There’s a Problem with Digital Technology

Task:

You have your topic—digital technology.  Now you seek a specific problem to investigate in the relationship between some aspect of digital technology and some aspect of contemporary life.

This paper assignment on the relationships between digital technologies and human nature asks you to do the following:

1. identify a specific problem about the relation between digital technology, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, human nature and/or society you wish to explore;
2. choose a potential research question (with its subordinate questions);
3. research the responses to your question(s), collecting the data;
4. explore implications and complexities of that data gathered in your research; and then
5. choose a position based on that research to present in a seven-page argument. 

Your Audience: consider your readers familiar and happy with their personal digital technologies—laptops, cell phones, broadband—but unaware of the problem you’ve identified.  They are also unsure of the facts and uncertain about what they should think and do about it.

Your Role:  Take the position of a reasonable and informed advocate.

Format:

Papers should be typed in 12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced, with one inch margins at the top, the bottom and the sides.  Your paper must follow the guidelines of MLA style for formatting.

A successful paper will have the following:

1. The basic parameters of the assignment;
2. A clear and focused goal and purpose generated by the writer;
3. An introduction that frames the discussion and a conclusion that affirms the paper’s project;
4. An organization of paper and paragraphs that is logical, coherent, unified and easy to follow;
5. Reference to legitimate support (your research) using MLA citation;
6. Effective use of “They, I Say” structure, avoiding “voice mixing” and the “data dump”;
7. Specific and clear explanation of your ideas;
8. Logical relationships—linkages—between ideas, sentences and paragraphs;
9. Sentence style that is powerful, clear and precise; and
10. No surface feature errors.

What is a “data dump”?  A data dump is when a writer takes all of his or her research and dumps it into the paper without any kind of analysis, interpretation or assertions of importance or emphasis.  This is a common kind of the so-called “research paper” found in high school.  But it isn’t.  So don’t do this.  Data dumping makes for a very bad paper.

What is “voice mixing”? Voice mixing is a condition when a reader can’t tell the difference between the author’s own voice and the voices from the sources.  This is bad.  It should always be clear when a reader is reading the sources ideas (the “They Say”) and when they are reading your own ideas (the “I Say”).  To make matters worse, voice mixing can look a lot like plagiarism. 

What is one way to tell that you have data dumping or voice mixing in your paper (though not the only way)?  That your paper has one or a number of paragraphs that have only one citation located at the very end of the paragraph.  A paragraph should most likely have a source (or two) that needs an in text citation and then also have your