Oh, Mexico continued

So, Thursday, June 7th was a full day at the MEA convention, with Joan Mayans of the Global University Network for Innovation in Spain, and President of the Observatorio para la CiberSociedad, doing a featured presentation on the internet and the knowledge society. I wanted to ask a question about how he defines knowledge, given that from a media ecological perspective, knowledge itself is based on our technologies of communication, and the concept of knowledge changes along with those media (as discussed by Harold Innis, Walter Ong, and Peter Drucker), but I never got the chance.

Anyway, Joan was followed by Octavio Islas giving a talk on how the internet remediates television (that is, makes television its content, remediation being a term introduced by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin). And this was followed by a roundtable discussion on Neil Postman's legacy that included Robert Albrecht, Sue Barnes, Fernando Gutiérrez, Casey Lum,
and Janet Sternberg. Casey stole the show with a hilarious anecdote about climbing up to the roof of his house and pulling down his television antenna.

During the afternoon breakout sessions, I took part in a panel on media ecology methodologies that also included Casey, Dan Stout, and Paul Grosswiler. I basically argued for the methodology of no methodology, or at least that standard methods are not adequate for addressing the big questions that many media ecologists like to ask. I did talk about philosophical method in general, along with intellectual history (a meta-analysis that media ecologists do well, and that is especially associated with Jim Carey, but that is not sufficient in and of itself for our field), cultural history as practiced by Lewis Mumford, Eric Havelock, and Walter Ong, textual analysis as can be found in McLuhan Mechanical Bride, ethnography which Casey and Dan advocated, and various schema such as McLuhan's hot and cool, and laws of media, Innis's time and space, Postman's questions about technology, and Nystrom's analyzing media handout. Corey Anton, who had chaired the session, also talked about phenomenology. And I mentioned that in a discussion about methodology Neil had once said that all you need to do is just look around, and listen, and that McLuhan's essential method was to pay attention, rely on observation and pattern recognition.

I attended a second breakout session chaired by Casey, that featured another friend from my previous excursions to Mexico (and previous MEA meetings), María de la Luz Casas from the Cuernavaca campus of Tecnológico de Monterrey, along with the distinguished scholar Clifford Christians of the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, who was also representing the Jacques Ellul Society, and they engaged in a stimulating dialogue about Ellul's sociological and theological thought.

That evening, we had another wonderful reception, followed by karaoke night at the hotel bar, which was great fun. Towards the end, I reluctantly participated, but the less said about that the better.

Friday, June 8th was the big day for us, beginning with a featured presentation from Jay David Bolter, who elaborated on his immediacy/transparency vs. hypermediacy/reflectivity categories for understanding media. Jay was followed by a roundtable on McLuhan that I moderated, and that included Eric McLuhan, Octavio Islas, Paul Lippert, Robert Logan, Julie Newton, and Phillip Marchand. And this was followed by a roundtable on new media chaired by Ellen Rose, that included Jay Bolter, Clifford Christians, Katherine Hayles, Fernando Gutiérrez, Joan Mayans, and Alejandro Piscitelli--there was an intense and fascinating debate that went on between Cliff, who argued for the universality of humanism, and Kate, who took a relativistic position in defense of the posthuman. Kate Hayles then had her featured presentation, in which she discussed the relationship between narrative and the database. All told, it was four outstanding sessions.

In the afternoon, I attended a breakout session on new media that included papers by Sue Barnes on internet advertising (she was poised and unflappable despite problems with the room's lights that forced us to change locations), George Teschner on Wikkies and authority, Matt Thomas on hacking as a metaphor for self-improvement, and my MA student Marian Kozhan giving her first paper ever, which was on her MA thesis topic, courtesan blogs--Marian gave an excellent presentation, and I was very proud of her. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend the presentations of my other two MA students who participated in the event--Laura Rojas was on a Spanish-speaking session (this was our first bilingual convention), and Gary Kenton's panel was opposite one that I participated on, but I understand that their papers were very well received as well.

That evening, we had Eric McLuhan's Keynote Address, "The Ecology of the New Nomadism," followed by our Award Ceremony, which is a very important and meaningful part of our annual conventions.

This was then followed by my President's Address, which I'll deal with in a separate post. Then, we had another reception, followed by a surprise: Fernando, Octavio, and the rest had hired for us one of the best mariachi bands around, and they put on a stupendous performance. Everyone was extremely impressed, especially since mariachi is generally not treated seriously in American media, but these guys were GOOD!!! And so was Fernando's sister, who took the stage and belted out a couple of songs with the band. Everyone was glowing afterwards. After all, how many academic conferences include a mariachi concert? But hey, that's MEA for you.

Saturday morning, we were all pretty relaxed. There were two breakout sessions. During the first, I gave a paper that had been written by Stephanie Gibson, an old friend who at the last minute had come down with a high fever and couldn't make it to Mexico, so I told her that I'd present the paper on her behalf. It was about the controversy concerning public breastfeeding in the U.S. Actually, Stephanie had asked me a while back if I though the topic would be of interest for the MEA's journal, Explorations in Media Ecology, she was afraid that it wasn't media ecological enough, but I assured her that I thought it fit just fine within our field (which is an open system, after all). As a parent myself, the subject of breastfeeding is not entirely unknown to me anyway, and the paper generated a great deal of interest. For the next session that followed, realizing that the person who was supposed to be moderator wasn't there, I stepped in and we had a lot of fun with two papers, one of the quadrivium by Ed Tywoniak, and one on visual thinking and the ecology of ecology by Julie Newton.

That afternoon, we had a tour of several sights in downtown Mexico City, including the government palace where there were some absolutely stupendous murals by Diego Rivera. One of the people working for Fernando had previously worked for President Vicente Fox's administration, so she was able to get us into some places where most tourists couldn't go, including a beautiful meeting room for the Commerce Minister. We then toured a modern art museum built over the ruins of a pyramid (which was still visible in spots), and ate at the Opera saloon, where you can see bullet holes in the ceiling put there by Pancho Villa.

On Sunday, June 10th, following a morning business meeting, we took a (blue) bus ride to the pyramids of Teotihuacan. It was my sixth time there, but I still love it, and always leave feeling energized. I know that the first timers were all very, very impressed with the site, to say the least. I really can't do the pyramids justice here, so I won't even try, but they are well worth the trip. Afterwards, we ate at the nearby La Gruta restaurant, which is down in a cave, an incredibly cool place, with great food, and a floor show featuring native and Spanish dance and song. It was a splendid way to top off a spectacular experience at the pyramids. Then it was the bus ride home, and later that night, a few hardy souls accompanied Thom and me to La Hacienda de los Morales, once the colonial governor's mansion, now an extraordinarily beautiful restaurant (and the food's not bad there either).

And on Monday, sadly, it was time to fly home. What an amazing, inspiring, exhilarating seven days!

Oh, Mexico

Oh, Mexico
It sounds so sweet with the sun sinking low
Moon's so bright like to light up the night
Make everything all right
--James Taylor

So, it's back to bloginess, and first thing on the agenda is the Eighth Annual Media Ecology Association which was hosted by Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Estado de México, at the edge of Mexico City. And to tell the truth, I really don't know how to convey the enormity of it all. Here's the brief message I wrote on the MEA listserv:

I am still recovering from an amazing and magnificent convention. With
over 700 attendees, it was by far our biggest. With the Governor of the
State of Mexico and the owner/CEO of one of Mexico's leading national
newspapers, El Universal, among the attendees, welcoming the MEA to Mexico,
it was by far our most prestigious. And given that it was bilingual and
incorporated a tour of several city sites and a trip to the pyramids, it
was by far our most elaborate.

Many, many thanks--gracias, gracias, gracias--to Fernando Gutiérrez and his
colleagues at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Estado de México, for their
enthusiasm, hard work, tremendous hospitality, and extraordinary
generosity.

This was a truly historic event!

