Essay Question
Pick 1 of the following questions to answer in the text box below. You must answer in your own words. You are not required to bring in any material from outside of the class, and you don’t need to include a Works Cited Page. You may quote material from the lectures or the readings directly, but if you do so, you must clearly mark that material as a quote, putting the quote in quotation marks and including in parentheses which video or reading the quote is from; failure to do so will be treated as plagiarism and will result in a failing grade for the exam. Your response should be roughly 300 words. That is not a strict minimum, nor is it a strict maximum, but just a rough expectation. You are not being graded on the length of your response, but on the strength of the response’s argument and your engagement with the course material. Please indicate which question you have chosen in the beginning of your response. 1. How does the idea of parasocial interaction lead to what Theresa Senft calls “microcelebrity”? 2. In what ways did World War II inform the history of new media? 3. How does the analysis of behavioral surplus in Surveillance Capitalism complicate the idea of “personal data”?
