Nathan Schneider is a researcher and convener of 'platform cooperativism,' a participatory research project about the development of an entrepreneurial ecosystem for democratic, cooperative online businesses, both in the Front Rage region and internationally. This includes traditional cooperative business models, as well as new forms of digital organization such as blockchain platforms and liquid democracy. He comes to this work informed by other past and concurrent projects on radical social movements and religious imaginaries.
keywords
media business models, cooperative economics, media studies, contemporary religion, social movements
MDST 2011 - Disruptive Entrepreneurship in the Internet's New Economies
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Fall 2018 / Fall 2019
Grapples with the disruptive business models that drive the online economy: both the dominant ones and the alternatives vying to transform it. In addition to the Silicon Valley model, this course explores lesser known internet economies around the world and proposals for a more equitable online future.
MDST 2012 - Hacker Culture
Primary Instructor
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Spring 2018
Chronicles the evolution of hacker culture from its origins as a geeky subculture to a criminal underground to its adaptation by CEOs. Considers how hacker formations sometimes represent a new kind of politics, sometimes a rejection of politics. Explores the contested figure of the hacker in the past, present and science-fiction of the internet.
MDST 5001 - Connected Media Practices
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Fall 2018 / Fall 2019
Provides a crucial frame through which students understand the evolution of film, television and gaming in the digital era. Explores an impending revolution in how screen media are created, circulated and consumed. Relates to a larger trend across the media industries to integrate digital technology and socially networked communication with traditional screen media practices.
MDST 5002 - Media Activism and Public Engagement
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Spring 2018
Explores politics of media activism. Relies on survey of existing theory and scholarship on media activism and close analyses of activist practices within both old and new media and on local, national and global scale. Special attention paid to questions of relativity and efficacy and value of media activism as both aesthetic and political activity.
