This Friday, the IMS Lecture Series kicks off with Brad King speaking  
on the topic, "Social Media + Non-Fiction Storytelling: The  
Distributed Story Stream." The presentation will be in Room 2049 of  
the Farmer School of Business at 11:15am Friday, Sept. 11.

For all the talk about emerging technologies, social media and new  
forms of communication, modern storytelling continues to look very  
much the way it's always looked. Linear, non-linear. Interactive.

But there's an new story paradigm emerging from the chaos of user- 
generated content, data streams of information and simple software  
technologies that allow us each to grab bits and bytes as they fly by.  
This "distributed story stream" is actually the most fundamentally Web- 
centric storytelling we have.

The Distributed Stream, the basis of his forthcoming book The Cult of  
Me, suggests a new form of collective storytelling that happens in  
real time, across multiple networks and with various levels of  
reputation and editorial control.

King's talk with examine what this new story paradigm looks like, how  
it works, how it's different than what we've done in the past and  
suggests hurdles that need to be leaped over sooner rather than later.  
Before we lose precious pieces of information to the ever-changing  
technological landscape.


BIO:

Brad King is an assistant professor of journalism at Muncie, Indiana's  
Ball State University, where his research examines how emerging  
technologies are changing the ways we tell -- and share -- stories. He  
is also one of six Emerging Media Fellows at the university, where he  
works with the university's Center for Media Design to develop and run  
multi-disciplinary projects.

A journalist since 1994, King earned his Master's from the University  
of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism in 2000. He  
then when work for Condé Nast's Wired magazine and then its sister  
website Wired News covering the convergence of technology and culture.  
In 2002 he co-authored Dungeons and Dreamers, a book on the history of  
computer games, virtual worlds and their effects on American culture  
for McGraw-Hill. In 2004, he was hired as the senior editor and  
producer for MIT's Technology Review.

Along with his academic and journalist work, King has kept close to  
his Net roots. He helped launch blogs at Variety magazine and MIT. He  
also sat on the advisory board for the first Austin Game Conference in  
2004. For the past several years, he has worked on the advisory boards  
for South by Southwest Interactive, a social technologies conference,  
and Carnegie Mellon's ETC Press.

King is currently finishing the second edition of Dungeons and  
Dreamers (ETC Press 2009), The Cult of Me, his book social media  
technologies and storytelling (ETC Press 2010) as well as editing  
Making Digital, a book of essays on digital project management.


-----
Cheryl Gibbs
Assistant Director
Journalism Program
Miami University
260A Bachelor Hall
Oxford, OH   45056
(513) 529-1923 (office)
(765) 993-0624 (cell)