“The Wire” and Baltimore: Audiences, Producers, and Subjects - Thursday, April 22, 11:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. (Camden)
Sponsor: Media Ecology Association
Chair: Gregory Adamo, Morgan State University
“Creators and their Creations: Media Responsibility and the Community”
Gregory Adamo, Morgan State University
“I Can’t Bear to Watch: A Scholar Looks at The Wire and her City”
Inte’a DeShields, Morgan State University
“The Wire and its Representations of Baltimore: Through the Eyes of the Natives”
Kimberly Moffitt, University of Maryland Baltimore County
“Journalism, Journalists, and The Wire”
Linda Steiner, University of Maryland College Park
The Wire, the critically acclaimed and Peabody award winning television drama has a strong relationship to the city of Baltimore. The panel will explore issues of the program in relation to the city of Baltimore, its residents as audience and subjects, themes of inner-city life, and the institutions it depicted. Theoretical approaches including audience reception, media responsibility, and television representations are applied to uncover the impact and importance of The Wire.
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Charting a Course for Our Children: Understanding New Media Environments and Children’s Interactions with New Media - Thursday, April 22, 2010, 1:00-2:15 p.m. (Camden)
Sponsor: Media Ecology Association
Chair: Peggy Cassidy, Adelphi University
“Historical Perspectives on the Changing Media Environment of Children”
Peggy Cassidy, Adelphi University
“The Limitations and Promise of Current Media Options for Children”
Anna Akerman, Adelphi University
“Integrating Media and Technology into the K-8 Classroom”
Alexis Seeley, Adelphi University
“Evolving a Language for a Digital Era”
Terrence Ross, Adelphi University
A common scene in a typical American home or classroom involves an adult struggling to use a new communication device (cell phone, DVR, iPod, etc.), only to have a child walk over, press a few buttons, and solve the problem easily. Throughout American history, as new media have been embraced by children, adults have wondered what to do. The possibilities of the new medium excite us, but the uncertainty of how it might change us—or, more troubling, how it might change our children—frightens us.
This panel will explore the changing media environment of children from a variety of perspectives. It will begin by looking at the historical context of present-day media change, and then move on to explore how new media offer children new ways to understand themselves, to express themselves, to respond to what they see in mainstream media, and to interact with others.
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New Horizons in Media Ecology - Friday, April 23, 2010, 1:45-3:00 p.m. (Calvert)
Sponsor: Media Ecology Association
Chair: Thom Gencarelli, Manhattan College
“Things Come in Fours: A Comparison of Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Canonical Formula”
Robert Blechman, St. George’s University
“Media Ecology and the Organizational System: An Inquiry”
Jack Ciak, Seton Hill University
“Electronic Media and Patterns of Production and Consumption”
James Morrison, Babson College
Respondent: Lance Strate, Fordham University
This panel features competitively-selected papers from the Media Ecology Association, an affiliate organization, for this year.
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Focus on the Future: Media Ecology - Friday, April 23, 2010, 3:15-4:30 p.m. (Pratt)
Sponsor: Focus on the Future Series
Chair: Thom Gencarelli, Manhattan College
Thom Gencarelli, Manhattan College
Stephanie Gibson, University of Baltimore
James Morrison, Babson College
Lance Strate, Fordham University
This panel addresses the possibilities pertaining to the future directions, contributions, and impact of scholarship in the media ecology tradition. Each of the panelists will make a brief presentation, to be followed by a roundtable discussion, and a conversation with the audience.
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Techtonic Shifts: Five Ways that Emerging Technologies and Media are Changing Socio-political Life - Saturday, April 24, 12:15-1:30 (Lombard)
Sponsor: Media Ecology Association
Chair: Todd Kelshaw, Montclair State University
“Beyond the Fold: Rhetorics of Demise and Opportunity in the Newspaper Industry”
Jeffrey St. John, University of Maine
Todd Kelshaw, Montclair State University
“From Transistors to Browsers: The Emergence and Potentials of Internet Radio” (DEBUT)
Rory Raabe, University of Washington
“I’m that Bored: Text-based Media and Sexting’s Field of Cultural Production”
Hugh Curnutt, Montclair State University
“Emerging Modes of Histrionics Across Variously Mediated Public Assemblies”
Todd Kelshaw, Montclair State University
“Rethinking Kategoria and Apologia in the Web 2.0 Environment: Lessons from the Whole Foods Case”
Christine Lemesianou, Montclair State University
Presenters address several important socio-cultural underpinnings and transformative consequences of new media, focusing on particularly profound moments of technological shift. Specific topics include: the news industry’s movement from print to digital platforms; radio’s migration from terrestrial to online broadcast; the application of first-person text-based media for documenting users’ sexuality; citizens’ newfound capacities for political theatre in mediated public meeting venues; and the proliferation and management of organizational crisis in interactive digital settings.
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Charting a Course Through the Media/New Media Maze - Sunday, April 25, 2010, 8:00-9:15 a.m. (Chesapeake B)
Sponsor: Media Ecology Association
Chair: Susan Jasko, California University of Pennsylvania
“From Zapruder to Albarghouti: A Study of User-generated Content as News Video”
Jennifer Neidenberg, American University
“Video Games Have Politics”
Ryan Rogers, Syracuse University
“Fallingwater: A Philosophical View of an ‘Impossible’ Building”
Kristin Roeschenthaler Wolfe, Duquesne University
Respondent: Thom Gencarelli, Manhattan College
This panel features competitively-selected papers fom the Media Ecology Association, an affiliate organization, for this year.
