CAMBRIDGE—Brisk winds blow orange-colored leaves from the trees and some of them make their way inside the I.M. Pei-designed Wiesner Building at MIT, the nation’s top technology school. Students, professors and vagabonds from industry are also bustling at an early hour this Friday, in anticipation of an intimate and heady two-day conference on media culture.

Futures of Entertainment 2, sponsored by MIT’s Comparitive Media Studies program and Convergence Culture Consortium is underway in Bartos Hall where Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green set the tone with a dazzling display of samples of this “convergence” we’re here to hear about. Jenkins starts by showing a clip from a 1953 program by legendary animator Tex Avery called T.V. of Tomorrow. He points out how 54 years ago people were envisioning the interactive medium now unfolding.

Jenkins talks about how TV programs are extending their storylines naturally into other mediums, like gaming and online. He says, NBC’s Heroes “embodies all the transformations underway in TV.” He says, TV isn’t an appointment medium today, it’s an engagement medium. We’re ten minutes in and already the audience is enriched.

Jenkins touches on CSI, Halo 3, the Geico cavemen, Colbert, indie film “Four Eyed Monsters,” SoulJa Boy, Luminosity, Harry Potter, Comic-Con and the iPhone on his way to a map of the convergent media culturescape. And this at MIT, a place where they build things!

Clearly one of the things they’ve built here is a fantastic media studies program, which is why people from Turner Broadcasting, AOL, MTV Networks, and agencies like Saatchi, Naked, Organic, Deep Focus, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Fallon, GSD&M and BFG are in attendance.

…post updated Sunday, Nov. 18th…

Later in the morning Marc Davis, Social Media Guru at Yahoo and a graduate of the Media Studies program at MIT, is talking about mobile media in a panel devoted to the topic.

Davis says Nokia has it figured out. In fact, their N95 phone isn’t a phone at all, it’s a socially-aware video camera. A phone is now a content production tool and the physical world is the new frontier for interconnected networking. We’ve entered the age of “real-time geo-aware content production.” Davis is pretty smart.

Davis clicks around and explains one of Yahoo’s research and development projects, ZoneTag. He says high end Nokia phones allow mapable photos to auto-appear on Flickr from one’s cellular camera phone. “A collective map of human attention, that’s what we’re building.”

One of the central themes of the conference is user generated content or UGC. Friday’s panel on “Fan Labor” delves into the subject, as do the others. Mark Deuze, journalism professor and author or Media Work, says interns or someone in IT are often the people tasked with moderating fan discourse, which tells us something about its status in professional culture.

More resistance to UGC is felt on Saturday morning during the “Advertising and Convergence Culture” panel. Hill Holliday’s media guru, Baba Shetty* says “UGC is a joke. It isn’t democratic, nor useful,” and the so-called users are mostly people trying to break into advertising. Naked’s digital ninja, Faris Yakob, says most UGC concepts are lame, lazy and misguided. Buzz Marketing Group’s CEO, Tina Wells says marketers must listen more. She says they’re doing 98% marketing and 2% listening. Her point is half-measures won’t get the job done.

UGC is further examined in Saturday’s final panel, “Cult Media.” Henry Jenkins, co-founder of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program is moderating the panel of entertainment bigs, members of which are batting the term “transmedia storytelling” around like a badminton birdie.

Transmedia storytelling is Jenkins’ term. This is how he described it in a handout to his students.

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.

To someone in marketing communications, this might sound like integrated marketing. But it’s not. Rarely, if ever, does a marketer build a story across multiple media. Rather marketers simply repeat the same story in different media channels. However, there’s no rule against the practice and for the ambitious brand, such a path makes perfect sense. The key is designing space in the brand narrative for meaningful community participation.

[UPDATE] *Baba Shetty wants to clarify the point he made about UGC.

“What Faris and I were referring to at that point were some of the early industry attempts to incorporate UGC just as a submission form for television scripts (that might run on the Superbowl, or the Oscars). That approach trivializes the power of the audience to get into a conversation with a brand. It just paves the same path we’ve always taken. The really powerful UGC ideas will listen carefully to the audience, and give them tools to talk amongst themselves in new forms (not just TV ads).”