Week 6 Blog

This week we were talking about hashtags and Tufecki claims. One claim I wanted to talk about was the first claim that Ted had a Ted talk about going over "Organizing without organizations" which was an idea that actually jumped out at me. The idea that we can organize without organizations meaning that we collaborate easily with users without the need of a large organization to do a lot of the work for us.


We dont need a large organization to form (as showed in class) to form a petition or make media content or other numerous things that we can use. So why exactly is this so important? We do not need the presence of a large organization to make a petition or a video, we have the capability to make these things and get them out to people very easily and very efficiently. Through say twitter, a person could make a petition and use twitter to spread the message, through this these people can share it out and it can spread over a large area very quickly.

I did not understand the idea around clicktivism and why it has no real effect over government or politics. I feel like with the first idea it would allow people to spread their ideals and even give another outlet for people trying to push for their ideals or running for office an easier time to get information out there. What do you all think?

Week 4

Our new unit started after we had our take home exam, finally starting unit 1 storming. We learned about reddit how sources like reddit are beneficial to many people as well as the zapatista movement. With the beginning of this unit we had to join groups and with this unit being called storming it reminds me of the Tuckman stages of storming

The Reddit article was very interesting to me because it shows the value in the internet and for communities that subreddits can harbor. The suicide prevention subreddit gives space for people to feel safe and able to speak freely. It shows the power that a community like this can have, the internet as a whole was able to protect itself from SOPA with reddit being a large platform for it.