Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / Utilizing critical and feminist science and technology studies methods, this thesis offers a new framework, called critical breaking, to allow for reflective and critical examination and analysis of instances of error, breakdown, and failure in digital systems. This framework has three key analytic goals: auditing systems, forging better relationships with systems, and discovering elements of the context in which these systems exist. This framework is further explored by the examination of three case studies of communities of breaking practice: video game speed-runners, software testers, and hacktivists. In each case, critical breaking is further developed in reflection of resonant and dissonant elements of each practice with critical breaking. In addition, artistic productions related to these case studies are also introduced as inflection points and potential alternative expressions of critical breaking analysis. The goal of this thesis is to provide a way to engage with breakdown and error and more than simply the negation of the good or as a sensationalist talking point, and instead use it as a fecund place for reflective, analytic growth. / by Christopher Kerich. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

Thesis: S.M. in Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Humanities, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 73-79). / This thesis develops an intersectional, critical analysis of the field of practice known as Civic Tech and highlights other relevant community-organizing and activist practices that utilize technology as a central component. First, I develop critiques of Civic Tech as a dominant technocratic, neoliberal approach to democracy and bureaucracy and trace the history and intellectual genealogy of this specific movement. I then highlight civic technologies outside of the field of Civic Tech that have resulted in more redistributive and democratic outcomes, especially for Black people and other people of color. Finally, I define a research and design practice called Critical Community Technology Pedagogy that is demystificatory, multi-directional, transferable, and constructive, and draws upon examples from the Civic Lab for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) in Newfoundland, Data DiscoTechs in Detroit, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy in New York City. / by Maya M. Wagoner. / S.M. in Comparative Media Studies

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [176]-185). / The main research question of this thesis is the following: What is the relationship between spaces and innovation in the context of design organizations such as IDEO, the MIT Media Lab and Design Continuum? This thesis explores the relationship between four types of spaces, namely, 1) urban, 2) building 3) workplace and 4) users and innovation and creative practices of these three case studies. Drawing mainly on visual ethnography, the thesis shows how the four organizations' situated spaces-in-use shape their innovation, learning and knowledge sharing practices. The findings are used to complement and expand existing theories, to reflect on the "spacing" of the three design organizations under study and to contribute to the outline of this interdisciplinary emerging field of research. / by Cristobal Garcia Herrera. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 94-99). / Zeki Müren is Turkey's beloved queer pop star whose career spans a period between his first radio emission in 1951 and his death during a live television program in 1996. He is a pioneer of 'Turkish Art Music', a trailblazer in utilizing novel mass communication tools, a proud nationalist who donated half of his estate to Military Veterans Organization, and an LGBTQ solidarity symbol whose gender-bending image has been an inspiration to queer individuals in Turkey. Müren's artistic production and his star image contain multiplicity of meanings that have rendered him accessible to publics from various backgrounds, subcultures, and generations. This thesis examines Zeki Müren as a media text that is scattered across music (radio and records), cinema, gazino nightclub performances, and television, during his lifetime, and deconstructed and appropriated by fans, artists, musicians, and media makers after his death. Based on their ideological and representational affordances, these media together create a polysemy - multiple meanings that Müren's star image signifies - whose elements are often in tension with each other, while providing different entry points for different audiences. With the guidance of Richard Dyer's work on intertextuality and structured polysemy of star images, and Henry Jenkin's theory of transmedia storytelling, this research follows the traces of Müren's transformation from his radio days, to cinema, gazino, and television performances, while situating these textual analyses within Turkey's political, media, and LGBTQ histories. In addition, two media components in-production - a feature-length film 'A Prince from Outer Space: Zeki Müren' and a participatory and interactive documentary 'Zeki Müren Hotline' are interwoven into this intertextual and cross-generational conversation, emphasizing the generative polysemy of Müren's star image. / by Beyza Boyacioglu. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2009. / "September 2009." