Conference
April 24-26, 2009
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CALL FOR PAPERS

In his seminal essay "The Bias of Communication" Harold Innis
distinguishes between time-based and space-based media.  Time-based
media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while
space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as
portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of
transmission, diffusion, connections across space.  Speculating on this
distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the
ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic
and social structures, and the arts.

Our current era of prolonged and profound transition is surely as
media-driven as the historical cultures Innis describes.  His division
between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic in the age
of the computer, but similar tensions define our contemporary situation.
Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which
information circulates. Moore's Law continues to hold, and with it a
doubling of memory capacity every two years; 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 are simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. They
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 historians who seek to
understand the place of media in our own culture?

What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise
the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find
ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words
and images generated by new technologies?

How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we
tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we
construct?

What are the implications of this tension between storage and
transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for
notions of what is public and what is private?

We invite papers from scholars, journalists, media creators, teachers,
writers and visual artists on these broad themes.  Potential topics
might include:

The digital archive
The future of libraries and museums
The past and future of the book
Mobile media
Historical systems of communication
Media in the developing world
Social networks
Mapping media flows
Approaches to media history
Education and the changing media environment
New forms of storytelling and expression
Location-based entertainment
Hyperlocal media and civic engagement
New modes of circulation and distribution
The transformation of television -- from broadcast to download
Cosmopolitanism backlashes against media change
Virtual worlds and digital tourism
The continuity principle: what endures or resists digital
transformation?
The fate of reading


Submissions

Abstracts of no more than 500 words or full papers should be sent to
Brad Seawell at seawell at mit.edu no later than Friday, Jan. 9, 2009.  We
will evaluate abstracts and full papers on a rolling basis and early
submission is highly encouraged.  All submissions should be sent as
attachments in a Word format. Submitted material will be subject to
editing by conference organizers.

Email is preferred, but submissions can be mailed to:

Brad Seawell
MIT 14N-430
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139

Please include a biographical statement of no more than 100 words. If
your paper is accepted, this statement will be used on the conference
Web site.

Please monitor the conference Web site at
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6 for registration information, travel
information and conference updates.

Abstracts will be accepted on a rolling basis until Jan. 9, 2009.

The full text of your paper must be submitted no later than Friday,
April 17. Conference papers will be posted to the conference Web site
and made available to all conferees.



-- 
Michael Zimmer, PhD
Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies
Associate, Center for Information Policy Research
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
e: zimmerm at uwm.edu
w: www.michaelzimmer.org