Paper instructions:
The Digital Democracy Discourse

Observe your use of the Internet for a given amount of time, paying attention to and keeping a list of all of the links (hypertext) that you click on and websites you visit.

Do you know which of these sites might be collecting and selling your personal data? Have you thought about changing your browser’s preferences to allow or to not allow tracking by third parties? Have you checked Facebook or Google’s privacy policy lately and made sure that you aren’t oversharing?

With the digitalization of the markets and the arrival of interactive technologies, a popular discourse arose about how the new technologies are revolutionary and the new technologies themselves solely will revolutionize society. Recent social movements, such as the “Arab Spring” were celebrated as utopian products of the social media.

At the same time, a critique of this approach pointed out the surveillance, privacy, free labor and commodification of information aspects of the digitalization and contended that the usage of these technologies by media corporations is actually reproducing current power relations.

Here are two articles that summarize these discussions: Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, 2006 (http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570810,00.html) and Aras’s Constukuncel’s Discourse Analysis (tinyrul.com/arasddd). Read and evaluate the two approaches while giving examples of your own usage and experience with digital media. With which approach do you agree? Why?

Optional: For additional complexity, you might consider how the discussion of ancient rhetorical devices described in chapter 3.2, compare in light of the discussions of new interactive communication technologies.