Several people at the convention asked me how it all came to be, so let me begin before the beginning, with the fact that down Mexico-way there were a couple of media ecologists, the older one being Octavio Islas who is particularly interested in Marshall McLuhan, and is the kind of guy who knows everyone and is always busy trying to do a million and one things, a very McLuhanesque kind of guy. The younger media ecologist is Fernando Gutiérrez, who is especially fond of Neil Postman, and is a calm, organized type who is good at getting things done.

So, back in the spring of 2003, Fernando went to New York City for a vacation, and went to see and talk to Neil at New York University. Fernando has a picture of himself with Neil displayed in his home from that time. So, Neil told him that if he wanted to learn more about media ecology, he should go to the Media Ecology Association convention, which was being held at Hofstra University on Long Island, Fernando went, and at the end of the event he came over to me, introduced himself, and said that they were very interested in media ecology at his school. I was very pleased myself, not the least because I had been to Mexico City when I was an undergraduate in the seventies (I used to have relatives there), and I wound up going down there several times, the first time to give a public lecture and a small seminar on media ecology at Tech, the second to teach an interdisciplinary faculty seminar on the subject for the entire Tech system (32 campuses in Mexico, plus about a dozen others elsewhere in Latin America), the third time as one of the keynote speakers (there were about ten) at the Fifth Bienal Iberoamericana de la Communicación, which Tech hosted. I should add that it wasn't a problem for them that I only speak English (it is a problem for me, I must say), as they all study it in school, and there was translation services at the Bienal.

So, they were very willing to host an MEA convention, and I was eager to make this happen, especially after Fernando became department chair. The MEA Board of Directors had mixed opinions on the subject, as after all this would be a big step for us, and a big leap of faith, but they eventually gave Mexico their blessings. And last year I went back down there with Thom Gencarelli, who agreed to be the co-coordinator of the convention with Fernando, and Janet Sternberg, for a planning meeting (Thom was then Treasurer, now Vice-President of the MEA, Janet has been Executive Secretary, and I'm El Presidente), after which Thom and Janet were also convinced that the event would be a smashing success.

And so, Thom, Janet, and I flew down to Mexico the day before the convention was scheduled to begin, Tuesday, June 5, and after checking in to the official convention hotel, the Holiday Inn Tlalnepantla, we were able to visit Tech and see numerous workers setting up the elaborate stage for the plenary sessions. And there were enormous posters and banners all over the place with the beautiful design representing the convention--here's one example from the convention website:

This doesn't really do it justice, but it give you an idea of the artwork involved. Also, because our host is a tech school founded by entrepreneurs, they have very good relationships with the business world, and were able to get sponsorship from a variety of sources, and on some of the signs, programs, tags, etc., the logos you see above were accompanied by a bunch of others for Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Coca-Cola (!), and several other companies--it was quite a trip to see the MEA logo placed side by side with these major corporate logos that probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each to develop.

So, on the morning of Wednesday, June 6, the blue bus picked us up at the hotel at 8 (don't ask me why it was blue, it just was, and I couldn't help but think about the lines from "The End" by The Doors:

The blue bus is calling us
The blue bus is calling us
Driver, where are you taking us?

And when we got there, there was an amazing crowd already present, and people pouring in from all over. Overall, there was something on the order of 700-800 people in attendance over the course of the convention, and the vast majority were there right at the beginning for the Welcoming Remarks, because in addition to the Rector (in charge of three Tech campuses), there was the Mayor of the town Tech is technically situated in, Atizapán (within the Mexico City metropolitan area, but a suburb), the President of one of their leading newspapers (equivalent to our NY Times and Washington Post) whose news corporation and his personal foundation both gave major support to the event, and most impressive of all, the Governor of the State of Mexico (one of 32 states that make us the nation, and the most important of them), who was described to me as the second most powerful man in Mexico, and a leading contender to be the next President.

Neil Postman had been quite used to meeting with dignitaries both foreign and domestic, but of course this was a new one on me. The governor arrived late, was accompanied by a number of Mexican secret service types, and surround by a multitude of photographers. Most of the interaction was between the president of the newspaper, El Universal, and the governor, who appeared to know each other quite well. In contrast, the mayor and the governor kept their distance, since they were from opposing political parties. Before the governor came, I had a brief talk with the president of El Universal, me thanking him for his support and the honor of his presence, he thanking me and the MEA for coming to Mexico. Fortunately, I had brought and was wearing the El Universal logo tie I had received as a present at the Bienal, which he commented on and was pleased to see. After the governor arrived, I was eventually called upon to greet him, saying what a pleasure and honor it was to have him there, and him saying the same to me.

There was a formal quality to all this that was unlike anything I had previously encountered with the MEA, and while I think all of us media ecologists were anxious to get going and get into the intellectual exchange that the MEA is really about, I believe everyone understood the importance of respecting the situation and the cultural differences. So, there was about ten of us who made a grand entrance into the hall, and took our seats up on the stage. This included the Rector (in charge of three campuses), the General Manager of our Tech campus, the head of the newspaper owner's foundation, a representative from Microsoft, and Fernando and Thom.

Most of the greetings were made in Spanish, and since every seat in the audience had headphones to receive simultaneous translation, everyone knew what they were saying, except for me and Thom up on the stage. All I knew was every so often they mentioned my name, and the MEA, and I smiled and nodded. I was told that for the most part, what each person said was "thank you" to every other person up on the stage, so that much of the greetings involved each person listing everyone else's names, over and over again.

For my part, I had a short welcoming speech that I had written, and modified as I was told to thank the governor, mayor, president of El Universal, etc. I used less humor than I otherwise would have, and more formal speech than I have in the past. Anyway, seems like this is a good opportunity for me to enter my welcome into the record, or else what's a blogger for? So, here goes:

MEA 2007 Welcome

I am pleased to be able to welcome you to the Eighth Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association. And I want to begin by by acknowledging that with this convention, the MEA has taken a great leap forward. After all, we have never held a meeting outside of New York State or Massachusetts before. And we have never traveled as far south as New Jersey. And now, here we are in Mexico. This is a momentous occasion for the MEA, and I just want to savor it for a moment. [At this point, I paused for a few seconds.]



From the very beginning, we envisioned ourselves to be an international organization, a global network of media ecologists, and this year's convention is the first step towards the full realization of that vision. We formed the MEA at a meeting held at Fordham University on September 4, 1998, and there were five of us there that day, Susan Barnes, Thom Gencarelli, Paul Levinson, Casey Man Kong Lum, and me. And all of us were, at that time, residents of the New York Metropolitan Area. Ever since then, I have repeatedly joked that the MEA is an international organization with most of its membership in New York. But it is becoming harder and harder to make that joke, and I look forward to the time when it will no longer be possible. I look forward to the time when our only meaningful geography is the global village.



At the same time, I should note that the late James W. Carey associated the field of media ecology with what he referred to as American cultural studies, and that Camille Paglia has situated us within what she terms the North American intellectual tradition. And it is true that North America has been the place where most media ecological activity has been occurring. This is not to say that we have a monopoly on media ecology, as we can certainly recognize the contributions of Walter Benjamin, Sigfried Giedion, Jacques Ellul, and Jean Baudrillard, to name a few. But North America has been central for media ecology because it has been a locus for technological innovation, for the development of the media of mass communication, and for interpersonal media as well, and also for the study of communication.



When we speak of American cultural studies and the North American intellectual tradition, the tendency has been to focus on scholarship originating from the United States and Canada, but it is time for Mexico to take its rightful place at this table. And so I want to welcome you to NAFTA, media ecology style.



From now on, when we speak of the geography of media ecology today, we should speak of three great cities: Toronto, where the influence of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis is felt most keenly; New York, where Neil Postman's impact is the greatest; and Mexico City, where Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Estado de México is introducing media ecology to all of the Spanish speaking world, due to the intellectual leadership of Octavio Islas and Fernando Gutierrez. And it is truly a privilege for the Media Ecology Association to meet here at this exciting point in the history of our field.



