According to Walter Ong, we are currently living in the ecological age, “in principle an age of total interconnectedness.” Many of these interconnections happen with the help of digital technology existing under the guise of “the digital,” which Boyle, Brown, and Ceraso is “everywhere at once and nowhere in particular.” It is possible that this all-encompassing though unspecific location of “the digital” is what makes digital technologies so important to the fabric of interconnections in the world and perhaps somewhat insidious in their ability to mask sometimes questionable practices. The realities of digital technologies, or “the digital” more broadly, lie in that push and pull between the optimistic improvement of life and the pessimistic paranoia of power and oppression in the mesh of the ill-defined digital space and practice. For this project, you should engage with the readings that we are examining together this unit to examine some aspect of digital ecologies, using Eyman’s discussion of the ecological metaphor in digital studies. You can examine some of the optimistic availabilities of digital technologies or the pessimistic practices of the digital, but at the base you want to consider how the interactivity of the digital ecology helps you to make sense of your topic. For instance, you might examine issues like privacy/surveillance, monetization, hate speech, censorship, algorithms, or automation in digital ecosystems like social media sites or other websites or online tools like reddit, discord, or others. You might examine the ways in which central ideas about things like work, play, fun, or shopping are mobilized in certain digital spaces. Of import in this project is that you consider how a central issue of your choosing works within a digital ecology (i.e. multiple interconnected spaces online) and how that might help us to understand the complexities of digital technologies in writing studies. Some basic questions you might ask yourself as you get started are: • What is the central issue you are examining? How would you define it? How do the readings we discuss define it? • Who does this issue affect? • How does this issue matter to digital writers? • What platforms will you examine to better understand this issue in practice? • What questions do you still have about this issue? What’s unclear, changing, challenging, etc. about this issue?
Purpose
This project addresses the following student learning outcomes for this class:
* Explore frameworks and metaphors for understanding the structure, value, and interactions of digital writing
* Develop research practices to disentangle and present the inner workings of web platforms
* Examine key issues affecting digital writing in our current moment
* Practice working with structures of technology, organization, and markup language behind the surface of web writing
The Specifics
This essay should be a thesis-driven examination of the issue you are exploring. You should make use of the research we’ve read together (at least two pieces) and you should supplement at least one piece of research that you find on your own.
The essay should be 1100 words, double-spaced, in either MLA or APA format. You should also make sure you have a title and a clear thesis. The essay should be submitted in a Microsoft Word format (.doc or .docx).
