Tactical Media Project Proposal

I want to focus my tactical media project around the role and responsibility that both schools and parents play in the reaction and control of cyber-bullying. The internet has created innumerable ways for people to communicate and interact, but not everyone uses these abilities for the better. Anonymity of social networking sites and blogs may allow people to take on different identities or harass others without taking any responsibility themselves for their destructive actions. Most commonly, people will make a page or profile dedicated to making fun of a certain individual or group, gathering friends to target and poke fun at them. The dangerous consequences of this don't stay within the confines of the world wide web, however.

Cyber-bullying has led to countless suicides of children, teens and young adults in just the last decade because these people felt like the only way to escape their harassment was death. Many of these cases could have been prevented had the individual's school, family or friends spoken up when they noticed something was wrong. Overall, the responsibility falls into the hands of the harasser, whether or not they feel like their actions warranted such a dramatic response as death.

It is important for all people using the internet to understand the consequences of their actions and words and that cyber-bullying is not only hurtful, but can be taken to extremely dangerous levels such as suicide.

Clay Shirky Ch. 1-3: Crowdsourcing

Shirky: Crowdsourcing

•  Chapter 1's policing episode: What is Shirky trying to say about the haves vs. have-nots in NYC? Did the thieving Sasha deserve the found phone or should she be punished for her non-negotiating actions?
• Pg. 23: Requires a group action to retrieve this phone through uses of technology (blog, MySpace)
•  Shirky's theories on technology leveraging human capacity to share and cooperate.
• Modernity as a pompous way of talking about the present.
• Shirky asks the scary, 'Marxist' question: Who are we? Natural competitors, dog-eat-dog world? Or do we naturally share and collaborate? He answers his question with the latter; while we are a naturally sharing and collaborative people, modernity makes this difficult.
• Features of modern times that make it difficult to cooperate?
•  Organizing without Organizations: an answer to modernity
• Be suspicious of the supervision of any and all organizations: financial cost & values cost. What would an organization without this managerial layer look like?
• Egalitarian vs. hierarchical... self-regulated rather than centralized.
• Shirky closes Ch. 1 with the example of an average person using social media organizing through crowdsourcing, without any authoritarian body, making decisions, sharing values, & getting stuff done.
• Ch. 2: Sharing as anchoring a community and encouraging collaborations
• How do contemporary technologies allow people to work together, make decisions, discuss, know and achieve a common sense without relying on the classically modern methods?
• Modern army: centralization, command & control, obedience, authority... unquestioned.
• Shirky claims that a post-modern organization would NOT have any managerial factor. People will work in egalitarian ways to act democratically, in an "Occupy Wallstreet" manner.
• Shirky's discussion of "social tagging" on Flickr & why a managerial process wouldn't work here:
• Consider the amount of resources it would take for Flickr to centrally decide to organize knowledge posted on its site. Learning content, goals, benefits... by the time this was accomplished, the cost of considering getting involved would outstrip any benefit to themselves or to society for their involvement.
• A change in journalism today: mass amateur journalism as better for the people
• Pg. 35: Relationship between different bloggers & photojournalists shows how people work together for a larger, communal cause. Flickr enabled & did more things than professional journalism could.
• Newspapers in Africa are more vital than ones here because of their sparsity... these try to maximize enthusiasm instead of revenue
• Shirky expresses skepticism of privatization from pg. 15 on when talking about collaboration... he is consistently anarchist: he doesn't want regulation.
• Network technology reduces the need for regulations
• Cannot have direct democratic rule in modern society - not everyone can decide on everything... but you can do this through networks: "Here Comes Everybody" (or those who choose to involve themselves)

•  What does a post-managerial organization look like?
• Relate crowdsourcing, remixing. notion of creative commons