Generation Like and Seminar Prep

MORNING CLASS:

Seminar Prep:
Your seminar prep is due today.  Print and turn in, or share/email with Lori.

Starter 4:

1. How important is privacy to you?  Particularly with regards to the information you put about yourself online?
2. How comfortable are you with the idea that internet marketers are using your personal information to develop marketing plans?  Where is the balance between  privacy and convenience for you?

Frontline:  Generation Like
We're going to watch the documentary linked above.  Then we're going to talk about it.

After we're done watching, write down 2-3 discussion questions sparked by the film.

In your small groups:

1. What was the most interesting thing you learned from this video?
2. What questions do you have based on this?  Share your questions, discuss them.
3. Respond as a group:  We’re actually living in an attention economy, and in order to be powerful in an attention economy, you have to realize that your attention matters, where you give your attention has consequences.  So if you give your attention to marketing, that has consequences. If you give your attention to fear, that has consequences. If you give your attention to celebrity, that has consequences. Be aware of where you give your attention in an attention economy  In an attention economy, how is one attention monetized? So if the kids are watching a salacious YouTube video versus one that recognizes human dignity, who is that harming? How is that making more?
4. Agree or Disagree:  Murray Milner Jr. wrote about how the one thing that young people have control over is status. They don’t have control over where they go to school, what classes they take, where they sleep at night, but they have control over who gets popularity and who gets attention within their peer group. And it becomes the thing that they become obsessed with because it’s the one thing that they have control over.
   To the degree that we minimize the opportunity for young people to have agency, to have control over their lives, we see it playing out over things like status, over things like attention, over things like likes. If we’re concerned about the kinds of likes and attention and validation that we’re playing into, we need to actually start giving young people more control over their lives.
5. Which side do you support more?  Why?  Digital marketers say that all of this data collection and analysis is designed to improve the experience for the consumer by offering more of what they want, or at least what companies think they want.  Privacy advocates worry that consumers aren’t getting fair deal for their data, and that the data is not secured.  
6. What does this mean?  Do you agree?  Disagree?  What are some examples?  Culture has always been a tangled web of authenticity and exploitation.   When we think about how social media affects our lives, we have to recognize how it reproduces what already existed in the world.
7. To what extent is the following statement true?  What are the implications of this (positive and negative)?  I think cool used to be identified with scarcity, the jazz singer who turns his back to the audience. Now cool has become omnipresent. So there’s been a real shift in what cool is.  Now cool is about giving yourself, opening yourself up constantly, rather than holding yourself aloof and apart.

HOMEWORK:
Be ready for seminar tomorrow!

AFTERNOON CLASS:
Starter 4:

1. How important is privacy to you?  Particularly with regards to the information you put about yourself online?
2. How comfortable are you with the idea that internet marketers are using your personal information to develop marketing plans?  Where is the balance between  privacy and convenience for you?

Seminar Prep (all texts are linked on the DOCS page of my DP!)
For EACH of the three articles, please type the following in a document.  Email or share it with Lori before class on Friday.

1. Read and annotate the article (make sure to look up any vocab...ironically, you can use your phone for this).  Make sure to go deeper than just an initial emotional response.  Make connections, analyze, question!
2. Find three sentences that stand out to you, and write them down in a list.  They could be sentences that move you, that ring with truth, that make you angry, that you totally disagree with.
3. Write a paragraph response to ONE of the sentences.  Pick it apart, react to it, respond…OR Draw a picture in response to each of the sentences…OR do some combination of the above.  If you do the visual option, you can give Lori the hard copy before class on Friday.  
4. In addition, what is the thesis here?  What’s the main argument being made?

So, you should end up with THREE paragraphs/pictures (one for each document), a thesis statement for each document, and 2-3 seminar questions.
 
Finally, after you’ve read and prepped all the articles, write 2-3 seminar questions.  These could be about a specific article, or they could be questions that span the breadth of all the articles.  They could be questions you don’t know the answer to, or questions that you think would spark a healthy discussion.

HOMEWORK:
Finish seminar prep before class on Tuesday.  Email or share it with Lori.