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-126). / It is commonly accepted that media and communication technologies play pivotal roles in the complex processes of what is broadly termed "globalization." The increasing speed, volume, and scale of transnational circulation has been one of the most dramatic development in the media landscape, creating what Appadurai has dubbed global "mediascapes" that are reshaping the way we understand cultural formation. While the rise of massive global commercial media enterprises leads to renewed discussion of the dominance of the "West" upon the "Rest," the increasing portability, transmitability, and reproducibility of media has helped to generate a grassroots globalization of migrant populations who circulate and engage with media from the "homeland," creating deterritorialized social imaginaries that transcend national boundaries. In examining the flourishing online fandom around the circulation of East Asian television drama, however, the established models of transnational media audiences prove insufficient. With the emergence of internet technologies, these mediascapes have now become networked, increasing the visibility and complexity of transnational media flows and the audiences around them. No longer are we seeing transnational media flows through only commercial markets or diasporic audiences seeking to connect with a virtual "home." In the online circulation of East Asian television dramas, fans with a broad range of cultural, ethnic, and national backgrounds are consciously working to shape audience engagement with these transnational television texts through fansubbing, content aggregation and curation, and the production of vast reservoirs of information, discourse, and meta-data that is constantly being expanded. More importantly, they are doing so publicly, collaboratively, and outside the domain of commercial television markets. enabling individuals to participate in the selection, (re)production, and circulation of texts and images that shape the very social imaginaries they inhabit. This work draws on insights from work on globalization, diasporic media use, fan and audience studies, and new media and employs various ethnographic, textual, and theoretical strategies and stances in an effort to illuminate key dimensions of these collaborative grassroutes of transnational media. What manner of cultural encounters are taking place within the interplay between diasporic conditions and fan practices? How do the circulation and consumption practices afforded by new media technologies inform, and can in turn be informed by, the conditions of global media audienceship? From there we may begin to remap some of complex social, technological, and textual entanglements of cultural negotiation in an increasingly global media age. / by Xiaochang Li. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 126-137). / Ambient street media are the media of our everyday lives in cities. Manifested in bits and fragments on the surfaces of the streetscape, these media often escape our notice - tuned out as visual clutter or dismissed as unimportant. Yet, attentive viewing and analysis reveal much about the local culture of communication and expression. This thesis blends empirical and theoretical methodologies in a year-long photographic study that takes a fresh look at the concepts and realities of "media," "the city," and "the everyday," and sets several disciplines in interaction with one another. Ambient street media include news racks, traffic and street signs, storefronts, sandwichboards, graffiti, stickers, murals, and flyers. This is in contrast to conventional notions of "the media" as one-to-many communication modalities consumed primarily in the domestic space, particularly television, radio, major newspapers, and the Internet. Studies of media in everyday life typically address these mass media, passing over ambient street media for any detailed examination. By examining both the explicit and implicit facets of street communications, this study elevates their importance in a number of disciplines, from cultural studies to urban design and planning. For example, we find much to counter postmodern anxieties about cities. / (cont.) While evidence of globalization and the prioritization of government and corporate interests over those of local entities and autonomous individuals are easily found, the ecology of street media includes a vibrant array of individual communications. Currently, much of the media made by individuals are unauthorized to appear where they do. But in the commercial area of Central Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they are accorded a high degree of tolerance by local authorities, making this a unique laboratory in which to see what happens when streetscape surfaces are accessible to many. The streetscape can be viewed as a communication medium in itself, special for its direct accessibility and affordability as well as the immediacy with which messages posted there can be received. Urban planners who seek to design spaces that give people a sense of place are encouraged to more equitably apportion space among government, commercial, and individual interests and add surfaces that are more accommodating to a wider array of inscriptions. / by Rekha Murthy. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2006. / Leaf 77 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-76). / On March 23rd 1969 Boston's public television station WGBH broadcast a program titled The Medium is the Medium. The program was a half-hour long compilation of short videos by six artists. The six pieces ranged from electronically manipulated imagery set to the music of the Beatles to an attempt at communication between four separate locations through audio-visual technology. As the narrator, David Oppenheim, the cultural executive producer for the Public Television Laboratory, intones at the beginning of the show, "what happens when artists explore television?" What happened was a program unlike anything seen before. The Medium is the Medium was the result of the pairing of artists with engineers. This pairing was the brainchild of the Rockefeller Foundation, which decided to bring these two together in what was the Artists-in-Television program. Founded in 1967 it gave seed grants to two public broadcasting stations, WGBH in Boston and KQED in San Francisco. These grants enabled the stations to begin residency programs matching artists with members of their production staffs. Several of the artists in the program had made films but most were coming to this type of time-based art work for the first time. The Artists-in Television program gave these artists the opportunity to expand their ideas into an art from involving television technologies. It offered those working in more traditional media the technology and expertise to try their hands at a nascent art form, video. / by James A. Nadeau. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2010. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-97). / Discussions of music reproduction technology have generally focused on what Jonathan Sterne calls "tympanic" reproduction: the recording and playback of sounds through microphones and speakers. While tympanic reproduction has been very successful, its success has limited the ways in which music reproduction is popularly imagined and discussed. This thesis explores the history of "re-performance," an alternative mode of reproduction epitomized by the early twentieth-century player piano. It begins with a discussion of nineteenth-century piano recorders and the historical role of material representation in the production of music. It continues with the advent of player pianos in the early twentieth century that allowed users to "interpret" prerecorded material, blurring the line between performance and reproduction and inspiring popular reflection on the role of the mechanical in music. It concludes with the founding of the American Piano Company laboratory in 1924 and the establishment of a mechanically founded rhetoric of fidelity. Bookending this history is an account of a performance and recording session organized by Zenph Studios, a company that processes historical tympanic recordings to produce high-resolution data files for modern player pianos. Zenph's project appears futuristic from the perspective of tympanic reproduction, but is more readily understood in terms of the history of re-performance, suggesting a need for renewing critical attention on re-performative technologies. Contemporary developments in music reproduction such as music video games and sampling may make new sense considered in the context of re-performance. This alternative history aims to provide a ground on which such analysis could be built. / by Nicholas Patrick Seaver. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-165). / This thesis is a study of the Fisher Price PXL 2000 camera and the artists and amateurs who make films and videos with this technology. The Pixelvision camera records video onto an audiocassette; its image is low-resolution, black and white. Fisher Price marketed the PXL 2000 to children in 1987, but withdrew the camera after one year. Despite its lack of commercial success, the camera became popular with avant-garde artists, amateur film- and videomakers and collectors, sparking a renewed interest in the obsolete camera. An online community has built up around the format, providing its members with information on how to modify the camera to make it compatible with contemporary digital equipment. Although Pixelvision garners little recognition from mainstream culture, the camera's hipster cachet and perceived rarity has driven up prices in the community and in auctions. This thesis examines the position of the PXL 2000 camera within the history of moving image technology, and in the context of today's digital video equipment. How has this obsolete video camera made the transition from analog to digital? The thesis also explores Pixelvision's position in the cultural hierarchy of media, as well as the motivations of artists and users who are creating with the camera today, as it moves further and further into its obsolescence. / by Andrea Nina McCarty. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-66). / What game design opportunities do we create when we extend massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) to cell phones? MMOs allow us to create representations of our own increasing mastery, and mobile gives us better access to this mastery and allows us to integrate it more fully into the ways we see ourselves. MMOs motivate mastery by making that mastery personally and socially relevant, and visibly showing it increase. Virtual worlds that make players feel physically and socially present increase motivation to achieve mastery. MMOs that convince players their avatars represent some aspect of their personalities increase motivation to invest in and experiment with different constructions of self. I apply these principles to an analysis of two games: Labyrinth, a game I helped create, and World of Warcraft, the current leading MMO. With Labyrinth, I explain the design decisions we made and their impact. With World of Warcraft, I described how altering the design could accommodate mobile play and better motivate increasing mastery. / by Daniel Roy. / S.M.