Monterrey Tech is known around the world as a prestigious university, and as one of the great centers of the field of media ecology, and as a truly hospitable, convivial, and delightful host. We are grateful to you for your support of the Media Ecology Association and its mission. And there are so many people here that have earned our appreciation, I know I cannot name you all, but let me name a few.



And let me begin by thanking the Governor of the State of Mexico, Gobernador del Estado de México, Enrique Peña Nieto, for joining us today for the opening of our convention. Gobernador, you do us a great honor by your presence.



We are also honored by the presence of the Mayor of Atizapán, Mayor Gonzalo Alarcón—thank you for joining us here today.



Next, I would like to acknowledge the man in charge of this campus, and more, Rector de la Zona Centro, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Roberto Rueda. Roberto, you too honor us by taking part in there ceremonies, and we are grateful for your generous support. I also want to express our gratitude to Pedro Grasa, the General Manager of Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Estado de México.



We are grateful for the contributions and support of our patron, Juan Francisco Ealy, President of El Universal. And I also want to acknowledge Enrique Bustamante, Chair
 of the Fundación Ealy Ortiz.



And I must certainly mention my good friend and colleague, a brilliant scholar, and the Academic Coordinator for this event, Octavio Islas, thank you so much Octavio, for everything. I also want to express our appreciation to the Protocol Coordinator, Amaia Arribas, thank you Amaia. And thank you as well to Verónica Rueda who has been handling In Campus Logistics. And speaking for all of us who frequently received e-mail messages from Arturo Caro, who is the Logistics and Invitees Coordinator—we appreciate all your hard work, Arturo.



Now, let me see, did I miss anyone? [Pausing again.] Oh yes, how could I forget the Director of the Departmento de Comunicación and the Convention Co-Coordinator, and my very good friend, Fernando Gutiérrez? Fernando has been indispensable, not only in bringing this convention to Mexico, but in bringing media ecology here as well. Fernando is a great leader, for Monterrey Tech, for Mexico, and for the MEA. And for this reason, I want to tell you now that it is my intention to nominate Fernando for a seat on the MEA's Board of Directors at our General Business Meeting on Sunday morning. As you may know, the twelve directors that make up our board are elected by the members in good standing of the Media Ecology Association, four directors every year, in an election conducted by mail following our annual convention. That will take place after the convention, but for the time being, we have a little something to tide you over.



[At this point, I called upon Thom Gencarelli to present Fernando with a plaque thanking him for his service in coordinating the convention. Only, Thom had forgotten to bring it up with him when he went on the stage. So, he leaped off of the stage, ran back to his seat to get the box with the gift, then ran back up onto the stage to make the presentation to Fernando. After Fernando said a word of thanks, I resumed my welcoming remarks.]



And I will just have to say, thank you Fernando, thank you my friend, thank you.



And to all of you here at Monterrey Tech who have contributed your time, labor, mental energy, and support to our annual meeting, muchas gracias.



Let me also take a moment out to acknowledge and thank the hard work of our other convention co-coordinator, Thom Gencarelli. And thank you to Janet Sternberg, the MEA's executive secretary.



And so, we have arrived at our Convention Number Eight. And eight is a number that symbolizes completion. In music, there are eight notes in an octave. In time-keeping, eight days moves us ahead one week. In computing, eight bits of information make up one byte.
In currency, eight reales became the basic denomination in the New World, the ocho reales coin, later known as the peso. And the ocho reales served as the world's monetary standard until the twentieth century. The ocho reales was the basis of the American dollar, which means that it is also the basis of the Canadian dollar.



The pirates of the Caribbean, among others, spoke of pieces of eight because it was common to make change by cutting the silver coin into eight slices. That is why we refer to a quarter as two bits, and why eight bits give us a complete dollar as well as a complete byte.



Of course, eight is also the root meaning of the name Octavio, so this is truly the Octavio MEA convention.



But I think it is also significant to note that when you turn the numeral eight on its side, you get the symbol for infinity. And this, I think is a very good sign for the future of the Media Ecology Association.



So, let me welcome you all to the future of the Media Ecology Association. Welcome to those of you returning from last year, and to those of you rejoining us from years gone by. Welcome to all of you media ecologists who have come to your first MEA convention, I promise you, you won't be disappointed. To all of you who are media ecologists, welcome to Mexico, but most of all, welcome home.



And welcome to all of you who are new to our field and our tradition, to the novices, novitiates, and newbies. Please, make yourself at home, and let us begin a conversation that will continue for years to come. Welcome to our friends and colleagues from our fellow associations and societies, thank you for joining us here today. Welcome to the faculty and students, media professionals and government officials from Monterrey Tech, from Mexico City, from the state of Mexico, and from the United States of Mexico, from Latin America, from the Caribbean and Canada, from the USA, and from overseas: Welcome to the MEA.



There is something magical about our annual conventions, something unique to media ecology that you just don't find anywhere else, a sense of spirit and synergy, and maybe even a bit of the brujo and bruja, a magic ecology. And I invite you all to take full part in it.



And now, it is my pleasure and my privilege, in my capacity as President of the Media Ecology Association, to declare that this meeting of the MEA is in session, our Eighth Annual Convention is convened, our proceedings may now proceed, we are open for business, the ball is rolling, it has begun.



Vamos!



So, that was my contribution to the opening ceremonies. Afterwards, we plunged into the intellectual exchange, beginning with a featured presentation by Alejandro Piscitelli from Argentina, a true media ecologist although he didn't realize it until he came to the MEA convention. Alejandro spoke about the internet, his approach reminding me of Doug Rushkoff when he talks about the liberating potential of new media.

That afternoon, I chaired a session on religion, media and culture, with really stimulating papers including a critique of the American Bible Society's efforts at translating the Bible into audiovisual media by Joe Kim, who's working on his doctorate at the Dallas Theological Seminary, a paper on Unitarian Universalist videoblogs by Pete Moberg, and a talk on the subject of cultural religion (e.g., Elvis, Trekkies, Deadheads, sports fans, etc.) by Dan Stout of UNLV, editor of the Media and Religion journal.

That evening we were treated to a delightful reception that included some excellent Mexican food. Then, the blue bus took us back to the hotel, where some of us had a drink (or two, or three) at the hotel bar. All in all, it was a fabulous first day.

Last Minute Bloginess

So, between the three days of MEDIA: Overseas Conversations (IV): An International Conference on Media Literacy-Ecology-Studies-Education that I reported on in my last 3 posts, and getting ready for the MEA Convention in Mexico City (see Media Ecology Mexico), which begins on Wednesday morning, there just hasn't been time for the old blog.

I'm not sure how much time, if any, I'll be able to devote to blogism for the next week, but please feel free to tune into the convention. I am told by our hosts, Tecnológico de Monterrey,
Campus Estado de México, that a live video feed will be available from the official convention website, http://www.media-ecology.org.mx/, and you can also review the schedule there to see what you might want to catch, if anything.

I had hoped to squeeze in an entry on last night's penultimate Sopranos episode, which was a very powerful piece of television, but I really don't have the time to compose an entry that would do it justice, so it will just have to wait until I get back, and have time to work on it, which means I'll write an entry for the final two episodes together in about a week and a half.

I did want to note that my prediction about Battlestar Galactica (see Battlestar Galactica Finale and Battlestar Galactica Finalized) has now been confirmed on the SciFi Channel website:

Battlestar Ending Next Season

The producers of SCI FI Channel's Battlestar Galactica confirmed that the upcoming fourth season will be the show's last. Executive producers Ronald Moore and David Eick said that it was a creative decision to end the acclaimed series with the upcoming 22-episode season.

"This show was always meant to have a beginning, a middle and, finally, an end," Eick and Moore said in a statement on May 31. "Over the course of the last year, the story and the characters have been moving strongly toward that end, and we've decided to listen to those internal voices and conclude the show on our own terms. And while we know our fans will be saddened to know the end is coming, they should brace themselves for a wild ride getting there: We're going out with a bang."

