At the end of the three-day Media in Transition conference, panelists swap impressions and reactions, offering some notional themes for future symposia.

Mary Bryson frames her comments as “a mash-up aggregation.” The conference’s “massive disagreements and sometimes awkward silences and gaps” were beneficial, “as we make our way in the present imperfect of media studies.” For Bryson, a key question arose: “What time is it here?” The past, present and future are now intertwined in media studies, and often in “incommensurable tension.” The next conference might wish to “mobilize and re-territorialize” itself across borders, making itself available in multiple host locations.

The traditional discourse around libraries and archives no longer serves us well, observes librarian Marlene Manoff, who calls for a “new terminology to describe or think about collections of digital objects, especially when they involve new services and functionalities.” She was “happy to hear a universal acknowledgment of the volatility and mutability of the digital record,” yet finds herself “still at a loss when it comes to questions about what should or should not be saved.” Colleagues in the profession have been “discussing the social and political implications of selection decisions for a long time,” and today, with so many people creating and collecting digital objects and files,” she perceives “a much broader conversation,” although there is yet “no cultural consensus” about these issues.

John Durham Peters offers three observations: He first addresses the difficulty of organizing knowledge in a field as diverse as media studies (or for that matter, in other modern scholarship). Peters likens media studies to “a 17th-century cabinet of curiosities.” He also gives “two cheers for breakdown,” for the ways that archives fail to conserve “all kinds of stuff.” He asks if we would regard Sappho as such a good poet “if we possessed all 12 of the books.” He’s not trying “to praise barbarians who want to burn libraries,” but to point out that “what counts as historical record is exceedingly malleable.” His last comment involves the “interesting reversibility” of transmission and storage. To “transcend time, we must use up space, just as to transcend space, we must use up time.”

Thomas Pettitt admits to an identity crisis of sorts -- that “those of us who do literature but who have lost faith in literature as a rounded concept are not quite certain what it is that we do.” Possibly as a result of the welcoming nature of the conference, he wonders if “over time, literature studies people will find our true identity within media studies.” Literature is a form of culture production whose scholars focus on aesthetics, particularly those in a verbal form. The conference was absorbed with questions of quantity (“megas and teras”), but asks Pettitt, “Have we neglected (aesthetic) quality as a factor?” And finally, he found confirmation in the notion that “advances in media technology are taking us back to conditions as they were before some of the mechanical inventions.” Is this “business of the future looking rather like the past?”

Researchers are well along in designing a highly efficient, inexpensive solar cell, but the big barrier to the dissemination of solar power in society remains the problem of installation, says Marc Baldo.

As an engineer, Baldo expresses confidence that “we’re going to mow down” the problem of producing a great solar cell and making it cheap. His own lab has developed a unique approach that’s found enthusiastic support from the federal government and others. Unlike conventional solar cells that use a single material such as silicon to perform both functions of absorbing light and converting it into electricity, Baldo’s cell “separates the functions and optimizes both.” His solar concentrator utilizes inexpensive material like glass or plastic onto which a thin film of dye has been painted. Sunlight strikes this surface, and the dye, which can be “tuned” or colored to trap specific wavelengths of light, emits light back to solar cells along the edge of the plate. There are enormous advantages derived from this design: The glass or plastic (considerably cheaper than silicon) catches diffuse light, so there’s no need to track the sun, and it concentrates the sunlight much more efficiently than conventional solar cells.

But solar concentrators alone don’t signal the start of a new solar age. Baldo addresses the considerable uncertainty around the broad deployment of solar power. Installation costs for single homes appear formidably high, perhaps 2/3rd the cost of the entire system. Colossal solar fields that might replace fossil fuel burning plants must ship their energy across vast distances, losing electricity along the way. And right now the national power grid isn’t set up to handle the fluctuations in energy that large-scale intermittent energy sources such as solar or wind present. Clouds are a “big pain” for grid operators, says Baldo.

He believes the best start for solar will be in commercial and industrial installations such as the rooftops of factories, supermarkets or warehouses, sites where there’s no loss moving power around, and where managers are already seeking ways to save on lighting and refrigeration, including smart electronics. His cost-effective concentrators could find their way to such installations in several years.

In addition to solar concentrators, Baldo is researching biological models for making solar cells more efficient: He just received a $19 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to study exciton circuitry in plants -- how plants capture light in packets of energy and direct the energy to where it’s needed. Says Baldo, “This exciton is the last, great unexplored territory in solar cells.”

Cooperation may be making us “a little bit too nice” when it comes to innovation, suggests Fiona Murray. She believes there’s nothing like competition for injecting energy into the process of solving key innovation problems, whether in business or society.

