Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 83-85). / The Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) series of comic books have, since 1967, dominated the market for domestic comic books in India. In this thesis, I examine how these comics function as public culture, creating a platform around which groups and individuals negotiate and re-negotiate their identities (religious, class, gender, regional, national) through their experience of the mass-media phenomenon of ACK. I also argue that the comics, for the most part, toe a conservative line - drawing heavily from Hindu nationalist schools of thought. In order to demonstrate these arguments, I examine selected groups of ACK titles closely in the first two chapters. I perform a detailed content analysis of these comics, considering the ways in which they draw upon history and primary texts, the artistic and editorial choices as well the implications of these decisions. In the third chapter, I draw a picture of the consumption of these comics, studying the varying interpretations and reactions that fans across generations have had to the works, connecting their conversations to my argument about ACK as public culture. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the extent of ACK's role in the popular imagination of its large readership as well as the part it plays in the negotiation of their identities as Indians. / by Abhimnanyu Das. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies, September 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "August 2009." / Includes bibliographical references (pages 95-99). / This thesis attempts to uncover the emotional and cultural economics of material culture. What does it mean for material good to be "fake"? What are the salient aspects that are being copied and are those aspects purely material? How does counterfeit branded fashion function as craft, as commodity, and as idea? The first chapter, Productions, looks not just at how fakes are made but what makes a fake, at how fake branded luxury goods are produced, both materially and immaterially. The second, Exchanges, examines the three most common sites of exchange, street markets, online message boards, and purse parties, and how the culture of exchange at each site produces a value specific to that site. The final chapter, Ownerships, explores how owners and observers make meaning from branded luxury goods, real and fake, and how, more specifically, how emerging legal discourses misunderstand the nature of creativity in fashion. To conclude, it considers what it might mean, more holistically, to use branded objects made, bought, and used outside of authorized channels, to constitute everyday life. / by Deja Elana Swartz. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 159-172). / As the pace of publishing and the volume of content rapidly increase on the web, citizen journalism and data journalism have threatened the traditional role of institutional newsmaking. Legacy publishers, as well as digital-native outlets and aggregators, are beginning to adapt to this new news landscape, in part by drawing newfound value from archival stories and reusing older works. However, this trend's potential remains limited by technical challenges and institutional inertia. In this thesis I propose a framework for considering the news institution of the digital era as a linked archive: equal parts news provider and information portal, the linked archive places historical context on the same footing as new content, and emphasizes the journalist's role as news explainer and verifier. Informed by a theoretical, historical, and technical understanding of the web's structural affordances and limitations, and especially by the untapped networking power of the hyperlink, I suggest how publishers can offer an archive-oriented model of structured, sustainable, and scalable journalism. I draw from concepts and lessons learned in library and computer science, such as link analysis, network theory, and polyhierarchy, to offer an archivally-focused journalistic model that can save time for reporters and improve the research and reading process for journalists and audiences alike. This allows for a treatment of news items as part of a dynamic conversation rather than a static box or endless feed, revitalizing the news archive and putting the past in fuller and richer dialogue with the present. / by Liam Phalen Andrew. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-155). / Hackathons, maker spaces, R&D labs: these terms are common to the world of technology, but have only recently seeped into museums. The last few years have witnessed a wave of art museum initiatives that invite audiences-from casual visitors to professional artists and technologists-to take the reins of creative production using emerging technologies. The goals of this thesis are threefold. First, I situate this trend, which I call "museum making," within two historical narratives: the legacy of museums as sites for art making and the birth of hacker and maker cultures. These two lineages-histories of art-based and technology-based creative production-are part of a larger participatory ethos prevalent today. A second goal of this thesis is to document museum making initiatives as they emerge, with an eye to how staff members at museums are able to develop such programs despite limited financial, technological, or institutional