A question and answer session of the behavioral presentations.
Bio
Tammy Haddad
Tammy Haddad is a veteran executive producer of network news and entertainment programs. Best known as the creator and longtime executive producer of “Larry King Live,” she brought Larry King to television in 1985.
By the early nineties, the show became the most watched and most talked about talk show in the history of cable television.
During the 1992 election, the show became the first stop for any presidential candidate trying to reach directly over the heads of the Washington press corps to talk to the citizenry.
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens is an author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2008.
Ben Relles
Ben
is Head of Creative Development at the YouTube Next Lab. In this role
he works with some of the most innovative producers in online video to
help them build their audience and develop their content and creative
programming. Prior to joining YouTube, Ben was Vice President of
Programming at online video leader Next New Networks where he led content strategy as the company built viewership to over two billion total views.
Ben also founded and runs the comedy network Barely Political which
has been viewed over one billion times since launching in 2007 and is
one of YouTube's top 10 most viewed channels of all time. Ben started Barely Political with his series of "Obama Girl" videos which quickly became a worldwide phenomenon and eventually was named by Newsweek as one of the top five memes of the decade. The Barely Political network continued to expand when Ben created a partnership with the Gregory Brothers to launch their Autotune the News series on the network. Ben also co-created the show The Key of Awesome which is currently one of the internet's most popular shows, with over 30 million views per month.
Zoe Stagg
Zoë Stagg is a writer who splits her time between San Francisco and New York City. With a Master’s in speech communication, her work has been featured, or is forthcoming, in Ready Made, San Francisco Magazine, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Sunset, Co-ed, Veg news, Relate, New York Moves, and Roam.
Baratunde Thurston
Baratunde Thurston is a technology-loving comedian from the future who cares enough about the world to engage with it politically. Yes, he votes. Regularly. With an ancestry that includes a great-grandfather who taught himself to read, a grandmother who was the first black employee at the U.S. Supreme Court building and a mother who took over radio stations in the name of the black liberation struggle, Baratunde has long been taught to question authority. It helps that he was raised in Washington, D.C. under crackhead Mayor Marion Barry.
His creative and inquisitive mind, forged by his mother’s lessons and polished by a philosophy degree from Harvard, have found expression in his monthly Fast Company column, on the sound waves of NPR, and on the screens of news networks such as CNN, MSNBC, BBC, Al Jazeera English and This Week In Tech. He even hosted his own show on Discovery Science called Popular Science's Future Of.
Far from simply appearing in media, Baratunde is also helping defining its future. In 2006 he co-founded Jack & Jill Politics, a black political blog whose coverage of the 2008 Democratic National Convention has been archived by the Library Of Congress. From 2007 to 2012, he helped bring one of America’s finest journalistic institutions into the future, serving as Director of Digital for The Onion. In 2011 he was a judge for the Knight News Challenge, a media innovation contest which funds experiments in the future of news. His book, How To Be Black, was published by Harper Collins in February 2012 and is a New York Times best-seller.
Lizz Winstead
Lizz Winstead is a Minnesota-born comedian who was co-creator of The Daily Show along with Madeline Smithberg, and served as head writer.
Lizz Winstead, Christopher Hitchens and Baratunde Thurston argue about the message of cable television.
In this internet world of new media, Winstead asks, is the televised news still important? Does Chris Matthews' "thoughtlessness" really impact American's lives?
Christopher Hitchens compares Barack Obama's race speech to the Gettysburg address and finds the former the "most boring speech ever made."
While Hitchens calls Obama a "megalomaniac narcissist," Ben Relles defends the campaign by detailing the layered process between raw material and Youtube-worthy product.
Interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of social institutions in the shaping of culture. Originally identified with the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (founded 1964) and with such scholars as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams, today cultural studies is recognized as a discipline or area of concentration in many academic institutions and has had broad influence in sociology, anthropology, historiography, literary criticism, philosophy, and art criticism. Among its central concerns are the place of race (or ethnicity), class, and gender in the production of cultural knowledge.