Option #1: The Inner History of Devices
After reading the two assigned chapters from Turkle’s The Inner History of Devices, please do the following:
- Identify three specific examples from these articles of personal experiences with technology that particularly struck you. For each of your three examples:
- Compose a brief description that includes the technology and how it shaped the person’s experience of the world.
- Connect the example to any of the other Required Learning Materials we have covered and discussed throughout the course. Be sure to refer to a specific reading.
- Describe one of your personal experiences with technology or an experience of someone you know that in some way resembles the examples in these two chapters.
- Use two quotes from any of your resources to support or explain your points. Make sure to provide in-text citations for both quotes in MLA format.
- Provide references for all sources in MLA format.
Option #2: Women and their Machines
After reading the two assigned chapters from Dyer’s From Curlers to Chainsaws, please do the following:
- For each chapter:
- Identify and describe a specific incident in the author’s life and how it connects to technology. Do you think this incident reflects the concept of technological determinism or social constructivism? Explain.
- Explain how this incident relates to the author’s gender, racial, religious, ethnic, familial, class or cultural identity.
- Assess your technological biography project and convey to the class anything from it that can relate to the idea of how technology can shape your self-conception and identity, or the self-conception and identity of the person you interviewed. How might technology enhance, expand or encompass your or your interviewee’s gender, racial, religious, ethnic, familial, class or cultural identity?
- Use two quotes from any of your resources to support or explain your points. Make sure to provide in-text citations for both quotes in MLA format.
- Provide references for all sources in MLA format.
Option #3: Virtually Me
After reading Smith and Watson’s chapter, “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation,” please do the following:
- Select three terms you think are particularly interesting, and for each term, do the following:
- Define or explain the term in your own words by summarizing or paraphrasing from the resource.
- Use this term to talk about something you wrote, researched or learned while doing your technological biography. Make sure to justify your use of this term to talk about something from your technological biography project by referring to specifics from your work on the project and showing how the term applies.
- Use two quotes from any of your resources to support or explain your points. Make sure to provide in-text citations for both quotes in MLA format.
- Provide references for all sources in MLA format.