In November, a special two-hour Battlestar episode, "Razor," will air. The fourth season kicks off in early 2008.

At last month's Saturn Awards, Edward James Olmos said that the upcoming season would be the show's last, prompting Eick to say at the time that no decision had been made. "I promise you that when Ron and I make a decision about Galactica's future, we'll let you know," he said then.

There also was a column by Michael Cassutt on the same site where he expressed similar sentiments to my own about the quality of Jericho, and its unnecessary cancellation (see my previous posts, Jericho Fit and Audience Abuse), and also introduces the welcome news that CBS may at least approve a TV movie to wrap up the storyline. Here's what he had to say:

June 04, 2007
The Cassutt Files
The Walls Come Tumblin' Down

By Michael Cassutt


The science behind science fiction suddenly makes sense, thanks to Hard SF novelist and working scientist Wil McCarthy.


Award-winning critic John Clute informs and entertains as he shines a light on the most important new books in SF and fantasy.


Scott Edelman, Science Fiction Weekly's editor-in-chief, sounds off about everything and anything that matters in the sci-fi universe.

Apocalypses are hot right now. So saith no lesser authority than Entertainment Weekly, at least when looking at recent novels.

For example, Cormac McCarthy's The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer for fiction—though the novel is impossibly grim, the reading equivalent of being stomped in an alley by monks from A Canticle for Leibowitz. Even more strangely, it was picked up by Oprah's book club. Less strangely, The Road is going to be filmed from a script by Joe Penhall.

Two other recent novels, James Crace's The Pesthouse and Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown, have also been much discussed and possibly even read.

My family's fave, 28 Weeks Later, is still somewhere in theaters, those that aren't running this year's trequels.

Yes, apocalypses are hot—except at CBS, where the promising sci-fi series Jericho, about a small town in Kansas dealing with the horrific aftermath of a nuclear strike on several American cities—was canceled in mid-May.

As the John Mellencamp classic says, more or less, the walls "came tumblin' down."

Jericho was the bomb

Like all baby boomers, I grew up in the shadow of nuclear war. I had nightmares from exposure to early Twilight Zone episodes. I went through the "duck-and-cover drills." I remember feeling a good deal of fear—and sleeping in the basement, as we did during tornado alerts—during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. My small hometown in Wisconsin was near a Nike missile base—for shooting down not Soviet ICBMs, as everyone assumed, but only Soviet bombers.

I read more apocalyptic post-nuclear literature than was probably good for me, notably Pat Frank's chilling Alas, Babylon (1959), about the aftermath of a nuclear war as seen from a small town in Florida, and the classic Walter Miller Jr. novel cited above—the wonderful A Canticle for Leibowitz. I was disappointed (as an action-seeking youth) and later chilled (as a more mature adult, or so I fool myself) by the book and movie On the Beach.

Even that creepy sequence in George Pal's version of Wells' The Time Machine—the atomic satellite looming in the London sky—left an impression on me.

Oh, heck, it would be difficult for me to compile a comprehensive list of the post-nuclear stories I've absorbed.

So I was both pleasantly surprised by CBS' announcement last May that Jericho would be on its fall 2006 schedule, and more than pleased by its first episode.

Here's what I liked about Jericho: That instead of dealing with the nuking of America at the level of, say, 24 (where you talk to the president of the United States on your cell phone), it focused on a small town. It felt like the proper way to view such an event. ...

I also loved the character of Jake Green, the prodigal son who returns to town after a long, painful absence and is forced not only to stay, when the mushroom cloud rises in the west ... but to deal with his estranged family, and his ex-girlfriend.

The casting was good—particular Gerald McRaney as mayor of the troubled town and Lennie James as the mysteriously knowledgeable Robert Hawkins. The writing was smart. The events proceeded with a ruthless logic: the breakdown of civil authority, shortages of food and medicine, the problems of refugees and freelance paramilitary groups ... Jericho touched on all of them.

It also perfectly captured what is alluring about a post-nuclear world—the chance to be free of the past and the complications of everyday life, and to start over.

When the series returned in February, it was with a striking story that explored Jake's backstory as well as the larger conspiracy behind the nukes.

(By the way, has anyone commented on the similarities between Jericho and the climactic revelations on Heroes? I'm not talking about influence and certainly not plagiarism, but that whole zeitgeist thing.)

Unfortunately, the gap between the first half of Jericho's season and its return—from late November to early February—was fatal. The 2007 episodes reached 1.9 million fewer viewers than the first bunch. With viewership falling below CBS' threshold for renewal, Jericho was gone.

Too much flash, not enough bang

Tempting as it is to blame the network, it isn't entirely fair. Jericho's writing and production team made several choices that hurt the show's chances.

NOT ENOUGH LIGHT—Here I'm talking about tone. Yes, we've had a nuclear exchange; yes, people are starving; yes, the citizens of New Bern are being badasses. Every now and then you've got to lighten it up. Jericho permitted itself no jokes, none of the battlefield humor found in, say, Band of Brothers. There ought to have been a storyline about, say, what happened to the high-school basketball team—or some citizen with a quirky hobby. Something with a few laughs.

TOO MUCH LIGHT—In this case, I mean physical light. Limited by a television budget and schedule, downtown Jericho was a backlot and its outskirts some of the same locations seen in C.S.I.—the golden hills around Valencia, a town north of Los Angeles. You can get horror out of a sunny sky: look at the Mad Max movies. But it never played as a convincing Kansas winter to me.

BACKSTORY VS. FRONTSTORY—The writers who originally developed Jericho—Josh Schaer and Jonathan E. Steinberg—reportedly imagined a fabulous five years' worth of developments. But the series didn't get a go-ahead until that original pilot was reshaped by Stephen Chbowsky into the compelling first episode we saw, with Jake's return. The backstory as finally teased was interesting, however, and should have been exposed earlier.

HEROIC CONFUSION—I noted this in my last column ("The Mikeys"). Jake Green failed to be the central hero—am I detecting resistance by actor Skeet Ulrich? There were great action set pieces where he was off to one side observing, or letting some other character seize the moment, or absent. The series let Lennie James' Robert character dominate the screen time. It was a natural mistake—Robert was the mystery man with the cache of weapons and the ties to the forces behind the bombs.

Maybe Jake needed to be the one who knew about the big conspiracy.

CBS executive Nina Tassler, responding to criticism from fans over the cancellation, has opened the door to some sort of concluding episode—perhaps a TV movie? I hope so, but it won't change the fact that Jericho joins the long list of promising sci-fi series that died a premature death.

Too bad. I would have enjoyed seeing it develop.

Some good points, not that I agree with everything he had to say, but when does that ever happen?

So, so much for my last minute bloginess, time to go finishing packing, get a few hours sleep, and it's off to the airport and south of the border.

Last Round of Screenings and Conversations

So, today was the third and final day of MEDIA: Overseas Conversations (IV): An International Conference on Media Literacy-Ecology-Studies-Education (see my last two posts, Screenings and Conversations and More Conversations). Today, like yesterday, the conference was held at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus. And there was more unexpected traffic getting in today, this time on the Westside Highway, but not as bad as yesterday.

