Community Profiles

David Thorburn
 

Professor David Thorburn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cast of "The Honeymooners," 
1950's American television series

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Professor Thorburn is also a poet
whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, and other publications. He writes, 

“The older I get, the more I’m drawn to the distilled, concentrated energy of lyric poetry. There’s a profound difference between difficulty and obscurity. I think poetry can be accessible without sacrificing complexity and moral seriousness.”

The following Thorburn poem first appeared in The Atlantic, October 2007.


LISE 


Seeing the MGM lion roar
Lise complains she's seen this show before.

My father-in-law's live-in caretaker,
Haitian, tout douleur

She knows Seventh Day Adventist lore
The perfidy of men, how to cure

Oppressive itching. Her
Cooking doesn't please him any more

But he likes her lilting French, her hair
And gentle hands, her living soapy spoor.

— David Thorburn



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

“To understand our emerging digital culture, we need a continuity principle.”

Professor of Literature
Director, MIT Communications Forum 


Television was not yet considered a subject for scholarship when Professor David Thorburn arrived at MIT in 1976. In some places, just introducing a few clips from “The Honeymooners” into a course on English literature was enough to ruffle feathers.


Open to the future 
But MIT is a receptive place for scholars with cutting-edge interests. “MIT is friendlier to perspectives that might seem disruptive to the standard discourse,” says Thorburn, Professor of Literature and Director of the MIT Communications Forum. “The place is so deeply embedded in the future—so quick in its embrace of new technologies—that you’re made more conscious of them.”

Thorburn is a pioneer of television studies and the founder of the Film and Media Studies Program, precursor to MIT’s Comparative Media Studies (CMS).  He continues to teach classes in both literature and film and enjoys engaging MIT students with the cultural and historical perspectives they need to succeed in their careers, and to understand how technology is changing the world.


Edison and the movie camera
“You can’t grasp what’s going on with contemporary technology without historical reference points,” says Thorburn, who was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2002 for his exceptional teaching of undergraduates.

He often reminds his classes that while Thomas Edison invented the movie camera, he did not foresee the Hollywood industry and world culture juggernaut his technology would generate. “This is a wonderful lesson for MIT people,” he says. 


Culture influences technology
Edison expected the camera to be a consumer item used for making home movies. But no sooner than profits started to roll in from the first crude films, the quest for wealth drew major investors into the industry, which took off like a rocket. “In 1938, 67 percent of Americans went to the movies every week,” Thorburn notes.


“All technologies have latent possibilities," he says, "only some of which get developed,” often what is actually developed is influenced by what is profitable, not what is most valuable from a social or ethical perspective, he says. The movie industry was “not an inevitable consequence of cinema technology, but of the economic and historical forces that shaped how people used that technology.”

Since culture can and does direct the path technology takes, MIT’s future inventors and technology professionals can be more astute and successful by having knowledge in the humanities, arts, and social science disciplines.  In addition, Thorburn says, "our digital future will be much richer if we understand the complexity of older forms communication and art.”

In his essay “Web of Paradox” (published in The American Prospect), Thorburn writes, “The new grows out of the old, repeats the old, embraces, reimagines, and extends the old... To understand our emerging digital culture, we need a continuity, not a discontinuity, principle.”


Technology influences culture
Technology also has profound effects on culture, as Thorburn relates in a story from the early 1970s. He was teaching literature, and trying to identify a common narrative touchstone—some book or story that everyone in his class had read. The students appeared to have no such common reference, until Thorburn thought to ask about a then-popular television program, “All in the Family.” Everyone had watched the show

The collective experience of an era
“The implications of that radically changed my understanding of literary study,” Thorburn says. “The experience of network television was the dominant collective experience of an era.”

Thorburn’s interest in television ultimately led him to move from Yale to MIT, where he could not only continue work as a scholar of high modernism (he is the author of Conrad's Romanticism and the editor of a collection of essays on John Updike, among other works) but also delve deeply into new media. In 1982, he founded the cross-disciplinary undergraduate Film and Media Studies Program, and in 1996 became director of the Communications Forum, which also contributed to the founding of CMS.

  



“To grasp what’s going on with contemporary technology, you must have historical reference points."

 




MIT Communications Forum 
Under Thorburn’s leadership, the Communications Forum moved from the School of Engineering to the School of Humanities and Social Science (as it was then known). “This transition was more than a change of address,” Thorburn says. “Though it retained its commitment to rigor and clarity about scientific and technological matters, the forum began to focus more systematically on the social and cultural significance of communications media.”

Media in Transition
The move also helped catalyze the founding of a media-focused graduate program. Together with former MIT Professor Henry Jenkins, Thorburn applied for funding to launch such a program—and ended up with a grant for what became known as the “Media in Transition” project, a four-year series of lectures, panel discussions, and conferences that compared earlier periods of technological and social change with the contemporary experience of media transformation and convergence.

By the time that series came to a close, in 2000, two books had emerged from the project—Rethinking Media Change and Democracy and New Media—and Comparative Media Studies, MIT's first graduate program in the humanities, had been born. 

Contemporary media, as a subject for serious scholarship, had arrived.


Suggested Links


Thorburn webpage | Literature Faculty

MIT Communications Forum | Website

Communications Forum | Programming