Fri

assignment1.docx

Pick one of the following prompts to respond to:

· The reading Protesting the Protest Paradigm engages with the ways that content Tik-Tok has been used to criticize mainstream news media. Pulling from the reading and your own experiences of social media, what do you believe is the role of these platforms in creating social change? What are some of its limitations? Please be specific in your argument and examples.

· Research an example of a disinformation campaign that has occurred within the last four years. Describe the campaign through two concepts or terminologies introduced by McKay and Tenove, such as but not limited to corrosive falsehood, epistemic cynicism, moral denigration, techno-affective polarizati, unjustified inclusion or pervasive inauthenticity.

finalessay.docx

For the final you will be asked to expand on your midterm essay. You will be presented with expanded versions of the original midterm prompts and be expected to build off of your original midterm paper. Think of this as a part 2, asking you to expand on what you have already written. You will need to include at least an additional TWO readings from weeks 4-5 and an additional outside source for a total of 4 readings and 2 outside sources. You must still rely on a real life example to ground and develop your argument. You may use the same real life example but it must be engaged with accordingly to be responding to the expanded prompt and the new readings (I.E. Do not just copy and past from midterm). It will be crucial to respond to the comments made by your TA on your midterm. This essay should be between 2000 and 2100 words.

· Continuing your discussion of hegemonic power and intellectual property law, choose a business in the creative industry to further elaborate. (The example chosen cannot be EA Games). Explain how the business exemplifies qualities of cognitive capitalism and demonstrates qualities of hegemonic power. What is your relationship to this business as a consumer? Conclude by discussing what role this business plays culturally and why is it important that we engage with it more critically. The final should demonstrate a strong understanding of hegemonic power, the results of Intellectual Property law, and an ability to apply those concepts to a real world example.

· Draw upon your prior discussion regarding the tension between media as a source of profit versus a public good. Pulling from a real world example, situate surveillance / platform capitalism within this tension: How might these firms fulfill a public good versus focus on the market model. Be sure to explain the ways in which platforms and surveillance represent a new form of capitalism, the relationship between platforms and space-time compression, and the impact platforms can have upon the greater public. Conclude by suggesting ways in which platform firms could be more aligned with the public good and the feasibility of your solution.

finalessay.docx

For the final you will be asked to expand on your midterm essay. You will be presented with expanded versions of the original midterm prompts and be expected to build off of your original midterm paper. Think of this as a part 2, asking you to expand on what you have already written. You will need to include at least an additional TWO readings from weeks 4-5 and an additional outside source for a total of 4 readings and 2 outside sources. You must still rely on a real life example to ground and develop your argument. You may use the same real life example but it must be engaged with accordingly to be responding to the expanded prompt and the new readings (I.E. Do not just copy and past from midterm). It will be crucial to respond to the comments made by your TA on your midterm. This essay should be between 2000 and 2100 words.

· Continuing your discussion of hegemonic power and intellectual property law, choose a business in the creative industry to further elaborate. (The example chosen cannot be EA Games). Explain how the business exemplifies qualities of cognitive capitalism and demonstrates qualities of hegemonic power. What is your relationship to this business as a consumer? Conclude by discussing what role this business plays culturally and why is it important that we engage with it more critically. The final should demonstrate a strong understanding of hegemonic power, the results of Intellectual Property law, and an ability to apply those concepts to a real world example.

· Draw upon your prior discussion regarding the tension between media as a source of profit versus a public good. Pulling from a real world example, situate surveillance / platform capitalism within this tension: How might these firms fulfill a public good versus focus on the market model. Be sure to explain the ways in which platforms and surveillance represent a new form of capitalism, the relationship between platforms and space-time compression, and the impact platforms can have upon the greater public. Conclude by suggesting ways in which platform firms could be more aligned with the public good and the feasibility of your solution.

Week5Barlow-ADeclarationoftheIndependenceofCyberspace.pdf

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject

the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland February 8, 1996

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace