Tactical Media Project Proposal

I would like to do my project on the adverse affects of extreme parental pressure on athletes. I will discuss the problems this has on the psychological state and emotional state of children during adolescence, as well as high school and college.  I will also cover some of the extreme results of parental pressure, including suicide and eating disorders. I will also provide numerous examples that have been seen in the news. I would like to take on this topic in the form of a commons knowledge project, exposing the reality of a common problem in the daily lives of many people, which largely goes unnoticed.  My current plan is to create a remixed video with clips from different interviews with athletes and game clips demonstrating the reality that some children live with. 

Intellectual Commons: A Common Theme

The idea of the intellectual commons is that there is some knowledge that belongs to everyone, that everyone has the rights and access to use freely for their own creative work. This concept has been shown in a positive light in almost all of the readings we have done in Shirky, Lessig, Barlow, and Jenkins. In chapters 1 and 4 of Lessig's Free Culture, he points out the fact that some of the greatest creative works in the past 100 years have com from the borrowing and remixing of prior work. He uses Walt Disney as a prime example, listing off numerous movies that were inspired by the Brothers Grimm and made into softer, humorous works. He also discusses how the creation of almost every art form we know, film, music, radio, and cable TV, stemmed from what would now be classified as "piracy." He seems to see nothing wrong with the idea of inspiration from the work of others and it had never been a problem, until today's bureaucratic, capitalist society came to be.

Jenkins also was an advocate of the old school habit of active amateur productions being the main source of entertainment from town to town. No one had a problem with the remake of plays because everyone got to enjoy the art form this way. This coincides with the message of Shirky, who agrees that sharing is the basis of community and cooperation by people seeking to achieve similar goals. Shirky goes farther than Jenkins and says that the anarchy, or the organization without a head, is the only way to allow everyone to be involved in what they want, form a common culture and plans for this culture without submitting to the authority of another. It is in this way that the intellectual commons becomes larger, allowing ore people access to concepts and ideas that they can then unite and form bonds over. It is through internet networking that the privatization of knowledge can be lowered and people can start learning from the work, opinions, and ideas of others again.

In A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Barlow stresses the importance of the internet being the "home of the mind," a safe place where the idea of hierarchal organizational and profit is not welcome. This freedom of the mind, or intellectual commons, allows all people to express any idea or belief without fear and gets away from the idea of conformity that people have come to accept. All in all, these author's all believe in the ideas of the mind being openly displayed for all people to discuss, agree upon, or utilize for their own creative works. Having this open network of thoughts allows more people to be involved and assures that people are forced to think for themselves rather than accept the opinions of some overhead managerial force.

Shirky Reading on Crowdsourcing-notes

What are some of the features of the modern era that make it difficult for people to share and cooperate??
As organizations got larger and more prestigious, values became centralized on being the most massive, imperial, and most influential, its gets difficult to govern in a democratic way because you cant please anyone. This leads to an authoritarian environment and those willing to accept this, but people don't really want this, things have just gotten out of hand.
What would an organization without management look like?
self regulating, rather than centralized, egalitarian
Compare Shirky, Jenkins, and small authors on these ideas...also on views of intellectual property and sharing...also originality.