The Internet Today:

1.) What is the Internet, and how is Internet use evolving around the world?

 

How We Got Here: The Development of the Internet:

2.) How did the Internet originate? What role did the government play?

 

3.) What ethos guided early Internet users?

 

4.) What factors laid the groundwork for the commercialization of the Internet in the 1990s?

 

5.) What are the key distinctions between the pre-web Internet, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0

 

 

Our Complex Digital Environment:

6.) What are the benefits and complications of unrestricted communication?

 

7.) What is the relationship between online communities and political polarization?

 

8.) What are the benefits and complications of remixing?

 

 

The Business of Controlling the Internet: 

9.) Why and how do companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google mine our data? How does it shape their business practices?

 

10.) Why and how do government use digital surveillance technologies?

 

11.) Why and how has the Internet become increasingly closed?

 

12.) What is net neutrality, and why is it such an important issue?

 

13.) How have people begun to push back against corporate and government control of the Internet?

 

 

The Internet, Digital Communication, and Democracy:

14.) What is universal access, and what role has it played in people's visions for democratic media systems?

 

15.) What is the digital divide, and what threat does it pose to the Internet's democratic potential?

 

 

 

QUESTIONING THE MEDIA (QTM): Answer ONE of these questions--your choice:

Use these critical-thinking questions to reflect on your own experiences with media and apply your understanding of media concepts.

 

1.) What possibilities for the Internet's future are you most excited about? Why? What possibilities are most troubling? Why?

 

2.) In what ways do you participate in remix culture through the media you produce or consume?

 

3.) How are you affected by the rise of surveillance capitalism and surveillance states? What concerns do you have about their growth?

 

4.) In the move from a print-oriented industrial Age to a digitally based Information Age, how do you think individuals, communities, and nations have been affected positively? How have they been affected negatively?

 

5.) What do you think about the role of universal access in a democratic society?

ARTS & HUMANITIESCOMMUNICATIONSMEDIA 01