support or knowledge. Finally, I critically examine how museum making may or may not challenge traditional structures of power in museums. Museum making embodies a tension between the desire to make the museum a more open and equitable space-both by inviting creators into the museum, and by welcoming newer forms of creative production that might not align with today's art world-and the need to maintain institutions' authority as arbiters of culture. My analysis draws on a wide range of fields, including sociology, educational theory, media studies, museum studies, and art theory. This thesis is informed by extensive fieldwork conducted at three sites: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Art + Technology Lab, a program that awards artist grants and mentorship from individuals and technology companies such as Google and SpaceX; the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Media Lab, an innovation lab that invites members of New York's creative technology community to develop prototypes for and based on the museum experience; and the Peabody Essex Museum's Maker Lounge, an in-gallery space in which visitors are invited to tinker with high and low technologies. / by Desi Gonzalez. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 121-140). / In this work Erik Stayton examines dominant and alternative paradigms of ground vehicle automation, and concludes that current and imagined automation technology is far more hybrid than is often recognized, presenting different questions about necessary or appropriate roles for human beings. Automated cars, popularly rendered as "driverless" or "self-driving" cars, are a major sector of technological development in artificial intelligence and present a variety of questions for design, policy, and the culture at large. This work addresses the dominant narratives and ideologies around self-driving vehicles and their historical antecedents, examining both the media's representation of self-driving vehicles and the sources of the idea, common both among the media and many self-driving vehicle researchers, that complete vehicle autonomy is the most valuable future vision, or even the only one worth discussing and investigating. This popular story has important social stakes (including surveillance, responsibility, and access), embedded in the technologies and fields involved in visions of full automation (machine vision, mapping, algorithmic ethics), which bear investigating for the possible futures of automation that they present. However, other paradigms for automation exist, representing lenses from literature in the fields of human supervisory control and joint-cognitive systems design. These fields-compared with that of AI-provide a very different read on what automation means and where it is headed in the future, which leads to the possibility of different futures, with different stakes and trade-offs. The work examines how automation taxonomies, such as that by the NHTSA, fail to account for these possibilities. Finally, this work examines what cultural understandings need to change to make this (cyborg) picture more broadly comprehensible, and suggests potential impacts for policy and future technological development. It argues that a broader appreciation for our hybrid engagements with machines, and recognition that automation alone does not solve any social problems, can alter public opinion and policy in productive ways, away from focus on "autonomous" robots divorced from human agency, and toward system-level joint human-machine designs that address societal needs. / by Erik Lee Stayton. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 116-126). / This thesis surveys creativity in Chinese technology communities and its implication in China's development mode shift from "Made in China" to "Created in China." It discussed the history of creativity in China and how various types of creativity apply to Chinese technology communities. This thesis investigated Heike, or Chinese hackers, through archival research of Chinese hacker magazines; it explored topics discussed in Jike media, or Chinese geek media, using text mining (a type of data mining) methods including co-occurrence analysis, TF-IDF analysis and topic models (based on LDA); this thesis also includes a field study of Chuangke, seeing how Chinese Chuangke teachers build makerspaces in their schools, engage with the Chuangke education ecosystem, nurture future makers in their makerspaces, and interpret the Maker Movement in Chinese context. This thesis views Chinese hacker culture, geek culture, and maker culture under the lenses of "Ke" cultures, and it examines these cultures' relationships with technology learning, self-expression, innovation, and entrepreneurship in China. / by Yu Wang. