Study Guide: Final

2 out of 3 essay questions

(Questions will ask you to consider broad themes: study the areas below and think very hard about how everything relates to each other.  The exam will be COMPREHENSIVE, meaning that you’ll be asked to pull together many of these areas simultaneously)
You will have access to this studyguide during the exam.

 

Topic Areas :

1. Learning: how new technology affects learning: pros and cons

2. Advertising and marketing: how many ways there are to advertise on the Internet
Josh Bodnar and advertising

The role of Google as an advertising conglomerate

The role of Google as an everything conglomerate: distribution, hardware, software, content (the industry calls this "vertical integration," and typically it's a bad thing when one company controls all levels of production, exhibition, and distribution...mind you, though, every big company tries to do it)

3. Video Games, Virtual Spaces, Simulated Environments: key controversies about gaming and virtual communities: Digital Nation clips raise concerns--gaming is bad for our health, addicting, etc; Steve Johnson assuages concerns--gaming helps us think more strategically, mathematically, in sophisticated, challenging ways, etc. The Sleeping Curve.
Southpark's social critique of gaming

Phantom EFX's gaming entrepreneurialism

Social behavior: living faster, relationships, social networks

• changes in people's social behavior as they communicate online (positive and negative changes...can we learn to slow down?);
• playfulness and knowledge gathering (pros and cons--are we able to access more information, question authorship, feel that knowledge is freeing as we link from one (sometimes unrelated) idea to the next, or does skittering leave not enough time for reflection? deep thinking?
• politics and democracy (good sides, bad sides)
• relationships: are they profoundly changing, or are they more or less the same (albeit online)?

Privacy and censorship: examples of privacy violations (identify theft, data mining, stalking, GPS). How has our comfort with sharing compromised our privacy?
How are we headed into uncharted territory with regards to our privacy being so easiy compromised? What are the pros and cons of privacy?

Social behavior vis a vis Addiction and Porn: examples of addiction (gaming). Examples of new media porn (Chatroulette). Is our new media environment duplicating what happens in the real world (as some people argue, so why worry), or is stuff going on now somehow different?

 

 

Government Regulations:
The FCC and new levels of broadband access (100 megabytes a second, compared to 3-4 today): how is this possible? what is the controversy

Total Information Awareness
ACTA and international bodies working to control the Internet
Net Neutrality
The importance to democracy of information being free (Wikileaks; Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Technology does not exist in a vacuum: the same people that talk about anti-hierarchy and technological access are also getting incredibly rich and powerful (the young men who run Google, for example)

Social media as the next stage in postindustrial capitalism.

China and government regulation through hundreds of thousands of internet police, and a Chinese firewall
North Korea: a country with no internet