Murray is convinced competition make ventures “more effective, more global, more inclusive and more democratic,” all important dimensions for business in a flattening world. She describes the rapidly expanding R&D expenditures of India and China, including the vast numbers of Ph.D.s these nations are producing in science and engineering. The corporate sector has found building global R&D organizations and collaborations difficult. In this challenging environment, where the advantage goes to those firms snagging the best scientists, Murray believes “prizes are complementary mechanisms” for attracting global talent. Just like historic rivalries among great artists (Nb., Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese), or the race to discover the structure of DNA, “fierce competition” can yield “dramatic productivity” and innovation, especially when the right rewards are at stake.

Murray cites the 18th century competition to invent a mechanism for determining a ship’s longitude, which offered a 20 thousand-pound prize. She jumps to the present, with the X Prize Foundation and its various competitions to solve engineering challenges and societal problems, such as the three-person reusable spaceship, and a 100-mpg car -- each with a $10 million prize purse. But it’s not just the money. Recent studies show that prizes prove alluring when they focus efforts and resources on a problem that people are already studying, offering fame and “putting fun back into innovation.” The fascination skews rational calculations, with competitors often spending well beyond the amount offered to the winner.

Corporations should adopt the prize mechanism, believes Murray, to help generate new ideas (such as new applications for Google’s phone); or to help solve very specific problems. Campus competitions are up markedly, she notes, which might be a distraction for students at places like MIT. Start small and inside the organization first, creating a shared bulletin board and offering small prizes, she advises, which will “generate energy.” Then take competition beyond the company. And don’t forget, “the work must be fun” in order to “get a richer set of people to participate.”

While Arnold Barnett acknowledges addressing the same questions around flying year after year (“Does he ever change his schtick?”), he advertises some new twists this time ‘round. Barnett remains remarkably consistent, though, in his quite sunny assessment of the current state of aviation safety -- even after a recent string of air accidents.

Wielding statistics and the occasional wisecrack, Barnett arrives at his destination by way of a series of dialectical questions. How safe is it to fly now? Doesn’t that depend on how we measure aviation safety, and which statistics are the most informative? You could look at such metrics as fatal accidents per flight hours, or hull loss per 100 thousand departures, or passengers killed to passengers carried. Barnett proposes instead the “imperfect but meaningful” statistic of death risk per randomly chosen flight, which among other conceptual advantages, deals with the odds of being killed -- a factor with “intuitive appeal.”

Barnett’s numbers: From 2000 to 2008, someone who chose a U.S. jet flight at random would sustain an accidental death risk of 1 in 23 million (there were 3 crashes in 69 million total jet flights). There’s a much greater likelihood an American child will become president (one in 2 million) than die in flight.

Death risk statistics from the 1960s through today have improved steadily, plateauing in the current decade due to the unprecedented tragedy of 9/11. Currently, there’s a one in 10 million risk of death by jet in U.S. flight, around 1 in 14 million for other developed nations (the developing world’s aviation risk poses somewhat greater hazards: one in 1.5 million). Says Barnett,“Despite recent suggestions to the contrary, regional jet flights are not less safe than national airlines.”

While “fatal accidents on first world jets are on the verge of extinction,” Barnett worries about an increase in runway collisions, as the global economy improves. He hopes technological advances will address these concerns. The greater challenge comes from terrorism, which he feels sure will continue to target aviation. Using a cost benefit analysis, Barnett dispenses with proposals to ban laptops on flights, and also dismisses the idea of faster, more effective responses to terrorist attacks, which often come in clusters. Ultimately, our “optimal strategy might actually be to do nothing, except hope.” Perhaps we should come to view aviation dangers as Californians regard the threat of earthquakes: Take precautions but acknowledge “we have to take certain risks in life if we’re going to have lives worth risking.”

Contrary to popular thinking, China owes its astonishing economic expansion not to far-sighted government policy but to hundreds of millions of entrepreneurial peasants. Yasheng Huang’s research reveals not only how small-scale rural businesses created China’s miracle but how that nation’s recovery from the global recession and righting the massive East-West trade imbalance depend on this same under-acknowledged sector.

Huang begins with questions, including why China produces so much relative to its own consumption. He shows graphs dramatically illustrating the rise of China’s GDP with a concurrent drop in domestic consumption. A nation that doesn’t consume what it produces must export. Huang has pounded away at the question of this drop in consumption. He rejects explanations pointing at a Chinese bent for thrift, and believes instead that households have become impoverished in the midst of the nation’s decades-long boom.

