Jazz and Journalism: Reporting with Improvisation; Present Shock; REWIRE: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection
Current Berkman People and Projects 2013-05-29
Summary:
Jazz and Journalism: Reporting with Improvisation
Tuesday, June 11, 12:30pm ET, Location TBA. This event will be webcast live.
Improvisation theories, drawn mostly from jazz, have increasingly been applied to entrepreneurship, new product development, and other fields, but rarely, if ever, to journalism. Yet journalism is an industry built on improvisation, from the actions of reporters out in the field, to the deadline work of editors and page designers. More than that, it is an industry that needs a new framework in order to survive. Journalists must, I believe, be more agile, more open, more listening, and more willing to work as teams, take chances and improvise, if they are to succeed.
At this luncheon, Laura will present her preliminary ideas on improvisation theory and jazz in news development, arguing for a journalism framework that builds new culture out of improvisation.
Laura Amico is a Nieman-Berkman fellow in journalism innovation. Her work focuses on building more effective strategies for newsrooms to cover beats and build community engagement. RSVP Required. more information on our website>
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Tuesday, June 18, 12:30pm ET, Location TBA. This event will be webcast live. Reception to follow.
The always-on, simultaneous society in which we have found ourselves has altered our relationship to culture, media, news, politics, economics, and power. We are living in a digital temporal landscape, but instead of exploiting its asynchronous biases, we are misguidedly attempting to extend the time-is-money agenda of the Industrial Age into the current era. The result is a disorienting and dehumanizing mess, where the zombie apocalypse is more comforting to imagine than more of the same. It needn't be this way.
Winner of the Media Ecology Association's first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values. He is technology and media commentator for CNN, digital literacy advocate for Codecademy.com and has taught and lectured around the world about media, technology, culture and economics. RSVP Required. more information on our website>
REWIRE: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection
Tuesday, June 25, 6:00pm ET, Harvard Law School.
We live in an age of connection, one that is accelerated by the Internet. This increasingly ubiquitous, immensely powerful technology often leads us to assume that as the number of people online grows, it inevitably leads to a smaller, more cosmopolitan world. We’ll understand more, we think. We’ll know more. We’ll engage more and share more with people from other cultures. In reality, it is easier to ship bottles of water from Fiji to Atlanta than it is to get news from Tokyo to New York.
In Rewire, media scholar and activis<