Essay I will be approximately 5 pages in length, double spaced, proper MLA formatting with
internal citations and a Works Cited page (supplemental to the 5 pages). Students must
demonstrate the ability to quote, paraphrase, summarize, and cite sources correctly. Source
material will be the course readings (Sherry Turkles The Tethered Self and Michel Foucaults
piece Panopticism) and 4 academic sources of the students selection that will analyze the
issues within the course readings. Students will choose one of the prompts to attend to in their
essay development.
Prompt 1
In Sherry Turkles piece Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self she posits that we
are immersed in a new form of sociality, a changing communal space that comes from our
increasing reliance on our devices. With this comes a new understanding of intimacy and need
for validation. In Generation Like we see young adults seeking the external validation their
constant presence online creates, with little understanding of the implications on their internal
sense of self. In this prompt, discuss the ways in which this progression is changing the
landscape of our society as we are increasingly reliant on our devices and what we are offered
through our online immersion.
Hints: Think about selfies and why they are taken and posted. Think of how ones online
presence is viewed as an extension of their self, and how that has consequences when presented
in a public space. Think about how social media sites function in the society and the influence
they have. Think about how numbers are the new currency for social media influencers.
Prompt 2
In Sherry Turkles extended piece The Tethered Self: Technology Reinvents Intimacy and
Solitude she claims technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude, and at
one point asks As we distribute ourselves, do we abandon ourselves? Douglas Rushkoff, a
media theorist and an early proponent of immersion in technology, says that the internet has gone
from something we do to the way we live our lives, fully immersed. Expounding on Turkles
question and Rushkoffs commentary, examine the delicate balance of closeness and distance
that technology has inadvertently or deliberately created and the implications on our
interpersonal relationships.
Hints: Think about how we cultivate an online presence and how relational that is to our real
lives. Discuss about how the concept of intimacy is changing now that relationships are primarily
migrating to online initial interactions (swiping right). Think about the constant connectedness
technology fosters, such that there are no longer divisions of spaces or experiences.
Prompt 3
In Michel Foucaults Panopticism, an excerpt from his larger work Discipline and Punish,
the author explores the relationship between systems of social control and the power-knowledge
concept, marking the transition to a disciplinary power, with every movement supervised and all
events recorded. In The Facebook Dilemma an Austrian law student is shocked to discover
Facebook has been actively cataloguing extensive information about him, extended to even his
most intimate (and sometimes deleted) exchanges. In The Power of Privacy a journalist learns
that the information she assumed to be private, can, with relative ease, be exposed. In a society
with the increasing capacity to collect and catalogue expansive pieces of information, how has
the concept of privacy been altered and how will we understand privacy moving forward in a
technology immersed society?
Hints: Think about what privacy truly means in contemporary society. Think about the offering
of information we willingly and routinely submit to. If it is offered does that implicate the
individual, basically they are compromising their own privacy? Think about recent uses of DNA
databases to solve latent crimes, to assist with health insurance deliberations, or to locate
previously unknown relatives.
Prompt 4
In the Dutch Public Broadcasting documentary, Harvard professor emeritus Shoshana Zuboff
discusses Surveillance Capitalism, in which private human experience is used as a free source
of raw data to be fashioned into predictive behavior patterns and utilized for business purposes.
In Panopticism Foucault asserts surveillance such as this can be state implemented to enforce
compliance in a social structure, in fact China is increasingly using it in this way. In a world
moving rapidly towards large scale data collection, assisted by technological development, how
might we create more transparency for the general public? In other words, how might the
transaction between participants be less veiled?
