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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Laura Tiffany
For editorial matters:
Editor: Mark Wood
Phone: (909) 621-8158
Fax: (909) 621-8203
PCM Editorial Guidelines
Contact Alumni Records for changes of address, class notes, or notice
of births or deaths.
Phone: (909) 621-8635
Fax: (909) 621-8535
Email: alumni@pomona.edu
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Symposium / Media Studies
The Medium Is the Future
By Anne Shulock '08
Pomona’s Media Studies Program marked the 10th anniversary of the death of its founder, Professor Brian Stonehill, with a symposium exploring the unknowns of the changing media landscape. Held Feb. 29 and March 1 at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art and Pomona’s Rose Hills Theatre,
Page, Screen, Pixel: Media in Transition examined “worlds Brian imagined but never had the chance to fully explore,” as Trustee Paul Eckstein ’62 noted in his opening tribute. Speakers discussed innovation in media old and new:
Newspapers surviving the Internet era:
In his keynote address, The New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller ’70 said the Web, despite its large impact on newspapers, won’t kill them off. “The civic labor performed by journalists on the ground cannot be replaced by legions of bloggers [or] a search engine; it cannot be supplanted by shouting heads or by satirical TV shows,” he said. “People crave trustworthy information.”
A complex world of networks and hybrids:
Marsha Kinder directs The Labyrinth Project, consisting of digitally based works often combining video, old and new photographs, text, animation and sound. But, Kinder pointed out, “narrative remains crucial” to media-users. She transfixed the audience with examples of The Labyrinth Project’s gorgeous, user-navigated narratives like the ghostly detective story “Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986.”
Books that never end:
“Our sense of what books are is going to change dramatically,” said Bob Stein, director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. He looks to place books within digital networks: “They will be more like living things.” Siva Vaidhyanathan, a fellow at the Institute and also a speaker at the symposium, shot back: “The most terrifying thing for an author is to have a book that’s never done. The scenario you’ve outlined is a nightmare one.”
Wait a sec. Writers still matter:
Middebury College’s Jason Mittell spoke on the trend of increasing narrative complexity in contemporary American television shows such as
Lost. In contrast to the (possible) community-driven books or newspapers of the future, these television narratives require a hierarchy of authorship and meticulous design. But Mittell argued that part of the pleasure for viewers is working to solve these complicated worlds, while trusting the authors to deliver that which they’ve set up.
The Googlization of Everything:
Siva Vaidhyanathan of the University of Virginia is writing the manuscript for his new book,
The Googlization of Everything, online in blog format. His work considers the non-neutral role of search engines, and he cautioned that, for as much as we know about how the algorithms work, “Google is magic.”
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