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The Center for Social Media

The Center for Social Media showcases and analyzes strategies to use media as creative tools for public knowledge and action. It focuses on social documentaries for civil society and democracy, and on the public media environment that supports them. The Center is part of the School of Communication at American University.

What Can Indie Film Learn from Indie Music?May 18

On May 7, I led a discussion at the Maryland Film Festival  of what independent film can learn from the upheaval in the music business. At the festival's "Filmmakers Taking Charge" conference, music manager and promoter Jason Foster talked about the value of providing free downloads of songs, in order to make money at live events and with direct sales, often at those events. (He also noted that it was a lot cheaper to make music than to make movies.) Promoter Cullen Stalin talked about the challenge of dealing with industry behemoth Live Nation/Ticketmaster, which has a lock on many venues and on promotion as well. Both said that promotion via social media was absolutely key to their work; giving…

Fair Use Question of the Month: Can I post recordings of me playing a video game?May 18

QUESTION: Dear Center for Social Media, I have a question that touches on point four of the Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video. I own and play a game called Audiosurf. The game uses songs as a base and creates game levels based on the properties of the song such as BPM, pitch etc. Each level is the length of the song chosen and the player plays it in a Guitar Hero like game play, with varying game modes changing how it's actually played. Due to the difficulty of making a repeat performance of a perfect play in some levels, I make it a habit of recording my play sessions. These recordings then include not just…

MYMM presentation: New Models for Impact AssessmentMay 12

Jessica Clark: Making Your Media Matter 2010View more presentations from Jessica Clark.

At Making Your Media Matter: Two new CSM reports examine emerging models for media impact assessmentMay 12

At today's Making Your Media Matter conference, the Center for Social Media is excited to release two reports that examine new models for assessing media impact: Investing in Impact Throughout the spring, the CSM and The Media Consortium (TMC) drew together dozens of leading public interest media makers, funders and researchers in Chicago, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Boston for a series of Impact Summits. These convenings—which asked attendees to describe how they measure reach, relevance, engagement, inclusion and influence in their work—informed a new analysis co-published by CSM and TMC: Investing In Impact: Media Summits Reveal Pressing Needs, Tools for Evaluating Public Interest Media. In Investing in Impact, we outline the major arguments for…

Talking about Documentary Ethics—Among FriendsMay 10

What keeps filmmakers from having a sure sense of what’s acceptable, in an environment where every day the demands for entertainment, sensationalism, and extremism are ratcheted up? Fear of talking about the problems they encounter, according to conversations members of the Washington, D.C. chapter of Women in Film and Video (which also by the way includes men) had at dinner meetings throughout the city and at WIFV’s Wednesday One. Filmmakers risk reputation and contracts if they share doubts, conflicts and questions they have about the best way to get their work done. All of WIFV’s hosted conversations, including Wednesday One, were off-the-record and unrecorded. WIFV organized informal, intimate conversational spaces precisely to overcome the very real problems that filmmakers face…