Recent Research
Everything Is 'Breaking': Live News Space, Then and Now
Paper presented at MIT Media in Transition 8 conference, May 2013
Abstract: The concept of 'live-ness' in visual media emerges from the now archaic inception of broadcast news, and yet television as a medium anticipated new media in its ability to articulate the screen (or screens) as a direct portal between private and public space. In the television context, live-ness represents, specifically, the capacity to join disparate geographies across the broadcast surface – the private viewer space and the public-space share a single stream of time, and television acts as the proverbial “window to the world,” through which the viewer passes between private and public spheres. Television as the dominant pipeline of content now begins to fade, but what the new media landscape inherits from it is the residue of 'live-ness' - the live webcast, the live feed, the webcam, real-time updates, etc. – and to be live is to be public. New media, then, are 'live', always-on places where the user is also the producer, where news is forever potentially breaking, and where the portal between private and public experience is permanently open.
Other Talks/Research Areas
The City as Information Space
Information, Architecture, and Power
From August Sander to The Maysles Brothers - The Modern Portrait Project
The Making of the Present: Modernism and the American Newsreel
Teaching / Course Titles
Archive Fever: Understanding and Building Digital Archives [proposed]
The Culture of Information [info studies]
Media and Democracy [media studies]
Narrative Cinema [film history & theory]
Power 101 [CAPA lecture series]
Media Technology and Social Change [media history]
Media Convergence and Culture [media studies]
The Portrait Project [documentary genre class]
The Experimental Film Tradition
Mega-Media [digital archives; media studies]
The Interface is the Message [technology and culture]
Mediating the Past, Mediating the Present [media studies; historiography]