Welcome to a special pre-1960s corporate authorship-themed week from In Media Res. While each of the contributors this week will respond to one another, the forum is still open to everyone to add their comments as well. Please feel free to respond to their comments and add your own thoughts and ideas about the series as well.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, November 26, 2007 – Christopher Anderson (Indiana University) presents: “Live Modern with Jack Webb”

Tuesday, November 27, 2007 – Kyle Edwards (Oakland University) presents: “Corporate Authorship, Film Adaptation, and Universal Pictures’
The Raven (1935)”

Wednesday, November 28, 2007 – Kyle Barnett (Bellarmine University) presents: “Advertising Hillbillies: Genre, Authorship, and Audience”

Thursday, November 29, 2007 – Michael Kackman (University of Texas at Austin) presents: “Stars on the Tarmac: Air Travel & the Global Commodity Intertext”

Friday, November 30, 2007 – Avi Santo (Old Dominion University) presents: “Managing Little Orphan Annie’s excesses”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

Welcome to a special fandom-themed week from In Media Res.

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, November 19, 2007 – Francesca Coppa (Muhlenberg College) presents: “Celebrating Kandy Fong: Founder of Fannish Music Video”

Tuesday, November 20, 2007 – Matt Hills (Cardiff University) presents: “Life on Mars - They Filmed An Alternative Ending?”

Wednesday, November 21, 2007 – Aswin Punathambekar (University of Michigan) presents: “Flash Fandom and Indian Idol”

Thursday, November 22, 2007 – Louisa Stein (San Diego State University) presents: “Convergence Fashion: Hailing the Gossip Girl Fan”

Friday, November 23, 2007 – John Hartley (Queensland University of Technology) presents: “A Double Drabble* of Bugger All: On Monty Python’s Galaxy Song”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

The Chronicle reports today on the results of a National Endowment for the Arts study on how much reading people do (download the report). The Chronicle article is for subscribers only, but I’ve quoted the most significant parts:

Just how reading-averse have Americans become? In 2006, the study found, 15-to-24-year-olds spent just seven minutes on voluntary reading on weekdays— 10 minutes on Saturdays and Sundays. They found time to watch two to two-and-a-half hours of television daily.

Older and presumably wiser— or at least more bookish— generations didn’t do much better. In 2006 people ages 35 to 44 devoted only 12 minutes a day to reading. Even the best-read group, Americans 65 and older, logged less than an hour each weekday and just over an hour on weekends.

[…]

When Americans do manage to read something, whether it’s a book or a blog, more and more of us can’t do it well. The proportion of 12th graders reading at or above the proficient level fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, from 40 percent— hardly a robust number to begin with— to 35 percent. Meanwhile, during roughly the same period, the share of college graduates who could reliably find their way through a piece of prose declined by 23 percent. If you think your master’s or doctorate renders you immune to the national decline, think again: Even Americans who have studied at the graduate level saw their reading skills atrophy: 51 percent were rated proficient readers in 1992, but only 41 percent made that grade in 2003.

So what does this have to do with MediaCommons? Well, as you’d expect, the study cites “the omnipresence of electronic media” (quoted in the article) as a possible contributing factor. My question for everyone, then, is, do you ever encounter “what about the decline of reading” as an objection to your research in digital media? I’d be shocked if the answer is no, because I do, all the time. How do you respond to it? I still haven’t figured out a good answer that satisfies interview committees, dissertation committees, or conference presentation audiences, because the truth is that I do not want my research to supplant the reading of bound books with covers and paper pages, and I think that people who demand that I apologize for my research are overreacting to and misinterpreting what I do. I want people to read books and then blog about what they read, but I wonder if that’s too glib an answer.

I would love some other views. I guess for me personally, though, the common rebuttal of Steven Berlin Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You thesis doesn’t encapsulate what I really think, so I wouldn’t counter with that.

Welcome to a special Latino media-themed week from In Media Res. \

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, November 12, 2007 – Mari Castaneda (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) presents: “Latino Hip Hop: The Complexity of Challenging the Status Quo”

Tuesday, November 13, 2007 – Joe Straubhaar (University of Texas, Austin) presents: “Will the Wolf Survive, Los Lobos”

Wednesday, November 14, 2007 – Mary Beltran (University of Wisconsin, Madison) presents: “On Chances Lost: The World Outside Ed’s Garage”

Thursday, November 15, 2007 – Juan Pinon (New York University) presents: “SíTV and the emergence of English-language Latino television networks”

Friday, November 16, 2007 – Antonio La Pastina (Texas A&M University) presents: “Queering Ugly Betty’s nephew”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

Also, please check out these previous Latino-themed contributions by Hector Amaya (and another), Tasha Oren and Tara McPherson

For the past two years, I’ve served on the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Public Policy Committee. I encouraged SCMS to form the committee, following the impetus emerging out of the Television Studies Interest Group, motivated primarily to tackle the issues of copyright and fair use as it impacts the field of film and media studies. I’m happy to say that our first major initiative has just been published - the SCMS Best Practices for Fair Use in Teaching is now available on the SCMS website and will be published in Cinema Journal soon.

If you’re a film or media educator, I urge you to download the document - and if you’re not, share it with any educators you know. We’re optimistic that the document can serve as a small bulwark against the creeping protectionism being pushed by the content industries. We plan on following this document up with a similar statement focusing on publishing fair use issues. I’d be happy to answer any questions about this document, or field any concerns about publishing that we might address in the next document, in the comments below or on my own blog. Please share the link broadly, as we want this message to be heard.

Welcome to a special Nordic media-themed week from In Media Res. While each of the contributors this week will respond to the other contributions, the forum is still open to everyone to add their comments as well. Please feel free to respond to their comments and add your own thoughts and ideas about the series as well.

This will be the first of seven themed weeks for In Media Res this season. We will also be showcasing themed weeks on Latino media, fandom, corporate authorship, dance, alternative media and interfaces.

So, without further ado, this week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, July 30, 2007 – Christian Christensen (Karlstad University — Sweden) presents: “ABBA 1974: The Birth of Swedish Modernity?”

Tuesday, July 24, 2007 – Sari Elfving (University of Tampere — Finland) presents: “‘I miss my superfast broadband!’ Comical heroes in phone operator’s tv commercials”

Wednesday, July 25, 2007 – Espen Ytreberg (University of Oslo — Norway) presents: “Amateur?”

Thursday, July 26, 2007 – Anna Orrghen (Södertörn University College– Sweden) presents: “Katarina Löfström’s “High Noon”: The Materiality of a Medium”

Friday, July 27, 2007 – Mari Pajala (University of Turku — Finland) presents: “What is so comical about old choreography?”

We all talk about how we want our online work, particularly our work with “new media” — as in audio and video — to count in our tenure cases and annual reviews for our institutions. Perhaps this work, especially if it isn’t peer reviewed, doesn’t always translate as research, or at least we’re not always able to convince our reviewers that it’s research.

I can’t remember if we’ve already discussed this before, but how about making a case for media compositions as creative activity? My first tenure-track job had as its categories for annual review, tenure, and promotion “Teaching,” “Service,” and “Research and Creative Activity” (not in that order, of course). My current institution has this as well.

What do you think? Does your institution reward creative activity for professors who aren’t in strictly creative designated positions, like creative writing, art, or music? Might your department respond to your media work better if it were framed as creative activity? I’m thinking the places that are more likely to be amenable to this kind of thing are second-tier research institutions, like the two at which I’ve worked. These are also the universities that tend to reward publication outside of your primary research area, the one you were hired for.

More to the point, is this something MediaCommons ought to think about when we write statements about our review process which are aimed toward tenure and promotion committees?