東京大学大学院 情報学環・学際情報学府 The University of Tokyo III / GSII

イベント Event

July 23, 2015

「メディア化された世界」サマープログラム “Mediated Worlds” Summer Program 2015 (7/23,31,8/3)

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東京大学大学院情報学環
角川文化振興財団メディ ア・コンテンツ研究寄付講座
「メディア化された世界」サマープログラム
“Mediated Worlds” Summer Program 2015
公開講座
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東京大学情報学環・角川文化振興財団メディア・コンテンツ研究寄付講座は、日本のポップ・カルチャーに焦点を当てた2015年のサマープログラムを開催 します。毎年異なったテーマを掲げ、日本のメディア文化を考えますが、今年は「メディア化された世界」をテーマとし、映画、テレビ、音楽、SNSなど複数のメディアを取り上げ、その中に見られる有名性と自己呈示を検証していきます。2週間の期間中に開かれる講座の中で、以下の3つの講座が公開講座となっております。ご興味がある方は、ぜひご参加いただければと思います。

The “Mediated Worlds” Kadokawa Summer Program 2015 is an intensive class that focuses on how media technologies have expanded the category of celebrity and contributed to new modes of mediated publicness. Our goal is to better understand how media technologies shape presentations of self and a culture of self-promotion and visibility. The enrollment for the program is now closed, but the following three lectures are open to all students and faculty. This is a great opportunity to hear from three of the leading scholars in the field of media and cultural studies.

P. DAVID MARSHALL, Personal Chair in New Media, Communication and Cultural Studies at Deakin University in Melbourne Australia

Keynote Address: “The Era of Persona: The Personalization Complex, Celebrity, and Our Transforming Public Culture”

One of the tired truisms to describe the contemporary moment is that we are living in an era of constant change. Indeed, this way of expressing the sense of our cultural condition has been popularly employed for more than forty years and it is usually linked to the new technologies that have become part of our everyday lives. This presentation attempts to identify cultural change from a different posture, a different way of reading the world. To capture the contemporary and its transforming sense of identity that is often linked with a kind of pressing anxiety, I would claim that we are living in the era of persona. What this identifies is that in a slightly longer trajectory, we have been building an increasing focus on the production of the self and its form of public display. To describe this longer arc that has led to the era of persona, this presentation will develop the related concept of the personalization complex, a term to describe the two-century focus on the self and individualism in all sorts of publicly mediated ways. The personalization complex addresses the way that the self has been configured in consumer culture, in configurations of democratic politics and its development of a neoliberal idealized self, and also in representational forms and images that have emerged in popular culture and are best expressed through the uses made of celebrity for more than a century. What defines the era of persona is the extension of the publicly produced self out of our media representations and into the everyday fabrication of a visible identity in online culture. Persona, it must be realized is neither individual nor social, but a reading and integration of the social in order to project an individual public identity for strategic and tactical purposes. This zone of the production of persona is explored in this presentation where different levels of competency and resources – what could be called persona literacy – determine each individual’s capacity to produce a persona. In this increasingly individualized expression of public identity, the boundaries and borders of what constitutes the public, private and intimate are in flux as individuals reach through their personas a presentation/performance that draws attention and produces a reputation. At the core of the era of persona is this different economy of value of the publicly presented self. This presentation will begin the work of identifying and assessing the implications of this transformed structure of value that identifies this moment, this era of persona.

Date: July 23, 2015
Time: 16:00-17:30
Location: University of Tokyo, Hongo, Daiwa Ubiquitous Computing Hall, Ishibashi Memorial Hall (A306, 3F)
http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/cam01_14_04_j.html

MIKE FEATHERSTONE, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London

“The Body in Consumer Culture: Image, Transformation and Affect”

The body is accorded a central status within consumer culture. There is a constant proliferation of images of youth, fitness and beauty combined with a more general ‘if you look good you feel good’ philosophy. The benefits of active body maintenance, slimming and fitness regimes are presented as keys to an overall life transformation. Yet despite the flow of body images, a question mark can be put against the belief that constant attention to appearance and ‘looking good’ actually delivers the anticipated promise. The rationalistic assumptions found in some of the media life transformation publicity television programmes such as Extreme Makeover and Look Ten Years Younger, can be seen as problematic. There is the assumption that people are constantly preoccupied with their body image and the benefits of reconstructive work. Rather than dwell on the notion that attention to improving our body image will make us happy, the focus should also be on ‘the body without image,’ the body in motion, the affective body which operates in everyday life. This presentation utilizes perspectives developed within the sociology of the body and body studies to investigate the tension between body image and the ‘body without image.’

Date: July 31, 2015
Time: 13:00-14:30
Location: University of Tokyo, Hongo, Daiwa Ubiquitous Computing Hall, Ishibashi Memorial Hall (A306, 3F)
http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/cam01_14_04_j.html

MATT HILLS, Professor of Film and TV Studies at Aberystwyth University

“Revisiting the Affective Spaces of Fan Conventions: ‘Unfolding Events’ and Sites of Pilgrimage/Pastiche”

Affect has already played a significant role in fan and celebrity studies (Grossberg 1992; Marshall 1997 and 2014), and here I will revisit debates surrounding fan conventions as sites of pilgrimage (Geraghty 2014) and pastiche (Booth 2015), considering the ways in which cons can operate in relation to “affective space” (Lamerichs 2014; Annett 2014). Focusing on official ExCeL conventions such as ‘Doctor Who: The Celebration’ (2013) and ‘Sherlocked’ (2015), I will consider how these cons promise playful “retellings” of fans’ sacralising, enchanted relations to popular culture (Buerkle 2014; Saler 2012). But at the same time that these highly commercial, neoliberal events proffer themselves as “spaces of representation” (Knott 2005: 37) carrying values of immersive presence, communitas and sacredness, they are also contested by fans as excessively “pre-staged” and exploitative (Ferris and Harris 2011:18). We may need to consider such events more critically, yet without falling into an “academic fandom” (Beaudoin 2008: 91) that attacks corporate cultures as inherently inauthentic. To this end, I will address how ‘The Celebration’ and ‘Sherlocked’ can be theorised as “non-places” (Auge 1995) where affective spaces are projected and symbolically revisited rather than straightforwardly inhabited. I will argue that such anticipations and commemorations indicate the need to theorise contemporary fandom as a series of “unfolding events”, implying paratextual completism (Gray 2010), rather than merely as fan-text affective encounters (Hills 2015a and 2015b).

Date: August 3, 2015
Time: 13:00-14:30
Location: University of Tokyo, Hongo, Daiwa Ubiquitous Computing Hall, Ishibashi Memorial Hall (A306, 3F)
http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/campusmap/cam01_14_04_j.html

Website: http://kadokawa.iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp/summer_program/