At the start of the twenty-first century, no city has been more influential in the development of global media than Los Angeles.  The changes effected by new communications and analytic technologies—ranging from web-based media forms, data mining tools, and digitization practices to instant messengers, mobile locative technologies, and gaming environments—are so proximate and sweeping in scope and significance that they may appropriately be compared to the print revolution.   But these changes are happening on a very rapid timescale, taking place over months and years rather than decades and centuries.  Because of the rapidity of these developments, the intellectual tools, methodologies, and disciplinary practices have just started to emerge for responding to, historicizing, and interpreting the massive social, cultural, economic, and educational transformations happening all around us.  In this new age of accelerated global interaction, interdependence, and communication, UCLA aims to become the institutional leader in articulating the intellectual agenda for assessing and interpreting the cultural significance of media and technology.