PART ONE ASSIGNMENT
In Stop Googling. Lets Talk, Sherry Turkle identifies as a problem the various ways digital technology has replaced conversation, which she sees as vital in forming and fostering empathy within us, and claims that in forgoing conversation, we are harming ourselves, our relationships with friends and family, our ability to productively learn and enter the workforce, and, ultimately, our ability to make communal ties. In Week One and Week Two modules, you will read four other newspaper articles that that also present a problem stemming from our use of digital technologies: Your Online Privacy Depends on your Friends Data Habits as much as your Own; Girls are Taking Drastic Measures to Achieve the Perfect Instagram Snap; What Might Explain the Unhappiness Epidemic; and The Awkward Truth about Trolls. All of these articles briefly discuss problems with digital technology, specifically negative impacts that stem from our use of these technologies. No matter how much we love our digital tech devices, theres no doubt that there are problems, too.
You will choose one of the problems discussed in these articles and use that as a jumping off point for your own research, meaning you will expand upon the specific problem raised in the article or you can bring in a closely related problem for your research.
As smart phone users, as social media users, as extensive digital technology users, you will have opinions that will serve as an initial entry into the conversation these articles begin with us, but your task will be to make a carefully researched argument in relation to a problem described in one of the articles. For instance, in Girls are Taking Drastic Measures to Achieve the Perfect Instagram Snap, the writer focuses on the movement from enhancing pictures to actual plastic surgery, so that we can look like our airbrushed and filtered pictures. You might want to pursue this specific problem or you might want to jump from here into effects on men, taking dangerous selfies, etc.
REMEMBER, YOU WILL WRITE THREE SHORT PAPERS THIS SEMESTER, BUT THEY WILL COME TOGETHER TO BECOME YOUR RESEARCH PAPER
PART ONE ASSIGNMENT: 3 pages
Here’s how to set your paper up:
Description of Problem: (about 1 page)
How would you describe the problem youre going to focus on? Think of yourself as a reporter and provide the who, what, when, where, in an objective way. If youre going to focus on our need to be on our phones all the time, show me what that looks like. Perhaps describe, for instance, what you see when friends are together and are all on their phones. How does that make you feel? This first section is a good place to try to get your reader to feel what you feel, which is an appeal to emotions. Note: you wont include a thesis statement in this paragraph; all you want to do is describe a problem without stating where you stand on the issue.
Statement of Background: (1-2 pages)
You opened your paper by describing a problem or issue. Here you will set up the conversation as a way of establishing the background of your argument. Identify two authors we’ve read (from the five I provided) who make important claims about digital technology and its impact on us. Properly set them up in conversation by establishing relationships between their ideas. Your goal here is 1) to establish a sense of what these authors think about the problem theyre writing aboutyou will not comment on their ideasyou will just present their ideas, in relation to one another, so that your audience has a sense of the conversation about digital technology and subsequent problems, and 2) to move closer to the problem youre going to discuss.
In addition to the conversation, a statement of background, as the name implies, conveys to your audience pertinent information, such as statistics and definition of terms. You may use anything from the sources Ive provided you to help you relay key information.
Tentative Proposition (Thesis Statement)
At this point, you will not have conducted your own research, so your task here is to weigh in with your opinion on these ideas and make clear the problem you would like to research. Its safe to end this section with a questionyour overall research questionthat will become your thesis statement when you write Part II. For instance, you might want to research the effect of Instagram perfection on men as compared to women, so you could simply ask, as your overall research question: Are there dangerous effects on men due to their increased time on social media?
Essay One Parameters:
Three FULL pages, minimum, not to exceed four full pages. These pages DO NOT include the Works Cited page. The Works Cited page is a separate, additional page.
Three sources are required from the five sources I provided. Your only sources for this essay will be the sources I provide you and which weve discussed. No research is needed for this section.
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