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Evaluating proposals on a rolling basis until Jan. 9, 2009, we are now accepting abstracts and full papers for the sixth Media in Transition conference sponsored by MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum:
Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission
Conference dates: April 24-26, 2009 at MIT, Cambridge, MA
In “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based media such as stone or clay and space-based media such as paper or papyrus. The former, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space. Although this division between the durable and the portable is perhaps problematic today, similar tensions define our contemporary situation. Digital communications have increased exponentially the speed with which information circulates. We are poised to reach transmission speeds of 100 terabits per second, or something akin to transmitting the entire printed contents of the Library of Congress in under five seconds. Such developments profoundly challenge efforts to maintain access to the vast printed and audio-visual inheritance of analog culture as well as efforts to understand and preserve the immense, enlarging universe of text, image and sound available in cyberspace. What are the implications of these trends for scholars, librarians, journalists and media makers who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct?
See http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/ for the full call for papers.
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