CAMBRIDGE—Sally Hogshead, author of Radical Careering, says we have much to gain by aspiring to be the dumbest person in the room. I think I may have achieved her lofty goal today, as I’ve surrounded myself with brainiacs at MIT—students, teachers and people from industry engaged in delivering and absorbing the densest information available on convergent media culture.
The Bartos Theater lobby in the Wiesner Building (designed by I.M. Pei)
The occasion is Futures of Entertainment 2, sponsored by MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium and Comparitive Media Studies program, which is Henry Jenkins’ domain. Jenkins, along with Joshua Green, made the opening presentation, which was more of a whirlwind than anything. In all honesty, there was so much knowledge delivered in the first hour this morning, it’s hard to believe I’ll have any capacity left to learn from the successive panels, but I’ll do my best.
Ivan Askwith is live blogging the sessions, so I’ll point you in that direction for more, and then circle back when I have time to process all the incoming information.
By the way, there are ad peeps here from Organic, Deep Focus, Goodby, GSD&M, Fallon, Naked, BFG and Saatchi.
Here’s the conference backchannel, where questions are asked in an online forum, then voted on. Popular questions rise to the top and are then posed to the panel.
[UPDATE] Here’s a batch of links to others covering this event: Faris Yakob, John Eckman, Rachel Clarke, Fallon Planning Blog, Ralph Koster and Media Maven. I also posted on today’s session at BFG Blog and put up a Flickr set.