Huang’s research analyzed previously unexamined data to resolve this paradox and produce a novel thesis, detailing the rise and fall of rural entrepreneurship in China. In the 1980s, enabled by government liberalization, tens of millions of peasants began home-grown private businesses, from small-scale manufacturing to service delivery. They supplemented meager agricultural incomes, generating profits that they used to better their standards of living. The Chinese economy boomed. But in the 1990s, a new regime took over, taxing the grass-roots entrepreneurs and pouring money into infrastructure and state-run enterprises. Politicians imposed steep fees on education and healthcare, soaking the newly minted rural capitalists. GDP rose, but household incomes dipped, as hundreds of millions pinched pennies instead of generating profits. The Chinese made lots of things that they couldn’t buy. A global trade imbalance ballooned.

The recession has struck the rural Chinese especially painfully (they make up 70% of the nation’s population). More than 100 million who had migrated to cities for work have lost their jobs with the shutdown of factories, and there has been a “virtual collapse in non-farm business income growth,” says Huang. New Chinese policies have begun to attend to rural issues, such as abolishing rural taxation, reducing fees, and spurring microfinance. This should help increase household income. But in key areas like land reform, there’s only been talk. Huang believes a Chinese stimulus package aimed at reinvigorating the building boom won’t do nearly as much good for the economy as liberalization of social policies and attempts to unleash once again the productive energies of the rural poor.

Nostalgia, anxiety and optimism mix in this panel devoted to imagining what lies ahead for the book, as publishing professionals and others discuss the impact of digital technology on the business.

Small Beer Press, Gavin Grant’s boutique Massachusetts publishing company, “is still in the business of producing paper objects.” But new technologies are transforming his work in several ways: He licenses some books via Creative Commons; releases others as downloads in a variety of ebook formats (generating these can be an expensive “hassle”); and deploys social media, in the form of blogs and Facebook-enabled communication, to publicize and attract passionate readers to the firm’s website. Grant sees Amazon and its Kindle as a bully driving readers toward best sellers, and is interested in the “hyperlocal” possibilities of the web for publishing: finding readers for his one-of-a-kind publications, and inviting them to peruse his non-mainstream book lists.

Agent Jennifer Jackson describes some intriguing direct marketing activities made possible by the web, including author-produced book trailers on YouTube, and an online media project undertaken by clients and other authors: a website consisting of episodes for a fictional TV show. Jackson also maintains blogs that she hopes provide “transparency” about her end of the business, a way to bridge “the great divide” between agents and authors. Her authors are concerned with digital piracy but Jackson feels wide distribution of an author’s work ends up generating more sales over time.

Robert Miller’s frustration with the trade publishing model-- in particular, astronomical advances to authors, and book return rates of 40% -- led to HarperStudio (a Harper Collins offshoot). His notion of “starting something from scratch” involves making digital and physical books available simultaneously to the reader. His first offering is a collection of previously unpublished pieces by Mark Twain that are available as individual books, or in discounted bundles with audio books and downloadable books. He celebrates the reduction in production costs in moving to digital, but he’s wary of the small but rapidly expanding ebook market, which he anticipates will impose a “downward pressure on prices,” a loss of revenue that will negatively impact his business.

Bob Stein envisions a wholesale evolution of the essence of books, from objects to “a place where readers and sometimes authors congregate.” His Institute on the Future of the Book hosts experiments in publishing, such as one where an author essentially blogs and moderates responses around a particular subject. Readers could someday collaborate with dead authors, adding chapters to finished books, for instance. He sees ebooks as transitional: “The experiments which have to do with increasing sales of book are interesting, and will prolong publishing but won’t invent the future of how humans work together to increase our knowledge, which is what publishing used to do.” These new expressive forms won’t emerge quickly. It took 300 years after the invention of the printing before the first novel was written, he notes, but inexorably, “we’re shifting the ways humans communicate with each other.”

There are ample opportunities for new energy entrepreneurs, these panelists agree, but motivation and certain kinds of know-how play key roles in bringing new ventures to fruition.

Idealism led Christina Lampe-Onnerud to “go into the energy space” at 23, but
“inertia” surrounding the energy business may intimidate today’s entrepreneurs. Her Boston-Power company, which makes “green” lithium-ion batteries, has forged good relations with policymakers, and now hopes that these politicians will be “brave enough” to “put frameworks out 20 years.” In addition to long-term policy changes, Lampe-Onnerud is counting on a continuous influx of good scientists and engineers to drive her company forward. She encourages everyone with new ideas or the capacity to provide leadership to respond “to the biggest opportunity and threat we have.”

