ASU East

TWC494/598: Infoglut Deal With It
Multimedia Writing and Technical Communication
Spring 2005

Graduate Assignment

This course is about information: its creation, production, organization, and dissemination. Inevitably, each of these aspects of information is tied to social, cultural, economic, and legal issues. The Internet and the technologies that power it are often cited as having as profound an impact on information as the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg in the 15th century. As information technologies evolve and new applications are developed, our concepts of informations change.

For this assignment, you will examine new services available on the Internet that have the potential to profoundly affect how we find, access, and use information. They also have the potential to profoundly impact ownership and legal issues surrounding information.

The services you will analyze are:

Write a 10-15 page white paper analyzing the 3 services. Include a summary of what they do (or propose to do). The majority of your paper should focus on analyzing the services in the context of this course and on how they potentially change the way in which information is accessed and used and the social, cultural, economic, and legal issues. You may want to select one of these to focus on in your analysis. All three, for example, raise many economic and legal issues in terms of access to and ownership of information.

While you will find some evaluations and other information on the 3 services, for the most part your analysis will be through first hand exploration. Be sure to take careful notes. The two Google sites are in beta and may change over the course of the semester so good notes recording what you've tried and when will help you avoid potential frustration.

Your white paper should be completed in 3 steps:

By February 6th: email to me that you've been able to access the 3 sites, whether you want to focus on one aspect or issue in your analysis, and any questions you have about the assignment (or the sites).

By March 13th (20 pts): submit a brief (1-2 page) progress report on your evaluation and analysis of the site. You should include what you've done up to this point rather than going into any evaluation. Include a bibliography of sources through research.

April 25th (30 pts): submit your completed white paper.

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Last modified: 6 January 2005