Deliverable(s): Active links to news articles or academic studies regarding any, some, or all of the four topics specified below, along with a brief description of the source material.
Criteria for Deliverables:
• Source documents and links must be in English.
• All material cited must be directly relevant to the topics specified below.
• News articles cannot come from gossip media or other “non-serious sources” (e.g., TMZ entertainment, National Enquirer), and academic studies must be from peer-reviewed journals.
• Descriptions of the article or study must be provided below the link. To do this, you must have read at least part of the source material or link! The description must be the length of a regular paragraph (3-5 sentences), and address the following issues:
o What is the specific topic or story?
o How long (pages or words) is the source?
o (If not visible in the link) Who is the publisher and/or author?
o What position, if any, does the article or study take?
Topics: Four topics, as explicitly defined below, are eligible for extra credit:
- Social media: the effect of social media activity on workplace productivity and classroom education. Research the consequences of IT consumerization (Ch. 16, p. 288) specifically on employee and student efficiency. Source material does not have to be either pro- or anti-use. For background see “ScreenTime”, a recent ABC (Diane Sawyer) special. Examples of good sources are:
a. 2012 Atlantic article: Do Cell Phones Belong in the Classroom
b. 2014 Social Psychology paper: The Mere Presence of a Cell Phone May Be… - Outsourcing: the distribution of business and societal costs and benefits arising from the outsourcing by U.S. corporations of jobs held by U.S. citizens. Consider this issue from a broad perspective of employment transfer, which includes not only nearshore and offshore outsourcing (Ch. 19, p. 345), but also importation of restricted labor into the U.S. (e.g. via H-1B visas) or “in-house offshoring” whereby companies keep ownership of the good/service production but move the facilities offshore and hire foreign labor as employees. An example of a relevant story is:
a. 2015 Daily Mail (UK) article: Disney firing U.S. workers but not before asking them to train Indian replacements - Information privacy: effects of IT/IS advances and proliferation on individual freedom security. Research digital and physical-world surveillance capabilities (BPI 6-7) in the context of governmental and/or private-entity control over personal liberties and behavior. Given that society and government needs to enforce some minimum level of national security and domestic order, source material does not have to be categorically pro- or anti-technology. An example of a relevant study is:
a. 2019 Journal of Democracy study: The Road to Digital Unfreedom … Surveillance State about the policies of China’s President Xi - Cybersecurity: extent to which critical infrastructure is vulnerable to online hacking. Consider this issue in the specific context of physical and digital systems that are important for economic or societal functioning (e.g., electric power grid or banking transfer systems). Also restrict your search to highly organized black-hat hacking by criminal organizations, societal factions, or nations. One possible starting point is this list of significant cyber incidents since 2006 from CSIS, which classifies incidents independently by offender and victim.