Research Paper

As a media ecologist, Marshall McLuhan’s main claim is that the media through which we contact reality actually exert effects on our perceptions of that reality. For this essay, you, much like McLuhan did in The Medium is the Massage, will be charting those effects for a certain topic that is currently relevant in the realm of media studies.

For this essay, you will create an argument that describes and analyzes the effects of media on one or more of the following cultural aspects:

• Demise of print media
• Net Neutrality
• “Fake news”
• Popularity of reality TV
• Emergence of virtual or augmented reality technologies
• Whistleblowing and Wikileaks
• Cyberbullying, online sexual harassment and “trolling”
• iGen/Generation Z/post-Millennial generation
• #metoo and Time’s Up movement
• FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet’s Google)
• Artificial intelligence
• Cryptocurrecny and the digitization of money

This list is not exhaustive, so you can choose another topic as long as it has current news stories being charted in popular or alternative news outlets (beware of fake news and conspiracy theories!). You can choose to chart and examine the progression of the effects on one of these aspects over multiple media or through a single medium. For example, a paper can address how society treats sexual harassment in the internet age OR it can address how society’s treatment of sexual harassment has changed during the transition from old media to new media.You may also find that analysis of one of these areas requires you to analyze another, e.g. perhaps you want to argue that fake news has its roots in the emergence of reality TV as a mainstream genre, so “mission creep” is admissible. As the subtitle from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects suggests, you will be trying to accomplish the same as McLuhan was in this text: charting the effects of media, tracing their causes from the composition of those media and speculating about the societal consequences.

There will be two major parts of the essay:

• Literature review: section of the essay that synthesizes sources and offers background information for the reader.
• Argument: section of the essay that makes an argument in the style of the media ecology discipline (This does not mean you must write like McLuhan, with pictures, metaphors, allusions, etc., but you must keep focus on the various ideas and modes of media analysis forwarded by McLuhan and other media ecologists).

Requirements

The following are MANDATORY guidelines. Not following any one of them will lose you 5 pts.:

• Make sure you have a good introduction and conclusion.
• 12 pt. Arial or Helvetica font ONLY
• 1 in. margins on all borders; double spaced
• For quoted material, observe MLA in-text citation rules; Works cited page must also be in MLA format.
• Minimum 7 sources. You must cite assigned sources from class in the works cited page. All those sources will count toward your minimum source requirement.
• 10-12 pgs. minimum