Principal Investigator David Thorburn
Co-investigators Karen Sollins , Mitchel Resnick , William Uricchio , James Paradis , Shigeru Miyagawa
Project Website http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/
The MIT Communications Forum sponsors panel discussions and symposiums concerning all aspects of modern communications, with special emphasis on emerging technologies.
Leading scholars, journalists, media producers, political figures and corporate executives have appeared at conferences and panels sponsored by the Forum. Translating specialized or technical perspectives into a discourse accessible to non-specialists is a defining ambition of the Forum. When engineers, scientists, other academics or media practitioners address the Forum, they accept a responsibility to speak in a common language that must be understood and used by literate citizens and professionals in many fields.
The Forum has regularly examined such topics as the regulation of communications industries, defense communications, the theory and history of communications systems, the political uses of media, the cultural and social significance of new media. The Internet and the World Wide Web are a primary, continuing subject for the Forum which aims to nourish speculation and productive, citizenly dialogue about this powerful emerging medium among humanists and scientists, entrepreneurs and policy makers, programmers, designers, and artists.
The Forum is funded by contributions from members of the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and foundation grants. The Forum's founding director was the late Ithiel de Sola Pool, a pioneer in the study of communications who taught in the MIT Political Science Department.
To mark its twentieth anniversary in 1998, the Communications Forum launched the Media in Transition project in collaboration with the new MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies (CMS).
Funded by the Markle Foundation, this initiative involved a series of forums and conferences comparing earlier periods of decisive technological and social change with our contemporary experience of media transformation and convergence.
International conferences devoted to the theme of Media in Transition are held every other year at MIT under the joint sponsorship of CMS and the Forum.