Today we discussed some of the legal and social aspects of privacy as well as how our understanding and expectations of privacy change depending on the context. Here’s a question I did not get a chance to ask you all: are we helping create a surveillance society each time we use a social networking site or interact with a website that collects data or tracks our use? Why is that different from being captured on surveillance cameras every time we leave our homes?
I distributed guidelines for the Research Topic proposal, due March 21. Please get in touch with any questions you have about this assignment; I am happy to discuss in person or over email. Remember, you will want to express your research topic as a question.
On Wednesday, February 29 we’ll talk about plagiarism. Please read Isserman, Plagiarism: a Lie of the Mind and Widdicombe, The Plagiarist’s Tale. Please comment on at least one blog post.
Slides from today are available here.
In Maurice Isserman’s blog on Plagierism , we see an academic objectively questioning the current role of this crime in our times. Yes Plagierism has been discribed as the stealing of another’s creative effort without giving him/ her the credit. Realistically was’nt it always that way? We popularly pick up other people’s slangs that sound great and then we “own it” like it was ours too. A few come to mind. Drop it like its hot, forget about it, break a leg,conspiracy theorist,man up,and blingged out, to name a few. We live in an age of repitition, it is how we communicate and we love combining words that come together so nicely ,it posseses a certain rythm that resonates to us propelling it into the next hit song or the next slag across everyones lips. Isserman’s colleague summs it up so simply when she says “Plagerism isn’t a bad thing simply because it’s an act of interlectual teft– although it is that. It is a bad thing because it takes place of and prevents learning.” Julia Schult. That in a nutshell is why such an emphasis is played on the crime at this higher level of education to measure that you have read and Is now competent enough to put it into your own words. So lets see your level of understanding going forward…..
When we use social networks and sites that gather info on us , we are definately enabling and Fueling the culture of an Orwellian society. Collecting data on us is in fact catagorizing us and therefor separating us . Systematically and in a very subtle way reintroducing a class system that has failed miserably in the past. So many futuristic movies have been made to show us what lies ahead in such a projection. Such a reality is scary to me. Technology is good but not without regulations. I would endorse a more utilitarianistic aproach to the greater good of all mankind but with the masses at the wheel……