Apr 30 2007
MiT5
Just got back from the Media in Transitions conference at MIT yesterday. I have mixed feelings.
On the one hand, in an objective sense, the conference was great. Manuel Castells went. Henry Jenkins organized it. Siva Vaidyanathan gave one of the wrap-up talks (although I had to miss it because my plane was taking off about then). Most of all what made it awesome was the fact that it is so connected to contemporary society. There was very little theory but a whole lot of references to You Tube, Cory Doctorow, and the kind of stuff I spend a lot of time looking at and reading. Hah! I knew reading Jason Kottke was work! In any case, I learned a lot, heard a lot of very good papers, and picked up an excellent book list that will serve me well as a basis for a bibliography for my (gasp!) book project. (That’s what your dissertation turns into–in the manner of pumpkins at midnight–when you finish it kids. Hint: don’t ever finish it.) However, what I thought was going to be the coolest part of the conference was the fact that I was going to be on a panel with McKenzie Wark, he of G4M3R 7H30RY fame (as well as the earlier, excellent A Hacker Manifesto, which is far more relevant for my work). However, it is here that my subjectively bad experience of the conference manifests.
The session I was on was entitled Games and Play. I know very little little about game theory generally or the current state of video game research. My abstract does not mention games or really anything that, to my mind, could be construed as being about games. It does mention McKenzie Wark, however, and perhaps that’s why they put me on this panel. However, as was to be expected, everyone there wanted to either talk to Wark or ask questions of a more sociological bent (still about games, however) to the other speaker, Dan Roy, who talked about Identity and Cross-Platform Gaming. Now, I don’t fault anyone for wanting to have a conversation about gaming when they came to a panel about gaming. But I still bothers me that I was asked one pity question and ultimately wound up talking to absolutely no one about my paper/subject area when the whole conference, it seems to me, was entirely built around things I think about all of the time (although I expect that’s hardly unique to me–the part about the thinking, not about the not talking). What my presence on the panel led to, no doubt, is confusion, as evidenced by this blog post, who states, of my paper, “Not sure what this has to do with Games and Play”. Nothing, and I can’t fault anyone for not being interested in my paper, because, for the most part, I am generally not invested in games.
Ah, well. Enough with the bitching and moaning. I did wind up having a very good lunch just after the session at Legal Seafood with S. Craig Watkins (whose two papers on hip-hop were among the highlights of the conference for me), D.E. Wittkower, Joost van Dreunen, and Ron Robinson. Unfortunately no link for Ron, as he was not speaking and I can’t find him in Google. But, among being one of the more interesting and energetic people I have ever met at a conference, also picked up the check. Thanks Ron.
And, as always, Boston is a cool town. Although MIT is little strange. It’s tough to critique the man when you’re in the center of the military-industrial complex and there are people from the State Department [not even kidding] attending sessions and mentioning the existence of classified CIA wikis).
I also just realized that this is my first post. Woo. Hoo.