Anyway, today we started at 10 AM with a screening. Here's the write-up from the program:

10:00AM-11:00AM: SCREENING –
Curator: The Reel Teens Festival

The Reel Teens Festival is an annual three day event held in early June that celebrates the creative genius of young people by screening films and videos made by teenagers from across the United States and around the world. Prizes are awarded in 9 categories, Fiction, Short Fiction (under 10 minutes), Documentary, Short Documentary (under 10 minutes), Animation, Claymation, Visual Arts, Music Video, and PSA (Public Service Announcements). An open dialogue with the young filmmakers are held during each screening. This year the finalists will be chosen from over 600 entries received. The winners are announced at the festival. www.reelteens.org

I Look Good
Mitchell White, Jordan Estes -Ages 17
A parody of a European pop song.
Music Video
New Orleans, Louisiana

The Tear
Jack Durnin - Age 19
What happens to a stray bullet or missed shot?
Animation
Grafton, New York

No Cinderella Story
Michael Keenan- Age 17
Study of sex among teens on Staten Island.
Short Documentary
Staten Island, New York

Wonderful World
Aaron Hall -Age18
A look at the world through a Louis Armstrong song.
Visual Arts
Olive Bridge, New York

Green Thumb
Peter Pa - Age 17
A teen examines his relationship with his mother.
Short Documentary
Lynn, Massachusetts

Helmet
Marty Cain - Age 15
A PSA for skateboarders.
PSA
Marlboro, Vermont

Runaway Ball
Dan Cayea - Age 17
The adventures of a wayward ball.
Visual Arts
Boiceville, New York

Reciprocity
Ian Dalesky, Patrick Dawn - Ages17
How far can an act of kindness go?
Short Fiction
Bend, Oregon

The Spirit Within Us
La Shae Brooks - Age 11
A celebration of nature and life on the Boise Forte Reservation.
Visual Arts
Nett Lake Village, Minnesota

Anti-Smoking
Jennifer Peters - Age 17
PSA
Golden Valley, Minnesota

A Day in the Life of a Russian in the US of A
Alex Yeremenko - Age 18
The typical every day occurrences of a Russian teen in America.
Short Fiction
Columbus, Ohio

Listen To Yourself
Michael Pantzer - Age 17
When you know you shouldn’t do something listen to yourself.
PSA
Loudonville, New York

Face
Kari Jo Skogquest - Age17
A multimedia stop-motion animation reflecting journeys of the self.
Animation
Golden Valley, Minnesota

Prom Night
Henry Street Settlement - Ages 16 -18
A gay teen seeks acceptance from his friends as prom night approaches.
Fiction
New York, New York

Inertia
Erica Eng - Age 17
Breaking the hum drum boredom of a dull class.
Visual Arts
Oakland, California

This Reel Teens group is headquartered upstate, and it was an interesting coincidence that they work out of Saugerties, NY, which is not only the site of the original Woodstock festival, but also the town where Neil Postman and his colleagues at New York University held the annual Media Ecology Conference for his graduate students, at Sacks Lodge (now converted into a tennis camp)--many good memories from there. Anyway, they're having a film festival on June 8th to 11th, the information is on their website, www.reelteens.org. As for the screening, the short films were all very impressive in their production values, very professional looking. I wasn't all that thrilled with their content, however, as they were largely imitative, for example of familiar types of music videos, public service announcements, and the like, one even was an attempt to do a kind of Borat. And they were full of clichés, in form as well as content, using visual and musical clichés. I think I was in the minority in holding this opinion, I should add, but on the whole I liked Thursday's screenings from the European Observatory of Children’s Television, and especially from Listen Up! much better, thank you.

The second set of screenings were of Machinima, the term being a contraction of Machine and Cinema, and it consisted of videos made from videogames visuals. Here's what it says in the program:

SCREENING – Curators: Carl Goodman - deputy director of Digital Media at The Museum of the Moving Image and Lars Fuchs – Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.

The Machinima Phenomenon is a new form of film making that uses computer games technology to shoot films in the virtual reality of a game engine. Rather than picking up expensive camera equipment, or spending months tweaking more expensive 3D packages, Machinima creators act out their movies within a computer game. www.machinima.org

Carl Goodman is deputy director of Digital Media at The Museum of the Moving Image, www.movingimage.us where he oversees the museum’s use and study of digital media and technology. He has served as the Museum’s Curator of Digital Media, organizing exhibitions including Digital Media, a gallery of software-based art, Digital Play, presenting historical arcade and contemporary home video games, and co-produced Behind the Screen, in the museum’s core exhibition. Goodman serves on the Board of Directors of Creative Time and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center.

A selection of recent short video works made within video game environments and online virtual worlds will be shown.

As was explained in the introduction, machinima has the advantage of being accessible, relatively easy to create, and based on established relationships, meaning that they are made by game players for other game players. The 3 major turning points are 1996 when the first movies based on Quake were produced, 1998 when the term machinima was coined, and 2002, when the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences (obviously tongue in cheek, but they do have awards) was founded, and the first festival and awards presentation was held at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. We saw a number of different examples, some just clips, some complete. Some were like music videos, some artsy, some truly hilarious, like when videogame soldiers are standing around questioning the reality they find themselves in, or in one instance, conducting a talk show interview (shades of Space Ghost Coast to Coast). Here's one of the most famous one's, Red vs Blue Episode 1:





Another one we viewed was from This Spartan Life Episode 1 Module 3, which presented an interview with Bob Stein, founder of Voyager (the company that put out books and experimental programs on CD-ROM published in the 90s):




Another good one was a machinima recreation of a movie scene, A Few Good G-Men:




And this one, The 1k Project II was surreal and way cool:



And finally, here's one about Second Life that reminds me of the brilliant short film, La Jetée (see my earlier post, The Jetty Stream), entitled My Second Life (Episode 1):




I got a great kick out of this stuff, and it reminds me of how, back in the 80s, I used to record videogames on my VCR and add a music soundtrack, just to try to get a weird result. I didn't save any of them, but I do have a VHS from a comedy group I was in, with a few skits, and one of the skits, which I came up with, involves a sportscaster doing a play-by-play of a Pong match, where the ball moves back and forth between two stationary paddles. One of these days, I should digitize that video and get it on YouTube.

Anyway, I had a delightful lunch with Renee Hobbes from Temple University, who's one of the leading media literacy scholars in the United States, and she was on the panel discussion that followed later in the afternoon, which was on media literacy, natch. We had points of view from the Philippines, Venezuela, and Australia, as well as the U. S., and the session was moderated by my good friend, Thom Gencarelli. Here's the program information:

Media Literacy as a Core Educational Element across Pedagogical Systems

The role of media literacy as a central component in education will be examined and discussed from an international perspective. How do teachers promote effective media literacy education and critical thinking skills within their school system?

Feny de los Angeles Bautista is co-founder and now executive director of two non-governmental organizations committed to children: Community of Learners Foundation (COLF) and the Philippine Children’s Television Foundation, Inc. (PCTVF). She was executive director of the Philippine Children’s Television. PCTVF produced the multi-awarded program for young children, BATIBOT, Radyo Batibot, PINPIN and a pioneering TV magazine for parents entitled PG (Parent’s Guide). She started her work in children’s television as research and curriculum director of the Philippine Sesame Street Project. She also served as the first chairperson of the National Council for Children’s Television of the Philippines. She holds an MS degree in Educational Leadership from Bank Street College of Education in New York and a degree in Family Life and Child Development from the University of the Philippines. www.colf.bayandsl.ph

Patricia Edgar is best known as the founding director of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation (ACTF) and was the chair of the Children’s Program Committee of the Australian Broadcasting Tribunal where she was instrumental in the establishment of program standards for children’s television.. In March 1995, she conceived and hosted the first World Summit on Television and Children. The Summit, held in Melbourne, began a worldwide movement under the auspices of The World Summit on Media for Children Foundation which she chairs. Summits have been held in London (1998), Thessalonica, Greece (2001), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2004), and South Africa (March 2007). A Sixth Summit is to take place in Sweden in 2010. She was awarded the Australian College of Education Medal in 1998 and an Achiever Award in 2001from the Committee for Melbourne in recognition of her outstanding contribution to education through the medium of television. In 2002 she was presented with the AFI Longford Life Achievement Award, the highest accolade the Australian Film Institute can bestow on an individual. She is the author of eight books and numerous articles and reports and holds a PhD from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. www.5wsmc.com

Victor Fuenmayor, is a professor of the Doctoral Program at the Department of Humanities, Zulia University, Maracaibo, Venezuela. He received a PhD in Spanish Literature at Sorbonne University, Paris and a second PhD in Semiology at the University of Paris VII. He also studied with Ronald Barthes at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris. His distinguished career includes in-depth practices and investigation in music, dance and movement. He has published extensively on semiotics, communication, literature and art, as well as several novels and poetry books. He received the poetry award at the IX Biennial Jose Antonia Ramos Sucre. He has participated on several Latin American and Caribbean arts and education UNESCO projects.

