One of the oft cited highlights of the Symposium is the evening portion of the event, which consists of cocktails, dinner, and a closing keynote address. As in previous years, we’re inviting Symposium participants to bring a guest to the evening portion. If you choose to bring someone, please let us know in advance so we can accommodate him or her. If you  need to, you can let us know when you register on Friday.

This year, we’re back at the beautiful Players Club on Gramercy Park, which was once the home of the American Hamlet, Edwin Booth (he had a famous brother too). We’ll provide transportation the the Players Club, but you are certainly welcome to get there on your own if you so choose — the walk is short and quite nice. If you’d like, you can join us for a historical walking tour of the Gramercy Park area on the way to the Club. The tour will be led by Stephen Petrus of Big Onion Walking Tours. Stephen is a historian specializing in NYC history and a former Fellow at the Institute. Those who went on his tour last year, raved about it. It’s well worth doing if you are so inclined.

At the Players Club, we’ll be joined again this year by composer and jazz pianist Ben Waltzer, who will play during our cocktail hour starting at around 6:00pm. At 7pm, Dr. William F Baker, the former head of New York’s Channel Thirteen and accomplished journalist, producer and speaker, will take the stage and deliver what promises to be a fascinating evening keynote address.

We’re looking forward to an exciteing event and hope you can stay for dinner.

The staff of the Institute feel that it’s important to capture and preserve as much of the thinking that takes place at each Symposium as possible.  Our fellows will be taking notes at the morning table discussions, and we will be photographing and filming much of the day.

We encourage participants to share their thoughts about the event, in real time if possible, using Twitter.

WiFi Access
If you wish to use Baruch’s wireless network while at the Symposium, we’ll need to register you for access. If you’re planning to bring a laptop or some other wifi enabled device and would like access to Baruch’s wireless network, please let us know by the end of business on Wednesday (4/29) by sending an email to Thomas.Harbison@baruch.cuny.edu with the subject line “Wifi access.”

Twitter
If you are a Twitter user and wish to comment on the day’s activities, please use the #blsci hashtag in your updates. We will set up a large display in our break area and will follow Symposium tweets in real time. Placing #blsci in your tweets will make it possible to easily aggregate all the day’s tweeting.

One of the challenges of producing content in the Web 2.0 world is developing an awareness of the audience for whom we are producing.

In this blog post, the Internet artist Ze Frank deconstructs the process by which he imagines his audience,  and explores the particular challenges posed by collaborative work. In many cases, one’s vision of the audience is jumbled; Frank argues that this makes producing work online very exciting, but can also pose challenges for one’s critical eye.  He suggests some methods for envisioning the audience:

When you write a comment, or a facebook status update, or anything that goes out to a group of people – pay attention to how you imagine it being perceived. Are you imagining each person individually? Have you created some in proxy individual for the group? Are you aware of an unknown audience? What are they like? Is there a mood associated with them? How did it all come to be?

He also suggests some methods for embedding a vision of the audience into collaborative work:

First you can directly state what you consider to be the intended audience: “write as if speaking to a child”, or “give advice to new buyers”. Second, you can reference a specific style (which takes the place of an audience): “like a soap opera”, “in the style of an encyclopedia”. And third, you can add a “final presentation” to the project: “Fifty entries will be displayed at this location when the project is done” or “images will be included in a book”. This at least creates a shared context for how all the contributions will be viewed, and can point to a broader audience (this ad will be shown during the superbowl), or to a very specific audience (this will be displayed at the children’s hospital).

Finally, Frank asks several well-known artists and writers how they view their audiences as they work, and offers some additional thoughts in response to emails after about his original post.

