Term+Paper

Papers will be assessed on their originality, creativity and organization as well as on the demonstrated mastery of basic writing and research skills including: development of a thesis and clear argument, effective use of research sources, and ability to express ideas clearly. Your professor is an important resource, so is the Student Learning Commons [|http://learningcommons.sfu.ca]. Draw upon those resources early in the writing process. Email: jkb9@sfu.ca
 * Major Essay ** 30% Due: November 26, 2011
 * Goals: **
 * To gain experience in developing a thesis, arguments and essay structure.
 * To conduct research in an area that interests you.
 * To explore a specific area of the discipline of communication.
 * Basic Requirements (see also General Requirements below) **
 * Maximum 3000 words, minimum 2000; not including bibliography
 * Use at least 4 __academic__ * sources
 * You may draw upon class readings and lectures but you need at least 3 outside sources
 * Include a bibliography or works cited page
 * Format according to a standard academic style (SFU CMNS uses APA; Chicago would be acceptable for this class too.)
 * You can get APA style guides [|here] and you can even get a template [|here].

Look at this first: = General Requirements: = > > Academic sources can be found on the Internet. Wikipedia is a great tool and a good starting point but it is not an appropriate source for academic papers. Good Wikipedia articles have extensive bibliographies at the bottom where you can find excellent (and not so excellent academic sources). Other kinds of Internet sources should only be used as examples of your arguments; approach them critically. Avoid citing journalistic or personal reviews.
 * Avoid that vague words like “society.” Be specific about what social structures and what social institutions are relevant to your analysis: traditional cultures, the music industry, advertising, etc. Don’t say: “society limits roles for women.” Do say, “The Hallmark Channel represents women in traditional, patriarchal roles as wife and homemaker.” Don’t say: “Society turns us all into consumers.” Do say: “As an advertising medium, TV always addresses viewers as consumers.”
 * Avoid all metaphors of reflection; use metaphors of representation. Media do not “reflect society” or reality, they can only represented it.
 * Draw upon the ideas and methods of relevant course readings/lectures and 4 outside academic sources, incorporating them into your essay. It is appropriate and expected that you borrow ideas so long as you cite your sources. See the APA Manual of Style or any other style guide for proper format of references. In the body of you paper, Underline or italicize titles of books, movies, TV shows, journals or magazines, put individual episodes or article titles in quotation marks. Plagiarism shows a lack of integrity, is dishonest, and is poor scholarship. The minimum penalty for plagiarism is an F on the assignment.
 * Be sure your introduction clearly sets out your thesis or main argument. Make sure your introduction contains a precise, concise thesis statement. Be sure to signal to the reader exactly what you propose to **argue** in the main body of your paper. Following paragraphs should offer **fully developed arguments** that support your main thesis. Most paragraphs should be at least 4 or 5 sentences long or about half a page. **Conclude** with a summary of your arguments and a restatement, in different words, of your thesis.
 * You will not be judged on your opinions, but on your **arguments**. Begin with insights and arguments and support those with observations and conclusions. Take a stand; challenge yourself and your readers toward new insights and ideas. A string of observations does not constitute an academic paper. Description should always be in the service of analysis.
 * Avoid informal language: //“basically,” “I mean,”// and vague terms: //“society,” “people,” “The masses,” “the media//,” //“viewers,”// etc.
 * Be careful with first person pronouns; focus attention on your arguments about your topic or issue in question, not on yourself or your process of writing this assignment. As long as you don't write about yourself or the process of writing, 1st person is okay. To say "I will argue that..." is to call attention to your argument, rather than yourself. To say "I watched six episodes and I noticed how characters were..." draws attention to you, not the show or characters.
 * Demonstrate all the effort, thought and care that went into writing your paper with a good looking presentation. Double space with a 10 or 12 point serif font like Palatino or Times, use one inch margins on all sides, number your pages and staple your paper. Do not use plastic covers, folders or paper clips -- just a simple staple.
 * Most important: take pride in your ideas and express them in the clearest, most convincing way you can.