Jacques Beaudry-Losique warns would-be energy entrepreneurs they’re up against a highly regulated environment. An offshore wind turbine might require 39 different permits, and it can take as long as 14 years to get approval for a transmission line. Beaudry-Losique promises that government is now working “to better align interests so we can move faster bringing these solutions to the table.” Energy entrepreneurs should arm themselves with experienced staff who can navigate regulatory channels. They should also build consortia and partnerships with foundations, government and university labs, other manufacturers and buyers. The administration “is making a huge commitment to energy efficiency and smart buildings” and views wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels, as “all hot.”

Compared to entrepreneurial ventures in IT and life sciences, clean energy startups demand “more money, more time and more late stage risk,” says Matthew Nordan. Biomass or coal gasification technologies might require a billion dollars for a pilot plant, which “is a level of risk so high that …investors won’t sign that check.” Many technologies intended to solve one problem end up creating another, or encounter bottlenecks as they scale up, such as the limited supply of precious metals required for the magnets of wind turbines. Some entrepreneurs find success in unique niches, though, such as those seeking to recover waste metal byproducts of tar sand operations. But Nordan warns of a big shake up, as the recent discovery of a massive pocket of natural gas in the U.S. will make competition even steeper for new energy contenders like solar and wind.

Robert Metcalfe finds a lack of “human capital” in current energy ventures. The talented CEOs “who have started five companies” are in short supply in energy, which also haven’t widely adopted partnering as a useful model. To Metcalfe, the energy problem “looks more and more like a networking problem,” which demands a smart grid with lots of storage. This should present entrepreneurs with novel areas to explore. Large utilities may prove obstructive: “We must find ways to get around them, …either recruit them or destroy them.” He’s optimistic there will be breakthroughs in such technologies as fuel cells, and that “when we solve energy, it will be cheap and abundant, and we will use much more of it.”

The situation facing our planet could hardly be more dire: There’s increasingly dangerous competition among nations for ever scarce energy resources, and climate change is racing ahead of predictions. Although Steven Chu believes “We are getting close to where it’s very nervous time,” he also sees “reason for hope.”

Just as science in the 1970s produced a “green revolution” in agricultural productivity, preventing mass starvation in a swelling global population, Chu is counting on transformative scientific and engineering ideas to achieve sustainable energy and cap climate change.

As chief architect of new policy, and with tens of billions of dollars to pump into his vision, Chu is targeting key areas. Number one on his list: energy efficiency and conservation. Since buildings use 40% of the nation’s total energy, designing more efficient homes and offices will make a big difference. There are “tune ups” possible for existing buildings, and software that can direct lighting, heating and cooling where it’s needed that can achieve 50% plus energy savings, and won’t break the bank. Says Chu, “This is truly low-hanging fruit, but we have to build the tools that allow architects and structural engineers to get on with it.”

On the supply side, Chu has his heart set on transformative technologies such as nanotech breakthroughs in solar power. He’s looking for ways to scale up biomass fuel production, now that synthetic biology can make microbes manufacture gas-like fuels. Noting in particular the work of MIT’s Dan Nocera, Chu says he “wants to use nature as an inspiration, but go beyond nature,” performing artificial photosynthesis to create new hydrocarbons. And as the U.S. and China continue dependence on coal, figuring out how to capture and sequester carbon from these plants figures “high on the list of things we must do.” He’s again hoping researchers will find some analog to nature’s ability to grab and neutralize CO2.

The ideal environment for jumpstarting such urgent scientific efforts, believes Chu, is something like Bell Labs, where Chu himself worked. The Labs performed “mission-driven research” around communications and for U.S. war efforts, but along the way also developed the transistor, information theory, radio astronomy, and lasers, among many examples. These scientist-led labs emphasized exchange of ideas and rapid infusion of research funds to the most promising work. This led to inventions that in turn transformed the U.S. economy. Chu envisions energy lab equivalents that “deliver the goods” along with fundamental science, “so you can have the Nobel Prize and save the world at the same time.”

While Barack Obama has rejected the Bush administration’s harsh stance toward Iran, panelists warn that we’re far from the start of fruitful relations, and that achieving real diplomacy will paradoxically require both patience and a sense of urgency.