Renee Hobbs directs the Media Education Lab at Temple University and is a co-founder of the Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA). She co-directed the PhD program in Mass Media and Communication at Temple University in 2004-2005 and currently hosts the Media Smart Seminars, a free professional development program for Philadelphia educators, media professionals and community leaders. She has published articles in scholarly and professional publications and has created videotapes, teacher guides, lesson plans and curriculum materials about integrating media literacy into K-12 instruction. Her video on media literacy Tuning in to Media, received a Parent’s Choice Award and her curriculum on analyzing the documentary genre, KNOW TV, received the golden Cable ACE Award in 1994. Ms. Hobbs received an Ed.D from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. http://mypopstudio.com, http://reneehobbs.org, http://mediasmartphilly.com

Moderator: Thom Gencarelli, was formerly associate professor and deputy chair of the Department of Broadcasting at Montclair State University in New Jersey. This June he will become chair of the Department of Communication at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York. Thom is vice president of the Media Ecology Association, and a past president of both the New York State Communication Association and the New Jersey Communication Association. His research includes work in popular cultural criticism with a particular emphasis on popular music, and in media literacy/media education, wherein he has sought to fuse media literacy efforts with media studies via the particular branch of media studies known as media ecology. He is currently working on a book about language acquisition and Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.
www.manhattan.edu http://coverpage.montclair.edu/home.php?username=gencarellit

Victor Fuenmayor had some interesting things to say, relating media literacy to the theory of multiple intelligences, and I was fascinated to hear that he spends a semester doing an analysis of the first 12 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey (I spend a class going over some of the scenes myself when I teach Science Fiction). Renee mentioned that there was a bit of a conflict going on within the media literacy movement between those who insist on a critical orientation and those who take a professional approach to media literacy (I noted that this reproduces a conflict that exists in many communication departments). Renee also talked about many of the concerns revolving around copyrights, which is creating problems for school teachers and librarians afraid of violating our overly strong and overly ambiguous regulations.

The conference ended with a bang, not a whimper:

5-6:00PM – Closing Remarks

Douglas Rushkoff, New York University – Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other’s values. He sees “media” as the landscape where this interaction takes place, and “literacy” as the ability to participate consciously in it.

His ten best-selling books on new media and popular culture have been translated to over thirty languages. They include Cyberia, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism, and Coercion, winner of the Marshall McLuhan Award for best media book. Rushkoff also wrote the acclaimed novels Ecstasy Club and Exit Strategy and graphic novel, Club Zero-G. He has just finished a book for Harper Business, applying renaissance principles to today’s complex economic landscape, Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out. He’s now writing a monthly comic book for Vertigo called Testament.

He has written and hosted two award-winning Frontline documentaries – The Merchants of Cool looked at the influence of corporations on youth culture, and The Persuaders, about the cluttered landscape of marketing, and new efforts to overcome consumer resistance.

Rushkoff writes a monthly column for science magazine, Discover and another for the music and culture magazine, Arthur. His commentaries have aired on CBS Sunday Morning and NPR’s All Things Considered, and have appeared in publications from the New York Times to Time magazine. He wrote the first syndicated column on cyberculture for the New York Times and Guardian of London, as well as a column on wireless for The Feature. Rushkoff founded the Narrative Lab at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and lectures about media, art, society, and change at conferences and universities around the world.

He is Advisor to the United Nations Commission on World Culture, on the Board of Directors of the Media Ecology Association, The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, and as foundling member of Technorealism. He has been awarded Senior Fellowships by the Markle Foundation, the Center for Global Communications, and the International University of Japan. He is finishing a dissertation on biases of media for Utrecht University

Rushkoff graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, received an MFA in Directing from California Institute of the Arts, a post-graduate fellowship (MFA) from The American Film Institute, and a Director’s Grant from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences www.rushkoff.com

Doug's a great speaker (he's a good friend too, but everyone agrees that he's a great speaker). I'll try to give you some sense of what he talked about. He said that what people were doing at this conference was pretty insignificant, when lined up against the powerful media industries, and noted that when it comes to media literacy, we always seem to be teaching about the previous medium--through writing, we created a civilization of listeners, through printing, we created a civilization of readers, and now with the internet we've created a civilization of writers (this blog being an example of that). He argued that as long as we remain one step behind we remain ignorant of the biases of the contemporary media, and as long as we remain ignorant of the biases of the contemporary media, "we're fucked" (I am simply reporting on what he said here). He then had a good line, "Do you think that Dick Cheney cares about all this? Let them eat blog!" I love that, "let them eat blog," that should be good for a blog post here at some point in the future. He then went on to say that it's no difference, as producers we're still consumers, paying for online access, for equipment, for programs, etc., and then maybe they won't sue you if you use a little piece of the culture you grew up with.

Doug went on to note, as some other participants had previously, that we're immigrants as far as the new media environment is concerned, while children today are the digital natives, but all corporations are concerned with is how they can use this, exploit what the kids are doing. If the bias of the medium is to sell toys, then storytelling will adapt to this and alter the narrative to suit the commercial requirements. He also noted that that's why evolution has become a theme in youth programs, because that means you have to keep buying newer models of toys.

He said that when he was a kid, the powers that be didn't really understand computers, so they taught him and others how to program, which means building an environment, a world, and which teaches us to look critically at our own world because it too may be a social construction. But as computer use became more widespread, and the time people spent on the internet started to have an effect on TV ratings, they tried to make the internet more about content than contact (nice turn of phrase, there, content vs. contact).

As a metaphor for all this, he talked about a kid getting a videogame. First he plays it until he gets stuck, playing is the first level. Then he goes online and gets the cheat codes (my son does this all the time), which means he's still playing, but has stepped outside of the frame of the game to do so. Once he's completed or mastered the game, he goes back to the internet and learns how to program the game, or at least create modules for it, and in this way becomes a writer. But he typically doesn't get to the final level, of being an actual programmer. Doug's core argument is that we need to be programmers (as a metaphor for getting to the heart and code of things, taking control for ourselves). He called this a "deep literacy," and suggested that the war on the university is a war on deep literacy, and also pointed out that we have been farming out computer programming/coding to places like India and China, and this is a really stupid thing to do, because whoever controls the code controls the whole ballgame.

In the question and answer session, he used a relatively new term, crowdsourcing--here's the beginning of the Wikipedia entry:

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for a business model in which a company or institution takes a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsources it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call over the Internet. The work is compensated with little or no pay in most cases. However, in a few examples the labor is well-compensated. In almost every case crowdsourcing relies on amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time to create content, solve problems, or even do corporate R&D.

In a mild form, all of the blogs we create are crowdsourcing for Blogger, we generate content, bringing people here, and Blogger benefits from the advertising. MySpace would be an even better example. But of course there are more extreme versions, and the mysterious case of X-13D that I wrote about in a recent post would be an even better example. So, anyway, crowdsourcing is another way in which the corporations are using the good characteristics of the internet for their own not-so-good ends. Another nice insight that he had was that the reason conservatives are opposed to teaching evolution is not just for religious reasons, but because evolution means that change and progress is possible, and conservatives are against change.

I pointed out that if everyone was a programmer, and if the code was constantly being rewritten, we'd have a pretty chaotic and unstable society, kind of mob rule at best, using the example of the Constitution of the United States, which was framed by a select group of really bright guys, who designed it so it could be modified, but not on the spur of the moment,not without some effort. Doug conceded the point, and concluded that what's important is that the people who get to do the programming (he had been talking about them as 15% of the population) get to do it based on merit, and that everyone has the opportunity to understand exactly what they're doing. An excellent end to an excellent talk. And a fine conference as well.

Now, I am really tired, and I have much to do to get ready for the Media Ecology Association convention in Mexico City, which starts on Wednesday, so that's all for now.

