Impacts of Technology

Building on your work in this class, you are asked to produce a short research paper that critically analyzes a technology and its existing/potential impact on different kinds of people and social relations.
For your paper topic, you can either:

1. Build on a previous topic from one of the first two assignments, or
2. Choose a new topic related to the course themes
   In most cases, this means taking the research you’ve already done, expanding it to gather more information, then writing the paper fresh.
   This assignment is most similar to a typical ‘final research paper’; the key task here is to find, read, and cite relevant research around your chosen technology & major concerns/arguments.
   The purpose of this assignment is to focus on rigorous, evidence-based academic research!
   • Good example: a paper on facial recognition (topic) and whether it amplifies racial bias (argument). Research would focus on academic research on facial recognition itself, but might also consider scholarship on racial bias, visual perception, etc. The paper might also cite from recent news articles, documentaries or government reports that provide notable examples of public debate around this issue, but note that this would not satisfy the requirement for peer-reviewed academic sources.
   This means we ask you to focus on ‘secondary’ research, rather than ‘primary’ (e.g. interviews or surveys). Such empirical research often requires a lot of time and care to do rigorously, from piloting your questionnaires to filing ethics reviews. For the purposes of this class, stick with secondary research.
   Submission rules and deadlines
   • You will submit a 1500 word essay
   o Your investigation should cite at least 5 pieces of academic research (peer-reviewed), using APA citation style.
    Only 2 of these sources can be from the course materials (although you can use more if you have at least 3 resources that you found yourself outside of the course materials).
    1 of your 3 sources that you find yourself can be from your previous assignment(s)
    You can reuse more if you have at least 2 new sources unique to this assignment