Suzanna DiMaggio observes the U.S. seeking “areas of common interest and managing areas of profound differences” with Iran, moving “well beyond a change in language” to concrete and profound shifts in policy, such as recognizing Iran’s right to a peaceful nuclear program; curtailing support for Iranian opposition groups; and reaching out for Iran’s cooperation on Afghanistan. DiMaggio says Afghanistan may prove key to building the foundations of a relationship, since Iran is concerned about halting the spread of violent fundamentalism and curtailing drug trafficking. The way forward, she suggests, involves approaching Iran in a “direct and sustained way to clarify U.S. intentions in the region while building confidence and trust,” which “will require each side to exercise great restraint,” and an acceptance that there will be frequent setbacks.

Jim Walsh describes recent U.S. actions toward Iran as “scene setting,” with such moves as dropping preconditions for discussing Iran’s nuclear program, and discouraging Israel from contemplating a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But “Iran is cautious,” with its government demonstrating “a certain schizophrenia” -- hopefulness and curiosity about Barack Obama, but skepticism about the U.S. pursuing substantive change. Tactical cooperation with Iran around Afghanistan and the drug trade appears to Walsh a better starting point for discussions than Iran’s nuclear program. He says, “Barack Obama may speak with a nicer tone, offer greater incentives, but if at the end of the day, he insists on no centrifuges, we will end up at the same outcome as before.” Substantial movement will take months, and all the while, Iran will continue to build centrifuges. Walsh sees a dilemma for the president: he must attempt to build confidence by moving slowly, but the “best chance for success is if Obama acts early and boldly while he still has the power of public opinion behind him domestically and internationally…It won’t last forever.

Stephen Heintz points out that “Iran is in the center of a set of issues of direct national interest to the U.S.,” including Middle East peace, the war on terror, regional stability and oil. The problem is that in trying to find points of intersection with Iran, each nation “has very little knowledge of the other,” as well as bad memories (the hostage crisis of 1979, the U.S. support of the Shah). This “only reinforces a relationship based on suspicion.” While Barack Obama “has done a superb job at creating different atmospherics,” there is a huge debate underway within policy circles, as different groups jockey to shape Iran policy. Heintz doesn’t expect much movement until after the Iranian elections, but hopes that the restart of multilateral talks, and discussions about regional security and drug trade will help free both nations of the “paranoia and fear” that’s built up over time.

European archivists grapple with the legal obligations, civic responsibilities and future prospects of their collections, which, thanks to the Internet and other new technologies, are increasingly awash in image and sound. As William Urichhio notes, “tradition-bound institutions know what we should be gathering: feature films, books, newspapers, political documents, but it’s much harder to know what to do with things like social media…say, networks of interactions.” Different organizations are evolving diverse strategies.

At France’s National Institute of the Audiovisual (INA), Claude Mussou describes managing “memory and heritage policies in the information age.” In the 16th century, she recounts, Francois 1 mandated that any book published would be first deposited in the royal library. The national collection law broadened over centuries to include new forms of knowledge production: documents, film, radio and TV, and beginning in 2006, websites, because of the migration of so many activities online, and because of the fleeting life
of many websites. Says Mussou, “Twenty, 50 or 100 years from now, when scholars or academics look for evidence and testimony for what the 21st century was,…web archives will be a necessary and valuable source.” She pointedly notes that we can’t rely on Google or other commercial interests to maintain web archives, and therefore governments must not “surrender their role as gatekeepers to collective memory.”

Sweden’s national library recently merged with the national media archive, says Pelle Snickars, which includes seven million hours of media material. The legal deposit law mandates anything put out on tape, radio or TV must find its way into the state’s collections. This imposes an enormous burden, both curatorial and budgetary. As it transitions to digital, the library must maintain its analog collection. Snickars says the larger problem involves rights: researchers would love access via the web to the material that’s being transferred, but the material belongs to others. Snickars worries about the best methods for digital preservation, and whether quality concerns should be sacrificed to quantity demands, as more and more people assume access to information online.

The BBC boasts 100 kilometers of shelves for its A/V collection, says Richard Wright, from 1920s radio to videotape from the 1960s onward -- all of which must be digitized to be preserved. The BBC is converting 200 terabytes per week of current broadcast material -- an enormous commitment to digital. As Wright points out, “We’re putting a very big egg in that basket, and the basket is not perfect.” The risk of loss of data is proportional to the data stored, and since so much is pouring from analog to digital, “the risk is growing by Moore’s Law.” One way to mitigate this loss: avoid compressing data, and seek redundancy. As we’ve moved from stone, to paper, and onto disc, storage capacity gets denser and cheaper, he notes -- almost overwhelming: “It’s why our grandchildren are swimming in a sea of digital photos.” If we can’t tag all this material appropriately, it will be “struggling to survive” for future generations.