Here is a list of suggested essay topics for you to mull over. For those of you still struggling to come up with a thesis for your term paper, perhaps one of these suggestions will help. But do not feel bound to use one of these topics, nor, should you choose to take one of these suggestions to heart, you do not need to follow the topic with absolute fidelity. In other words, use these topics as a way of sparking your own imagination. Improvise. Take what you find to be of value and leave the rest. Most of the topics give you a fairly broad sense of what you might do in a particular field, so feel free to be creative. > > Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don’t -- till I tell you. I mean ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’" > > "But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’" Alice objected. > > "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." > > "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." > > "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that’s all." > > This passage from Alice in Wonderland is frequently cited in communication texts, volumes on linguistics, and even in discussions in philosophy. The reason is that the conversation between Alice and Humpty Dumpty summarizes neatly the argument advanced by many writers that language is a form of power that enables us to control other people. "I fear we are not getting rid of God," the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "because we still believe in grammar." By this Nietzsche referred to his belief that by naming something we assume that it has come into existence, that language, in other words, is the means by which we create the world. What do you think? Is Humpty Dumpty right, and the master is the one who gets to decide what words will mean? George Orwell certainly suggested this in his book, 1984. Are there other non-literary sources that would make the same point? > > From there you can head off to the library to consult a couple of important journal articles: Communication Research 23 (1996), and American Psychologist 53 (1998). > > In addition, is the video game debate in any way related to the debates that occurred several decades ago with the arrival of television? Is it related to the debates that took place concerning zoot suits, jazz, comic books, rock and roll, and rap? Is it just a generational thing, or is there something different about video games? The expression “moral panic” is a useful one to look up in thinking about this topic.
 * 1) We have all learned to see “nature” and “society” as separate, often as opposites. But what is the real relationship between nature and culture? Is “nature” a product of culture and communication? It has been argued that the idea of “wilderness” is historically specific; that wilderness is a product of the European imagination that is then imposed on the landscape (and the people who live there). Algonquin Park was declared a “wilderness” while it was being heavily logged and the first act of the first park ranger was to remove all the people – First Nation and European -- who lived or hunted there. Begin by reading Raymond Williams’ essay “Ideas of Nature” and you might want to have a look at the books of Neil Evernden and Alexander Wilson – both Canadians.
 * 2) When I lived in Ottawa in the mid 1980s, they build a mall on both sides of a small street and then enclosed the street. Homeless men would hang out there to keep warm on cold days. The mall staff responded by kicking them back out into the cold. Then a smart lawyer came to their defense by pointing out that a street is a public space and the private mall security staff have no jurisdiction on public space. This whole incident is a product of a process that many have discussed: the privatization of our public spaces. How does this process change our public spaces? What is the difference between a mall and the street? How do such spaces communicate differently? What is the relationship between privatization and commercialization? What about gaming as public or private space (second life; world of warcraft)?
 * 3) The very rapid rise of the so-called blogosphere coincides with the equally rapid decline of newspapers. While some big papers may survive, journalism is migrating to the web and the blog format is becoming the main platform for the dissemination and consumption of news. Citizen journalism is becoming a bigger factor in the news landscape and the once-rigid lines between fact and opinion begin to blur. The ability to comment on stories changes the game. What are the positives and negatives of news and/or opinion blogs? What do we gain? What are we losing? Join in the discussion of these seemingly inevitable changes and take a stand the best way forward. Offer some analysis and insight into some news blogs. Here’s a great place to start: [] Also: http://freshmedia.me/
 * 4) Wikis are the changing communication landscape. Wikipedia had changed the way we think about and use information. They change the relationship between social power and information. Wikis blur the lines between amateur and professional. What are the implications of simple little tool that allows anyone to edit and contribute to a webpage? How will this change the way we learn, work, study?
 * 5) Are Canadian political parties finally learning the lessons of the 2008 Obama campaign? Analyze the relationships between politics, communication and the web. Are we witnessing the dawn of a new era of participatory democracy? Is it naïve to think that the web can give citizens a real voice and reinvigorate our democracies?
 * 6) Youtube is 99% crap, right? Of course it is, but it also represents a revolution in the way we consume (and now produce!) media. Anthropologist Michael Wesch argues that youtube offers new forms of expression, identity and community. The ability for consumers to also produce video changes the media landscape in fundamental ways. Watch his lecture here: [] The idea of the “passive consumer” of media seems so outdated to day. So what does youtube mean for our assumptions about “the media” generally or television in particular? What are the implications of the ability for us to become television producers as well as consumers? We can even create our own TV channels on the web; is this a fundamental shift and a new mode of production or are we just giving free content to a new set of media conglomerates like Google or Apple?
 * 7) Does art communicate? If so, how? What have writers said about the communicative potential of works of art? If art is essentially ambiguous, doesn't this work against the claim that it can be understood as a form of communication? Or does it work the other way around, and is the fundamental ambiguity in art part of its communicational power?
