News From Comparative Media Studies at MIT

I never thought I'd see it, but Henry Jenkins is leaving Comparative Media Studies at MIT and moving to the Annenberg School at USC. The full story (or as full as will ever be made public, I'd guess) is on Henry's blog.

I express surprise, but in another way I'm not surprised at all. The whole time I was teaching in Course 21 at MIT I observed how little the Institute as a whole seems to value Humanities and Social Sciences. I had thought though that they might care more about supporting CMS because they have such a strong international reputation and really enrich the academic programs, the campus community, and the school's image. But in the early 2000s I saw how much time Henry had to spend on fund-raising, and how in spite of the MA program's growth and the creation of the BA, that no new faculty positions were created. So really maybe the surprise is that Henry waited this long.

I would hate to see that program disappear; all the things they do are so valuable in general, and I personally gained a lot from some of the programs they were running when I was there. But I wonder what it will take for MIT to stop treating the humanities as not even second rate? I know many people want to work there; they have a good reputation, good students, good location, etc.. But in fact this is at least the third member of the humanities faculty I know who has chosen to leave in the last four years, and likely there have been others. Maybe this will be a wake-up call at last, but I doubt it.

I guess they're keeping me another year

So I've finally got the word from the powers on high that I have been retained in my job next year. Now I just have to make it through the actual tenure review in Spring 09... And even though the issue has been been debated across disciplines for decades now, still there is little recognition of work done outside traditional venues. --So, this blog counts for nothing, the rhetorically themed wiki I've created with students is not worthy of recognition, the monthly articles for a webzine, (but I think that's just because it's popular and not scholarly). And when I say they don't count, I mean they are not mentioned in the various letters at various levels that make recommendations about retention and tenure. Why after all this time have we not figured this out? Or maybe it's just my school? --Well, it must be more than just my school, because in 2006 the MLA issued a report finding that half of all US colleges and universities have trouble with this issue, and the current issue of Kairos takes the criticism even further.

I'm coming to realize that in a variety of ways US scholarship on new media and ICTs may be slipping, and it's still not being consistently recognized by our own institutions really aggravates the problem by creating disincentives for scholars to experiment with non-traditional ways to publish their work and participate in disciplinary conversations.

But of course I never take the easy route, so I don't know I'm even talking about this; it won't really change anything I'm doing!

New Network Theory, day 1, session 1

Here I am in the opening plenary, listening to a talk by Siva Vaidhyanathan about Google and its philosophy, and about how talk about Google is characterized by a strongly theological tone. Interesting discussion of how it's philosophy and technology are entangled and don't always work well together. For example, level of user interest strongly influences pagerank, so just based on Google's search algorithms, terms like "holocaust" would bring up pages of holocaust denial sites. Google engineers had to really mess with their own code in oder to get around this.

Then on to Google booksearch, which apparently sucks--well, I think it hardly compares to their regular search, but is it really that terrible? Maybe I just got lucky.

Google video--well, we all know the issues there, I think. Google tells you not to infringe, but they're not responsible if you do and they aren't going to police it (unless threatened with a lawsuit by Viacom).

Interesting influence of pragmatic and technical issues on copyright law enforcement. Search engines couldn't function if those companies couldn't copy the pages into their indexes without asking every time.

And then there are the privacy issues with Google Earth... Issues with the Chinese government over making dissident material available...

Clearly drifting from the "do no evil" position.

Google is seriously understudied. It's not neutral ....not a lot of other stuff--he's speeding up to finish....we need the synoptic rather than panoptic...

We need critical information studies--but the description is what we'd like to say about any field. While I agree with this critique of Google, I don't know that his larger calls are actually anything new or different. Ok, we'll see what the next speakers say.