In This Edition

New and Future Media

Part 1: Mass Media

Part 2: Interactive Media

Part 3: Multi-Media

Questions & Answers

Prof. Henry Jenkins Head of Comparative Media Studies

Reza Jalili '90 Founder of Ch1 Communications in New York

Candis Callison '02 Graduate Student in Comparative Media Studies

Barbara Barry, SM '00 Graduate Student in Interactive Cinema

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New media are reshaping contemporary experience from the ways people think about home and community to how they work, learn, and participate in public life. MIT pioneers in the Comparative Media Studies program examine how media technologies--from the most advanced digital tools to familiar analog varieties--serve as tools, invitations to participate, and mediators among peoples. On the digital frontier, MIT's Media Lab is a global symbol of new media knowledge in computer graphics, design, interactive cinema, narrative, cognition and learning, electronic music, and holography. At the Laboratory for Computer Science, hypertext inventor Tim Berners-Lee is developing a smarter Semantic Web and the Amorphous Computing group is investigating future media such as how "smart" paint on a building could report wind conditions.

This month openDOOR explores MIT's new media innovations:

• Mass Media: Using the interactivity of the web to share reactions to 9/11; computer games that aid learning; web content that enhances experience; and personalized multimedia.
• Interactive Media: A smarter Internet via a Semantic Web; a web exhibition of student projects in media; Chat Circles; migrating digital tools to everyday objects; making computers work for people; building new active learning tools.
• Multi-Media: Conversing with the audience through interactive cinema; adding psychosocial intelligence to agents; targeting sound as data; smart materials like paint that reports local wind conditions.

Poll: What part of the digital media revolution has had the biggest impact on your life? Computer/video games Digital photography/video Internet chat/instant messaging News on the web CDs/DVDs Online music