 * 8) A common Japanese saying is "The nail that sticks out must be hammered down." Edward Hall comments on the Japanese preference for conformity in his book, //Beyond Culture//. As Hall argues it, there are two ways we can distinguish between cultures in relation to their communication strategies: Collectivist cultures and Individualist Cultures. Japan is an illustration of a Collectivist culture; Canada epitomizes the values of the Individualist culture. In Individualist cultures self-promotion is viewed as a positive attribute, whereas in Collectivist cultures, self-promotion is eyed with distrust (the Chinese character for "I" looks very much like the word for selfish). A self-concept that includes "assertive" might make a Westerner feel proud, but in much of Asia it would more likely be cause for shame. What other relations between cultural style and communication follow from these kinds of distinctions? Is it really just a simple matter of the Japanese citizen wanting to blend in, and the Canadian wanting to stick out?
 * 9) "I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’" Alice said.
 * 1) The World Wide Web has exerted an enormous impact on communication research, especially in those areas devoted to the analysis of networks and commerce. But the web has also been important for communication researchers interested in the study of interpersonal relations. Is on-line communication a poor substitute for face-to-face interaction, or does is actually provide a rich medium for the interchange of personal information? We know that the explosion of on-line relationships in recent years has captured the attention of the popular media, but what have scholars been saying about this phenomenon? There are a number of good articles on this subject. You can start with a poorly written but interesting piece at: []
 * 1) Everyone knows that it is better to resolve conflicts with effective communication than with anger, but what constitutes effective communication in the context of negotiation? What sorts of models might be useful to follow? A good beginning guide is //Getting to Yes: Negotiating Without Giving In//, by Roger Fisher & William Ury. This book, which explains a model of communication for the purposes of conflict resolution, was developed at the Harvard School of Business. The model is used everywhere, from divorce mediation to international treaty negotiations. But what is most interesting is that it all comes back to communication. How does communication underlie such a vast range of mediation/negotiation practices? What are the central elements of communication that are used in the model Fisher & Ury outline in their book?
 * 2) In her book on video games, Marsha Kinder quotes her eight-year-old son: "A long time ago there were no toys and everyone was bored. Then they had TV but they were bored again. They wanted control. So they invented video games." Kinder’s son expresses nicely the idea that each generation sees its pastimes and its values as the culmination of human endeavor. But more than this, his comments raise questions about the nature of video games themselves, especially as they have been both praised and attacked in the popular media and scholarly press. What exactly is this debate all about? Do video games really place control in the hands of their users?
 * 1) In a book that caused some consternation several decades ago, American media critic Neil Postman argued that as citizens of North America we are in danger of "amusing ourselves to death." According to Postman, entertainment has become so thoroughly entrenched in North American culture, that we no longer expect anything -- even education -- to be less than amusing. If something challenges us by way of its difficulty or tedium, we simply give up, and tune into the next available channel. Obviously, this argument rankled many people. But it also touched a chord with countless others who said that Postman was on to something: the destructive potential of the mass media in the modern world. What’s your take on this argument? (Amusing Ourselves to Death was followed by an equally controversial book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.)
 * 2) The mass media entertainment industry promises us pleasure, but what exactly is pleasure, and what sorts of pleasure do these media deliver? The problem is that ‘pleasure’ is a deceptively simple term, replete with complexities of class relations, gender specificity, and generational biases. In a nutshell, pleasure is a political concept. But in what sense is that true? Can you prove it? How do the media of communication create specific kinds of pleasure?
 * 3) What is advertising’s relationship to the larger culture? Does advertising set trends or establish cultural norms, or does it simply follow them? Does advertising promote radical ideas? Does the necessity to be up-to-date bring advertising to the cutting edge of culture, or is it a conservative medium, avoiding controversy and lagging behind cultural and social trends? Does advertising co-opt and water down new ideas, new trends? Does advertising domesticate political movements like feminism or gay rights? How are trends like Punk, Hip Hop or skater cultures rendered in advertising? On the one hand there is Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty and on the other there are the anorexic models in submissive poses throughout all the fashion magazines. One thing is clear: advertising is contradictory to its core. How does advertising represent culture and subcultures? How do emerging cultural trends influence advertising?
