Tag Archives: roflcon

Advice from Henry Jenkins

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via joi

Last week on Friday, I met with Professor Henry Jenkins in his office at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies department about my future in graduate school.

Way back in the fall semester of 2007, I discovered the Comparative Media Studies website, and from there on my life would change as I switched gears from my English major to following everything happening with Internet studies at MIT, Harvard, and other schools attempting similar research. I would go on to attend ROFLcon, make my way over to Harvard for the Berkman @ 10 conference, and then eventually join teams with the likes of Students for Free Culture, MIT’s YouTomb project, the varied escapades of Tim Hwang and company, and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, among others. After my study abroad in Kyoto, Japan during the fall semester of 2008, I would return to Boston finally to focus my interests on Internet culture, Japanese animation, and fan studies, hopefully pulling the three topics together in a relevant doctoral program for graduate school.

So, last Friday I met Henry to speak about his decision to move from Comparative Media Studies at MIT to the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Since I had already pegged MIT’s CMS program as my ideal goal, I felt it valid to ask Henry about following him to SC. Unfortunately, he replied with an answer I expected: He will not know much about the management and organization of the program until he begins teaching there this autumn. Thankfully, he was able to advise me on a few potential research opportunities, recommend a number of other solid graduate programs in the States as well as abroad, and affirm that I have indeed been taking the correct steps (especially spending the next year gaining experience in the field to research my book). He did also provide an excellent piece of advice that I had (perhaps a bit foolishly) overlooked in my pursuits.

That advice was this: Immerse yourself in the popular culture.

I have one year before I’ll even be able to apply for graduate school, study abroad, and research abroad. However, on top of securing a job, researching current trends, and studying theory, Henry proposed spending as much time reading manga, watching anime, following Internet memes, and the like. I have a year, and he said one of the most beneficial things I can do is to engross in the popular culture and understand it inside out, in order to speak about it, establish arguments, and defend theses.

So, thank you, Henry. I’ll take your words to heart. I’ll be sure to keep in touch if I gain the chance to opportunity to study with you.

Internet Culture Research: New (?) Thoughts on Memes

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This article is highly experimental and has been published merely as a thought-provoking piece; therefore, please forgive any rambling that takes place throughout. – The Management

Ever since I got involved with ROFLcon (I attended the very first one and have been working with the team on hosting the smaller ROFLthing events since), I have had Internet culture research on my mind. Tim Hwang and I have talked over potentially writing co-writing a book on Internet memes, but recently the project has sunk below our interest in meme research, specifically that of engineering. But ever since “meme” because the Internet buzzword of our generation, I’ve constantly been at odds with the odd term. What exactly is a meme? Why are we using that specific word? And what do we learn about the Internet by studying memes, or vice versa?

If you haven’t decided to discover the term’s etymology, I’ll try to provide a basic explanation. Trying to explain the meaning of meme by looking at Wikipedia illustrates the issue of defining the word: throwing “meme” into Google provides you with both two articles on Wikipedia, the first entitled Meme and the second, Internet Meme. The discussion of meme here draws from the article Internet Meme; however, we cannot ignore the history behind the former article, especially since work around Internet memes borrows heavily from studies of memetics.

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SXSW: Promote That Which is Awesome

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Awesomeness will be going down in Austin, Texas come March 2009.

I’m putting together a panel on technology in the classroom for an infamous conference called South by Southwest. My presentation’s called “Blackboards or Backchannels: The Techno-Induced Classroom of Tomorrow.” This thing’s BIG. And I’m trying to make it bigger.

I’d love to show the audience the potential and capability of students connected. The Internet is a grandiose machine. So I’m extending a hand to fellow students and friends to get the word out.

If you’re willing to help, go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/1123, take five seconds to create an account, and vote on my panel idea. If you want to be more awesome, vote and then leave a comment, to get people talking.

This would be an awesome way to show that students, together, can break the system, be it a simple voting interface or the conventional, old-school methodology of education.

Visit the original Facebook note here and throw it around between your own group of friends.

Also, check out these other nibblets of amazing:

Christina Xu’s Behind the ROFLs: Next-Gen Conference Organizing While Broke

Tim Hwang’s The State of the Internet Memescape: 2008-10 and Obsolete?: A World After E-mail