Last week I discovered that the directors of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies master’s degree program had frozen admissions for the 2009-2010 academic year.
The repercussions of the decision have induced a number of reflections, mainly: Now that I have a year to think about it, is CMS the correct path? Over the past year and a half (since I discovered the CMS program’s website in October 2007), I’ve started my own blog, become interested in Internet culture, met really awesome people, and navigated onto a course toward cultural and media studies, mainly subcultural studies (ie. anime fandom) and criticism of contemporary popular culture (both Japanese and American), all alongside literary, social, and anthropological theory. Over the past six months, I’ve specifically been looking into otaku theory and anime fandom in the United States (surprisingly there’s a lot of critical information already published), which is, albeit extremely interdisciplinary, a very specific field of study.