 * 4) Is there any reason to be concerned about privacy with the growth of digital technologies? We sometimes hear it said that each of us is now leaving "digital footprints" as we go through our daily affairs, using our credit card here, our debit card there, our air miles card in this store, our points card in another. Is Facebook tracking every website you visit? Does Facebook sell your profile information to 3rd parties? But is there any valid reason to be concerned? Is privacy even all that much of an issue? In several articles and books, Oscar Gandy has suggested that digital surveillance is actually a form of hi-tech discrimination, a curious argument indeed. Do you think we are making too much of the surveillance/privacy question? Haven’t concerns about privacy been along for a long time anyway? Why all the furor over the data profiles of each of us currently being assembled with the assistance of the Canadian government? I mean, the government would never do anything to jeopardize democratic freedom, would it?
 * 5) "The individual feels fulfilled through fashion, but this fulfillment is ultimately a social and not an individual one. In this sense, it could often be argued that fashion bears little resemblance to any reasonable aesthetic judgment or individual taste" (Consumerism as a Way of Life, Steven Miles). We all know that clothes are a form of communication, but are they, as Miles suggests in the passage cited here, really a communication about our place in the social order? Are there truly no individualistic impulses in regards to our fashion choices? The book, The Signs of Our Times by Jack Solomon has a chapter that would be useful for a paper on this subject.
 * 6) The study of a variety of media of communication that were formerly thought to be outside of the sphere of academic interest has been the concern of students of popular culture and communication for some years now. For instance, academic inquiries have been made into comic books, romance novels, popular music, and fairy tales. Grant McCracken has even written a volume on women’s hairstyles entitled Big Hair. You might consider looking at some aspect of popular culture that could benefit from sustained, scholarly inquiry. For instance, popular television programs can make a good topic for this sort of paper (check out Horace Newcomb’s Television: The Critical View, and Doug Kellner’s Television and the Crisis of Democracy. The Journal of Popular Film and Television also makes for good background reading. Ask Jody for other sources)
 * 7) Along these lines you might be more interested in writing about popular film. You may not like Alfred Hitchcock, but a spate of new books have appeared in the past couple of years including Hitchcock’s America, and Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays. How do filmmakers communicate with their audiences, and how does a filmmaker’s style distinguish his or her work from that of his or her colleagues? Is there something specific about Tarantino’s work that enables him to communicate in a style that challenges or extends traditional film making techniques? Are Errol Morris’s films true documentaries, or does he play too loosely with the facts? You could look at a specific genre of films, or the work of a particular filmmaker.
 * 8) Did you know that department-store customers exposed to muzak shop 18% longer than customers who enter the same store when muzak isn’t playing? Did you know that the muzak inundated customer spends 17% more? Did you know that office workers make 25% fewer typing misteaks (oops! I guess I better turn the music up) when muzak is being piped into their workstations? So what’s going on here? How does information about which we are generally unaware exert so profound an effect on our behavior? This is a huge subject to investigate. Marketers now refer to "atmospherics," a term they use to refer to the sorts of changes that they can initiate in the commercial or working environment to enhance the sort of behavior they are trying to encourage (like shopping and faster work habits). Could you conduct a sustained analysis of the Apple Store in the Pacific Centre? What about a hip clothing store? Antique shop? Cafes? For a few starting ideas, check out Philip Kotler’s work in the Journal of Retailing, and look up "atmospherics" in some communication/marketing databases. Also look at: []
 * 9) You’ve probably heard of postmodernism, but perhaps the term is still a bit confusing. Why not un-confuse it in an essay examining the relationship between postmodernism and communication? The word gets thrown around quite a bit, but trying to figure out just what it means can be tricky. In Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity and Intellectuals, Zygmunt Bauman offers several clear-headed accounts of postmodern that you would find useful. Even the little volume Postmodernism for Beginners is pretty good.
 * 10) We know that the alphabet is a technology, and we know that the radio is a technology also. So is the computer. But what is really puzzling at times is that fact that so many writers seem to take such a critical view of technology. Why do you think this is? Or perhaps the issue is more complicated than that? Try looking through William Leiss’s book Under Technology’s Thumb for some ideas. You might also read Ursula Franklin’s book The Real World of Technology. Don Ihde’s book The Philosophy of Technology isn’t the easiest read, but it also contains some very useful information. In fact, Ihde’s essay in the book Technology and the Politics of Knowledge edited by Andrew Feenberg has some really interesting material on what Ihde calls "imaging technologies" like photography and television. Naturally, the rest of Feenberg’s book is good, too.

* Academic sources are those published in printed or online academic journals or books. Wikipedia, or other more specific wikis, are not considered academic sources. Yes, do cite Wikipedia! It is a great starting point, it can give you a sense of scholarship in the field and it can lead to academic sources. Wikipedia is not, however, stable or reliable enough to use as an academic source. Use it for initial information gathering but __do not cite it as a source__.