{"id":1038,"date":"2010-12-11T05:36:45","date_gmt":"2010-12-11T05:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mediaforsocialchange.org\/?p=404"},"modified":"2016-07-22T03:30:08","modified_gmt":"2016-07-22T03:30:08","slug":"theoretically-speaking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/2010\/12\/11\/theoretically-speaking\/","title":{"rendered":"Theoretically Speaking"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Behold beautiful Colorado and its magnificent autumn aspens! Actually since moving here I haven’t made it out of my house very much. I took this picture at the end of peak color. There was a patch of trees in the back of some condominiums off of I-70 and after snapping the shot I was soon back at home studying.<\/p>\n

This is my first quarter of graduate school at the University of Denver<\/a>. There’s a dent in my couch where I’ve been sitting for the past two months trying uncomfortably to balance my laptop and overambitious workload.<\/p>\n

I’m getting my masters degree in International and Intercultural Communications<\/a> from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies<\/a> and the school of Media, Film, and Journalism Studies<\/a>.\u00a0 Things have changed a lot since I graduated with my bachelors in 2003.\u00a0 For one thing everything’s digital.\u00a0 All of my readings are .PDF files and I didn’t buy any textbooks. I was studying them all on iPod until my left eye started to spasm around midterms.\u00a0 Also professors love doing powerpoint presentations.\u00a0 Maybe they’re trying to get attention from all of the students who are updating their Facebook statuses in the middle of class.<\/p>\n

I don’t really know where my degree will land me.\u00a0 Hopefully, I’ll have a job coming out of all this to at least pay off the obscene amounts of student loans I’ve taken out.\u00a0 At times I feel like this is all a formality to match up my resume to the qualifications of the help wanted ads I come across. I think about the subjects of my documentaries like Zsolt<\/a> who dropped out of high school or Paul Laffoley<\/a> who got kicked out of Harvard and get envious.\u00a0 Why should I be paying to study when I could be making movies or having adventures somewhere out in the mountains?<\/p>\n

The truth is that there is more to my decision to go back to school than to getting a piece of paper with the word Diploma <\/em>printed on it. \u00a0 The last few years have been crazy and I came to academia to make sense of them.\u00a0 Why did the people I encountered during my Peace Corps service act the way they did<\/a>?\u00a0 Why did I waterboard myself<\/a>?\u00a0 Why is my blog called Media for Social Change <\/em>and how can I create more?\u00a0 Of course when you really ponder them, questions beget more questions.\u00a0 My favorite class reading so far has been on how to start a peasant revolt<\/a>.\u00a0 It gave step by step directions on how to influence the masses and sway social movements towards favorable outcomes.\u00a0 Yet, is that knowledge necessarily a good thing? Who do your actions ultimately benefit?\u00a0 There’s a subjectivity when you judge social change.<\/p>\n

In Uganda the mayor of my small village would ask me for advice and I wouldn’t hesitate in giving some.\u00a0 In school I don’t always know the answers to the questions that my professors ask about the Third World.\u00a0 It’s humbling.\u00a0 Even more so is reflecting back on my experiences in light of what I’ve learned in the classroom.\u00a0 Does international development really help the people it intends to serve if it comes from the outside?\u00a0 I don’t always think that’s the case.<\/p>\n

How to use media to make development more participatory and empowering at the grassroots level has become my knew research question.\u00a0 If the answer isn’t fully there yet I intend to invent one in time.\u00a0 I’ll always make documentaries.\u00a0 They bring awareness to a cause and filmmaking is my passion.\u00a0 However, I believe that real social change will come from social media as it becomes increasingly accessible for the bottom billion to log onto the Internet with mobile devises.\u00a0 I hope that through this blog and through other avenues I can help make this happen.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, I’ll keep posting different projects that I’m working on.\u00a0 These will include papers that I’ve written on the media and the developing world.\u00a0 To start off here are a few links to my entries on my International Communications class blog<\/a> (yep, classes have blogs now).\u00a0 Over the next few weeks I’ll post some of my longer pieces.<\/p>\n

What’s Monsanto Been Up to Lately?<\/a><\/p>\n

The Merchants of Cool<\/a><\/p>\n

The Right to Remain Silent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Behold beautiful Colorado and its magnificent autumn aspens! Actually since moving here I haven’t made it out of my house very much. I took this picture at the end of peak color. There was a patch of trees in the back of some condominiums off of I-70 and after snapping the shot I was soon …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1202,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[199,226,230,250,252,52,311,370,387,88,397,483,522,136,569,534],"class_list":["post-1038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blog","tag-colorado","tag-communication","tag-development","tag-digital","tag-filmmaking","tag-graduate","tag-korbel","tag-mansanto","tag-media","tag-merchants-of-cool","tag-school","tag-this-american-life","tag-uganda","tag-uncategorized","tag-university-of-denver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1038"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1203,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1038\/revisions\/1203"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}