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 90-94). / In the early 1990s, the Internet emerged as a commercially viable global communications medium. This study considers the role that representatives of the military-industrial research world played in the physical expansion of the Internet. It does so by examining the social practices and processes of the semi-annual "Interop" computer-networking trade show, and one affiliated "exposition." Beginning in 1987, and for nearly a decade, Interop operated as a forum that brought representatives from industry and the research and user communities into strategic alliance to tackle the practicalities of expanding the Internet's core networking protocols and assembling diverse networks into a global Internet. The period examined culminates with the Internet 1996 World Exposition. Through that event, technologist Carl Malamud drew on the rhetoric of turn-of-the-century world's fairs to demonstrate the value of faster networks but also argued for a conception of "the commons" that could ideally be served by the rapidly privatizing Internet. In the absence of a comprehensive history of the commercial expansion of the Internet, analysis of these practices provides a pioneering analytic narrative of a crucial strand of this development. This thesis moves between levels of analysis, specifically between the Interop network, the Internet 1996 Exposition event, and the perspective of Malamud himself. By highlighting these hitherto neglected practices, this examination deepens our understanding of the forces that proved critical to the Internet's commercial success. / by Colleen E. Kaman. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 25-30). / Life After Hate is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping white supremacists transition out of the extremist lifestyle and to helping those outside the supremacist community understand how these groups work. Founded by ex-supremacists, the group is one of the only organizations in the country dedicated to helping those involved in the white power movement recover from racism. This thesis follows the stories of Life After Hate members and explores the science behind both everyday and organized hate. Touching on neuroscience, psychology and criminology, this thesis addresses the mechanisms that give rise to overt racists as well as those that contribute to systemic discrimination. / by Christina Couch. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 37-38). / As humans rebuild the world to suit our needs, many of our fellow creatures simply get out of the way-but others try their luck alongside us. Austin, Texas is home to two notable urban wildlife populations. In the early 1980s, one and a half million Mexican Free-tailed Bats moved into a bridge in the center of the city. Though initially greeted with fear and suspicion, they managed to turn their reputation around, thanks to the dedication of bat enthusiast Merlin Tuttle and their own set of helpful characteristics. Their nightly flight is now a popular tourist attraction, and the bats themselves are a beloved part of Austin's culture. Meanwhile, the rare Barton Springs Salamander, which has lived for in the same spring system for millennia, has watched Austin grow up around its home, and has watched its citizens turn that home into a popular recreational swimming area. Now, as the city's growth threatens the salamander and its habitat, environmental activists, academic scientists, and city wildlife managers do their best to save the salamander, and to leverage its rarity to save Barton Springs. The story of each species illuminates the many different ways in which we relate to the animals that live alongside us, and what those relationships say about us-our values, our goals, and how we picture the future. / by Cara J. Giaimo. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 31-35). / Living creatures must navigate their environments in search of food, reproductive opportunities, and better habitats, and they use many stimuli in order to do so. After centuries of skepticism, biologists in the 1960s convincingly demonstrated that the Earth's weak, omnipresent magnetic field was also detectable by animals trying to orient themselves in space, a sense dubbed magnetoreception. Long enchanted with animal migration, University of Manchester biologist Robin Baker asked a fateful question: Why not humans? From 1976 to the late 1980s, Baker amassed evidence that he claimed as proof that humans had a magnetic homing sense. When Baker's experimental subjects were blindfolded and displaced in a variety of settings, they could orient better than chance toward their original location or along assigned compass directions. Subjects wearing magnets on their heads, however, could not. Problematically for Baker, his peers were largely unable to replicate his results, leading to a passionate academic debate that lasted throughout the 1980s. His critics lambasted him over issues of experimental design, unconscious bias, and statistical false positives, while Baker accused his critics of misrepresenting their own data. Having exhausted his interest in the field-and undoubtedly weary of the challenges to his work-Baker stopped studying magnetoreception in the late 1980s, though he stands by his claims to this day. No researcher since has taken up the question of human magnetoreception with similar commitment, and Baker's results have remained controversial and largely unaccepted by the larger scientific community. Baker's case illustrates the necessity of reproducibility in science and underscores science's messy realities, a point similarly shown by controversial incidences of "pathological science," including Blondlot's discovery of N-rays, Weber's detection of gravitational waves, and Fleischmann and Pons' announcement of cold fusion. Baker's pursuit of the human magnetic sense also provides insight into the importance-and potentially self-deceiving dangers-of passion as a motivating force for scientists. / by Michael A. Greshko. / S.M.