Here’s a 1996 article by Nick Gillespie entitled, “View Masters: The Audience’s Power Over Media’s Message, that appeared in Reason magazine. In it, Gillespie deftly considers, among other things, the relationship between audiences, passivity and consumerism. It’s a bit old and dated in some significant ways (much has happened since 1996 after all), but provocative and interesting nonetheless. Here’s a brief excerpt:

The notion of TV viewers and consumers of pop culture as intellectual couch potatoes closely parallels longstanding conventional scholarly analyses of how popular culture works. As with the political consensus, the intellectual indictment crosses traditional right/left boundaries. Critics usually charge that pop culture, in seeking the broadest audience possible, appeals to the lowest common denominator and thereby cheapens and coarsens society. Most critics take the argument a step further and claim that, even as pop culture gives the people what they want, it destroys consumers’ critical faculties, effectively infantalizing them.

Consider, for instance, conservative Allan Bloom’s commentary on rock music. In The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Bloom writes, “[R]ock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire–not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored….My concern here is not with the moral effects of this music–whether it leads to sex, violence, or drugs. The issue here is its effect on education, and I believe it ruins the imagination of young people and makes it very difficult for them to have a passionate relationship to the art and thought that are the substance of liberal education.”

Television can lay claim to the status of most-favored punching bag and academic attacks on the small screen are representative of broader indictments of pop culture. Watching the idiot box, goes the argument, turns viewers into idiots. As their titles suggest, books such as The Plug-In Drug, Media: The Second God, The Glass Teat (and its sequel, The Other Glass Teat), and Telegarbage attempt to detail just how horrible and intellectually enervating the medium actually is.

Boxed In: The Culture of TV (1988), by Mark Crispin Miller, a left-leaning media critic and professor at Johns Hopkins University, provides a good example. “Those who have grown up watching television are not, because of all that gaping, now automatically adept at visual interpretation. That spectatorial `experience’ is passive, mesmeric, undiscriminating, and therefore not conducive to the refinement of the critical faculties,” writes Miller.

Read the whole article here.

Via Tech Crunch, an interesting article on the success of Twitter as a powerful means of communicating with a defined and focused audience. Here’s a juicy excerpt:

Back to Twitter: Why Audience works
Twitter works and enjoys such strong attachment because it provides real-time access to a well-defined audience. The backlog of all previous tweets is a guarantee of permanence (you can even search it) and you can catch up on it anytime. As a result, people use Twitter because they have an idea of who will see their lightweight messages and this sense of audience is reinforced by @replies, re-tweets and references in future conversations (online and offline).

Designing for the sense of Audience is a powerful tool to create cohesion and a sense of utility among users of a service. This lesson from Twitter can apply to many other services too. But before leaving the current discussion, it’s helpful to look at a service that has missed the full power of Audience so far.

Facebook: Designed for Audience?
Not so much. Facebook isn’t about Audience? That’s ridiculous, you’ll say — so let me clarify. I fully agree that social network profiles are all about self-expression and being seen, but a platform for self-expression isn’t necessarily designed for the audience that does “the seeing.”

Profile Pages on Facebook can have audiences of course, but this requires that users continually roam Facebook to look for news in their network. Facebook realized this limitation and introduced the News Feed. Its intent was to move a user’s “acts and performances” from the stage of the profile page to a single and central stage, a single place for Audience.

Read the whole article here.

The fine folks at Common Craft specialize in creating clear and simple animated explanations of important but often confusing concepts and technologies, anything from social bookmarking and computer hardware to zombies and the electoral college. Here are their brief guides to three Web 2.0 tools that will no doubt be much discussed over the course of the day on May 1: blogs, wikis, and Twitter. Please feel free to comment if you find these useful, instructive or provocative.

Performance artists, choreographers, and playwrights have long experimented with means of drawing audience members into a performance, making them more than just viewers, but participants as well. This video of a live dance performance in the Liverpool train station in London orchestrated by T-Mobile as part of a marketing campaign shows us an interesting example of an attempt to blur the line between audience and performer. It also brings up interesting questions regarding the relationship between marketers and their audiences.  Is there more to say here about the role of the audience than that they were subtly coerced into participating in a clever publicity stunt?

Here’s an interesting “Making Of” video that sheds some light on how the performance came together.