More Conversations

It was Day Two of MEDIA: Overseas Conversations (IV): An International Conference on Media Literacy-Ecology-Studies-Education (see my last post, Screenings and Conversations), with today's events being held at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus, which meant that I was responsible for the event. So, I'm getting ready this morning, and it turns out someone's climbed up onto the cables of the George Washington Bridge (my way into the city), and they've stopped all traffic (I'm sure lots of people were saying, "jump already so we can get going"). Well, I understand that he didn't jump, and rescue workers got him down safely, but this made for a bit of a delay right when I needed to get across the Hudson and down to 60th St. to make sure everything was okay with the set-up. Somehow, though, they got traffic moving quickly, and it was heavy but no delays heading down the Westside Highway, and I got there just a wee bit late (still almost an hour before we were due to begin).

No screenings today, just 3 panel discussions. Here's the write-up on the first one:

New Technologies and Early Childhood Language Development

This panel will discuss current and emerging screen media (including ipods, cell phones, video cameras and digital storytelling) as tools in contemporary early childhood learning environments. What are the benefits and how are they used to support young children’s language learning in developmentally appropriate ways?

Robert Albrecht teaches theory and history courses in the Media Arts Department at New Jersey City University. He holds a PhD from the Department of Communications and Culture at NYU. He has published numerous articles on the relationship of media and culture in both Latin America and the United States. Albrecht’s book, Mediating the Muse: A Communications Approach to Music, Media and Cultural Change (2005), was awarded the Dorothy Lee Prize for its contribution to “scholarship in the ecology of culture.” He is also the recipient of an Organization of American States Fellowship for study in Brazil as well as the Carlos Vigil Prize. He has served as Arts Editor to ETC. and currently serves on the editorial board of several communications journals.

Renee Cherow-O’Leary is currently a professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University in the Department of Humanities. Prior to this, she was a professor of Media Studies at Rutgers University. She was director of research for the magazine Group at Children’s Television Workshop and national coordinator of the media literacy curriculum “Creating Critical Viewers” developed by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. She is co-chair of the 2007 Alliance for a Media-Literate America’s first Research Summit. She holds a PhD in Culture and Communications from NYU.

Martin Levinson is vice president of the New York Society for General Semantics. and the Institute for General Semantics. He is currently doing educational consulting, teaching and counseling work. He is the author of books and numerous articles on general semantics formulations. He holds a PhD. His latest books include Sensible Thinking for Turbulent Times (2006) and Practical Fairy Tales for Everyday Living (2007). www.nysgs.org

Katherine Liepe-Levinson, founder of Muse Educational Resources, Inc. USA, has worked in the fields of education, prevention, and the performing arts for over two decades. She holds a PhD. Her workshops including stress and anger management, cultural diversity training and bully-prevention, explore topical issues through traditional therapeutic models and the techniques of the professional actor.

Moderator: Margaret Cassidy is an associate professor in Communications at Adelphi University. Her specializations include media history, K-12 media literacy, and current debates/controversies in media studies. She has written Bookends: The Changing Media Environment of American Classrooms and is currently researching and writing Digital Dilemmas: Ethics and Educational Technology contracted with Zephyr Press. She holds a PhD from New York University.

This first session was essentially a media ecology panel, with everyone connected more or less to Neil Postman and the old New York University media ecology program. Renee was a member of the first class of doctoral students enrolled in the program (starting 1971), Bob was my classmate, and Peggy got her MA with us at Fordham and then got her PhD in the program. Marty wasn't in the media ecology program, but in another one on English Education (the media ecology program was in the School of Education), and Neil Postman was his mentor, and Kathy is Marty's wife, so she is a media ecologist by marriage, but both of them are very involved with general semantics, both the New York Society for General Semantics and the Institute of General Semantics.

Renee began, talking about how children learn language, drawing on the theories of Lev Vygotsky about the internalization of language and other media, and using the Teletubbies as an example of children's media aimed at babies and based on an understanding of early childhood language development. Renee was pretty much in favor of technology, of understanding it, adapting to it, and using it, and this reflects Postman's own views back when he started the media ecology program circa 1970, before he became a great critic of TV and technology circa 1979.

Kathy talked about her own work in the New York City school system teaching drama and dance as part of an arts education initiative, and she talked about how this was used in conjunction with anger management and other forms of self-management where the goal is to eliminate violent and self-destructive behavior. It's all about trying to improve emotional intelligence, and she also discussed using uploaded photographs to teach about facial expressions and emotional cues.

During the question and answer session, I made some comments about theory of mind, the informal theory that we typically form that other people have minds like our own, so that we interpret their behavior in terms of underlying motivations, decision-making, and other mental process, which also includes considering the possibility of deception. There is an argument that's been made that the main deficit for people with autism is an inability to form a theory of mind, which is linked to major problems with linguistic development, and this idea is associated with, among others, Simon Baron-Cohen (brother of Sacha, so some think the Borat character is based on individuals with autism). It's pretty fascinating stuff, and relates to both Renee's and Kathys' presentations. Here's a link to Simon Baron-Cohen's Autism Research Centre, and to a site selling his DVD of Mind Reading: The Interactive Guide to Emotions, which uses video of facial expressions of emotion to teach theory of mind (which he also refers to as mind reading). A great book, from a theoretical perspective, whether you are interested in autism or just language development and human evolution is Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. A more recent work of his that generated a great deal of discussion is The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth About Autism.

On a different topic, an interesting anecdote Kathy related during the question-and-answer session was about an experience she had trying to get high school students in the Bronx to sign up for a dance program. No one signed up at all at first, so instead of asking students to participate in a dance program, she asked them to sign up for a dance video, and she got 60 students to come.

Marty Levinson read a satirical essay where he talked about replacing the 3 R's with the 3 I's, Imaging, Interneting, and Integer punching--a modest proposal. And Bob represented the critical view, reminding us about how Postman had argued that it was a mistake to think of capitalists as being conservative, that instead they have a reckless commitment to innovation and change in which profit is the only consideration, not the well being of our children. He suggested that when we talk about computers as technologies to be used in the classroom, we also think of drama, music, and art as technologies for education that deserve equal if not greater funding. And Bob was pretty much dismayed by Renee's optimism, but that's Bob for you.

All in all, it was a pretty stimulating panel. It was followed by one that I moderated on comics and graphic novels, a longtime interest of mine. Here's the write-up on it from the program:

Comics and Graphic Novels in Contemporary Youth Culture

In the age of the digital media revolution, the popularity of comics has endured and graphic novels have become quite a rage, within contemporary youth culture
Panelists will share their experiences as creators, critics, educators and organizers of international comic book festivals.

Michael Bitz is the founding director of The Comic Book Project www.comicbookproject.org at Teachers College/Columbia University. An internationally recognized innovator in education, he has worked to establish creativity at the core of academic learning, and he has done so for some of the most vulnerable children in the United States and elsewhere

Gerard Jones is the author of several books about "junk entertainment" and its relationship to American culture: "Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book," "Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Superheroes and Make-Believe Violence," "Honey I'm Home: Sitcoms Selling the American Dream," "The Beaver Papers: The Story of the Lost Season," and others. He was also a prolific comic book writer in the 1980s and 1990s, working on major properties for DC and Marvel Comics (Green Lantern, Batman, Spider-Man) and creating several acclaimed independent comics. He has also developed storytelling workshops for children and consulted with schools and entertainment companies on the developmental role of children's media. He is a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto and the father of a 14-year-old boy. www.gerardjones.com

Benoit Mouchart is an author, exhibitions curator and since 2003, artistic director of cultural programming of Angouleme International Comics Festival, in France. He has a Masters of Literature from Sorbonne University in Paris. He is the author of several books including research on Jacques Van Melkebeke and in collaboration with Francois Riviere, a biography of Edgar P. Jacobs, creator of “Blake and Mortimer” .He has been a critic of Bang and 9e, and contributed to the comic strip of the French magazines Geo, Telerama, Science and Life, and Beaux-Arts magazine. www.bdangouleme.com

