Tactical Media Project Proposal

I would like to do my tactical media project on the different approaches to environmental consciousness and the certain prejudices that are associated with each one. I come from a ranching family in the middle of Nevada and have grown up with a more conservative view on the environmental issues that are of importance in political and social debates today. Coming to Santa Clara, I have been exposed (I would argue, perhaps overexposed) to a different side of the environmental debate. With a focus centered more on recycling and preservation, rather than usage, of resources, I have heard a great deal of criticism towards the traditions and practices that my grandfather has partaken in since he established his ranch over 40 years ago. For my tactical media project, I would like to analyze both sides of this debate, seeing if it boils down to a set of core issues; I would also like to see if there is a political connection, as I know that the majority of my family is fairly conservative. I would like to conduct interviews with students, and maybe even faculty, on campus as well as use my own experience and information from my family to hopefully create a video that illuminates the different sides of the debate. 

Class Notes on Shirky

Shirky Chapter 1

• The policing episode: What is Shirky trying to lead us to? 
• Spends a lot of time talking about how technology is leveraging an innate human capacity to share and cooperate, collaborate
• In some ways our modern society is interfering with our innate capacity to share by the sheer scale of modernity: wide span of expanding technologies since the printing press, the modes of sharing are continuously increasing
• People naturally incline to sharing
• Are we naturally cooperative 
• What are some of the features of modern times that make it difficult for people to share cooperate and collaborate
• To organize without organization; answer to the problems with modernity
• Managing organizations 
• Be suspicious of supervisor levels of organizations 
• Look for the democratic/lack thereof nature of an organization
• As modernity and organizations got larger and expanded, modern values made it possible for larger organizations to exist
• What does an organization without management look like? 
• Non-regulated
• Egalitarian vs hierarchy 
• Scale
• Chapter 2: Community and Active Collaboration
• How does contemporary networked technology allow people to interact at scale
• As groups get larger, how do things get done, how is discussion achieved without relying on the classically modern methods
• Post-modern: organizations that are founded on strategies that don't belong 
• Classic Examples of Modern Organizations: 
• Catholic Church
• Apple (buerocratic) 
• Modern Army
• training
• obedience; responsive to central authority
• Hierarchy: layers of authority
• Command and Control
• Centralization of Authority
• Standardization 
• Indoctrinated to share values
• What would a post-modern organization look like? 
• Rid of managers
• Post-manegerial; organization does not need to be managed
• Radically democratic (Occupy Wallstreet)
• No organization
• People acting democratically
• Modern Organizations cannot be mobilized to do post-modern work
• Popular organization of knowledge
• What has mass amateurization done to journalsim
• Use of Flickr and other social media by ordinary persons as a form of journalism that is far better in many ways than professional journalistic coverage could ever be
• Folksonomy can do things that organized taxonomy could never do
• Human needs that no amount of professionalization could answer (page 35) 
• Sympathetic Response
• Enabled more than professional journalism
• In the aftermath of mass amateurization, what is left for professional journalism
• Features of journalism that represent modern organizational strategy (Fake objectivity) might have to be abandoned; journalists of future must embrace past, more argumentative and analytical approach to their job
• Shirky has sketicism of privitazation strategy of the "commons" from page 15
• Humans naturally share and modernity has gotten in the way
• Shirky's points reveal anarchist nature
• Network Technology reduces need/power for regulations
• More democratic regulation with networking technology