Choose one of the topics below and compose an essay that answers the set of questions asked
1. Robert Scheer suggests that the rise of information technologies (IT) and the ways that these can be used have created the framework for a surveillant state where any semblance of democracy will soon be impossible. Critically analyze how Scheer comes to this conclusion. Summarize what has been happening in computing and IT that allows data to be collected and stored by private firms, the government, or both. Use specific examples from the text and from lectures. How does compilation and control of this data threaten the American system according to the author? Can there be any democracy without privacy, and is privacy at risk in the United States, or is it already gone? What does Scheer think, and what do you say?
2. Theorist Giorgio Agamben states: “The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule” (Means without End, 2000: 39). While Agamben’s analysis focuses on real, territorial spaces that define the boundaries of this camp, it was suggested in lectures that the camp might also be looked at as a virtual space where society (or individuals within society) has engaged in a form of self-incarceration. Using They Know Everything About You as a guide, analyze the ways that we might indeed find ourselves part of the camp, and critically evaluate what the boundaries of that camp might be. In lectures, for instance, the concept of schizophrenia (borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) was used to suggest that we are trapped psychologically and that we find escape difficult, if not impossible; Gerald Raunig’s concept of the dividual was used to suggest that we are split into a “rear and digitized version of ourselves. Is this what traps us? Can we ever get out? If so, how? If not, what does this entail for society and for the idea of freedom? In answering, consider the title of Robert Scheer’s fourth chapter: “Privacy is Freedom.”