Masami Toku is an associate professor of art education at California State University, Chico. She is the general director of the project Power of Girls’ Comics and of the international touring exhibition of Girls’ Power! Shojo Manga! Her research interest is the cross-cultural study of children’s artistic and aesthetic developments in their pictorial world and how visual popular culture influences children’s visual literacy. Her recent collaborative research project is a cross-cultural study of the relationship between art and children’s comprehensive ability in Japan and the United States. She holds a PhD. She is the editor of the online Journal, Cultural Diversity in Art and Education www.csuchico.edu/~mtoku.webae and Visual Cultural Research in Art and Education www.csuchico.edu/~mtoku/vc

Moderator – Lance Strate is a professor of Communication and Media Studies and director of the Graduate Program in Public Communication at Fordham University. He is a founding member and also the president of the Media Ecology Association and editor of Explorations in Media Ecology. He holds a PhD from New York University. He is the author of several books including Echoes and Reflections: On Media Ecology as a Field of Study and co-editor of several anthologies including The Legacy of McLuhan and Communication and Cyberspace. http://lancestrate.blogspot.com
www.media-ecology.org

This session was a great deal of fun. As moderator, I began by confessing that I had been reading comics since, well, since before I could read--actually, it came as a great relief to my parents when I learned how to read and they didn't have to read them to me any longer. I mentioned the terrible stigma that comics had when I was a kid, and how I thought it was connected to the fact that it's a hybrid medium--high art tends to be pure--for example classical music tends to be only music--add lyrics, make it a song, and it becomes a lower art form. And while I was discouraged from reading comics, because I was a voracious reader of books as well, I was able to ignore the criticism. I mentioned how much things have changed, that today we're happy if kids are reading anything at all, as opposed to watching TV, playing videogames, and surfing the web.

I also wondered if comics had not become too abstract, too low-definition (in McLuhan's terms, a cool medium), in contrast to the high definition (hot medium) of computer-generated graphics, photorealism, and digital photography. I also wondered if comics still is that much of a youth medium, with so much of the market being made up of the middle-aged like me (as it turns out, this is not an issue in other parts of the world, where comics are firmly entrenched as a youth medium). And I wondered if the medium had become obsolescent, noting McLuhan's point that media tend to fade into the background, become environmental and therefore all but invisible to us, until they become obsolescent, when we start to take notice of them again. Could this be why we've had studies of comics as a medium coming from the late Will Eisner and the brilliant Scott McCloud in recent decades? McLuhan also said that the obsolescent medium becomes an art form, and comics have also been recognized as an art from over the past few decades.

So, the panel discussion was quite interesting, with Masami talking about Japanese comics, known as manga, and Benoit talking about the massive influence of manga on the French comics scene. In contrast, Gerard (who, as I mentioned in yesterday's post,Screenings and Conversations, I had a great talk with the previous evening at the reception held for us at the offices of Listen Up!), gave an overview of comics history in the U.S., talking about how the comics industry always was marginalized, perhaps due to the fear of images coming out of Puritan/Protestant culture (which is based on Judaism's original prohibition against imagery and idolatry, ironic considering that most of the creators of the first comic books were Jewish), and how they were cheap to produce, for example by bypassing the need to pay linotype operators and instead just hiring teenage kids (almost all sons of working class immigrants, Jewish, but also Italian, Irish, a regular New York mix). Finally, Michael talked about educational comics, but mostly about his Comic Book Project, where grade school teachers help students to express themselves by making their own comics, and he showed us some examples of such student work (which I thought a great parallel to yesterday's screenings of student-made videos).

Gerard's friend Jerry Robinson was in attendance. He was hired as a teenager by Batman creator Bob Kane to help with the artwork, and wound up creating The Joker and co-creating Robin (the Boy Wonder), and I was very pleased to have a chance to meet him and chat with him a bit. Two of my undergraduates came for the session, Jonathan Hogan (who's doing a senior honors thesis with me next year on Iron Man), and Brian McNamera (both were in my Science Fiction class this past spring semester), and I was pleased to be able to introduce the two fan-boys to Gerard Jones, who they knew from his days writing Green Lantern, Batman, and Spider-Man.

The final session was on new media in general, and here's what the program said:

New Media and Social Networking

Panelists will converse on contemporary modes of communication including blogs, vlogs, text-messaging, emails, games and sharing multimedia messages through new media platforms. A range of websites, from My Space to Linked-In to Second Life to You Tube, as an integral part of current social exchange and popular culture, will be discussed.

Robert W. Kubey is professor of Journalism and Media Studies, and director of the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers University. His publications have focused on the psychological experience of media and the state of media literacy education in the United States and worldwide. He has been an Annenberg Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow. He holds a PhD from the Committee on Human Development, Department of Behavioral Sciences at the University of Chicago. He has published over 50 journal articles and book chapters as well as his latest book: Creating Television: Conversations with the People behind 50 Years of American TV www.mediastudies.rutgers.edu www.creatingtv.rutgers.edu

Robert Logan is professor emeritus of Physics at the University of Toronto. He is also a senior fellow at the following institutes: The Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary and the Best Institute for Strategic Creativity at the Ontario College of Art and Design. He obtained his B.S.and his PhD from M.I.T. He was active at McLuhan’s Center for Culture and Technology from 1974 to 1980 where he collaborated and published with Marshall McLuhan. He was a policy advisor to Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and numerous cabinet ministers. A selection of his writings can be found at www.physics.utoronto.ca/~logan.

Vitor Reia-Baptista is a professor at the University of Algarve, Portugal with a PhD in Communication and Education - Media Pedagogy; and the Coordinator of CICCOM - the Research Center for Communication Sciences, where he is coordinating several research projects about media literacy, intercultural communication and new environments of media exposure. He is a member of the steering group of the European Charter for Media Literacy www.euromedialiteracy.eu He was also the Coordinator of the Portuguese research teams within several international projects such as Educaunet www.educaunet.org -a European program to develop critical awareness of internet risks through media education; Glocal Youth www.glocalyouth.net/eng/index.htm - an intercultural project about media products for young people; Mediappro www.mediappro.org -a research project about youngsters’ appropriations of internet and new technologies, especially mobile phones, video games and multimedia supports.

Bu Wei is a professor and the director of the Research Center for Media and Children at the Institute of Journalism and Communication in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China. Her main research fields include media and children; feminist media studies; empowering vulnerable (marginal) groups through communication; and social sciences methodology in communication research. Bu Wei has a Bachelor of Arts, Department of Chinese Literature and Languages, Beijing Normal University, and a Master of Law from Journalism School, People’s University. She is the initiator and coordinator for the website Combating-Domestic Violence Network of China Law Society. www.stopdv.org.cn

Moderator: Mark Glaser, is the editor of PBS Mediashift, a blog looking at the way technology and the internet are changing media. Glaser is a longtime journalist and columnist, writing in the past about hip-hop music, videogames, eco-travel and tech gadgets. He lives in San Francisco. www.pbs.org/mediashift

To be honest, this session was a little disappointing because not all that much was said about social networking, and having started a blog, gotten heavily into MySpace, and even uploaded a video onto YouTube this year, I was hoping to hear much more about the topic. Mark was very interesting, to be sure, and I would have liked to have heard more from him. My friend Bob Logan always has some interesting things to say, I should add. I also enjoyed hearing Vitor's European perspective on media literacy, and BU Wei's report on China. And Bob Kubey had some interesting things to say about how we tend to feel uncomfortable with unstructured time, and with being alone, and that's why we turn to media such as television and the internet. So it all was interesting, but not enough on role-playing games, Second Life, podcasts and videoblogs, and all that Web 2.0 stuff, and too much on copyright, which I've heard enough agonizing about, thank you.

Still and all, a very stimulating day, and a very successful two thirds of the conference. Now, it's off to bed, I have to get up early again to get back down to our Lincoln Center campus for the last day.