Paper Goal
Your 5-page paper will demonstrate your knowledge and application of the course material. Your paper will require you to engage with the course readings, concepts, and terms to answer the essay question
you choose to respond to.
The paper is broken into two parts. First, you use your outlining skills to develop a response to your selected essay question. Following submission, you will receive actionable feedback from your TA explaining how to strengthen your paper. Second, you will use this feedback to revise the outline and expand it into a well-written and well-argued 5-page paper.
Paper Topic, Length, and Source Requirements
You must select a paper topic from one of the five questions below. You cannot come up with your own topic. Any paper that does not respond to one of the provided essay prompts will receive a mark of 0.
Your paper must be five pages in length. The shortest acceptable word length is 1250, and the most extended proper word length is 1750. The word and page count does not include the cover page or your reference list.
Your 5-page paper must consist of at least four scholarly sources. Scholarly sources are peer-reviewed journals and academic books (what we have been reading primarily in this course!). Each essay question comes with a bibliography (composed of relevant outside sources) to help your research. All these sources are available through the library.utm.utoronto.ca/
Links to an external site. Your paper must include four scholarly sources from the bibliography list provided for each question. If you use literary references not on this list, you must determine if they fit your paper well.
If you are bringing in any other sources or examples (like a TikTok, Twitter post, news story, television episode, etc.) to support the arguments you are making in your 5-page paper, these must be cited with both in-text citations and an entry in your reference list. Failure to do so is a breach of Academic Integrity. These additional sources do not count toward your four-source requirement.
Selected Question Question #1 – Surveillance, Privacy, and Convenience.
Surveillance in our everyday communication technologies – from smartphones to websites to the Internet of Things – may or may not be understood as a “cultural necessity.” Discuss the trade-offs between surveillance and privacy for two different communities. How do the benefits or pitfalls of this trade-off play out for these communities? Who can access privacy, and who cannot? Why? Using evidence, your paper should consider whether the surveillance/privacy trade-off services or disservices your chosen communities.
Bibliography
Andrejevic, M. & Volcic, Z. (2021). Pandemic Lessons: Total Surveillance and the Post-Truth Society. The Political Economy of Communication 9(1), 4-21.
Hargittai, E. & Marwick, A. E. (2016). ‘What can I really do?’: Explaining the privacy paradox with online apathy. International Journal of Communication 10, 3737-3757.
Lyon, D., Bennett, C., Steeves, V. M., Haggerty, K. D. (2014). Transparent lives: surveillance in Canada. Athabasca University Press.
Marwick, A. E. (2012). The public domain: Social surveillance in everyday life. Surveillance & Society, 9(4), 378-393.
Nissenbaum, H. (2004). Privacy as contextual integrity. Washington Law Review, 79(1), 119-139.
