Here is an example of what was provided:
Example Passage

From “Google, Democracy, and the Truth about Internet Search” by Carole Cadwalladr (Ch. 18):

This is all happening in complete darkness. We have no way of knowing how our personal data is being mined and used to influence us. We don’t realize that the Facebook page we are looking at, the Google page, the ads that we are seeing, the search results we are using, are all being personalized to us. We don’t see it because we have nothing to compare it to. And it is not being monitored or recorded. It is not being regulated. We are inside a machine and we simply have no way of seeing the controls. Most of the time, we don’t even realize that there are controls (491).

Example Response

The dangers of major technological conglomerates like Facebook and Twitter pose to democracy have been debated fiercely since the 2016 elections and Brexit referendum. In her essay, Carole Cadwalladr examines what is happening to our data and how it is being mined to influence us. She claims, “We are inside a machine and we simply have no way of seeing the controls. Most of the time, we don’t even realize that there are controls” (491).

Here are the 3 I need to answer:

1)From “The New Liberal Arts” by Sanford J. Ungar (Ch. 17):

Many states and localities have officials or task forces in charge of “work-force development,” implying that business and industry will communicate their needs and educational institutions will dutifully turn out students who can head straight to the factory floor or office cubicle to fulfill them. But history is filled with examples of failed social experiments that treated people as work units rather than individuals capable of inspiration and ingenuity. It is far wiser for students to prepare for change–and the multiple careers they are likely to have–than to search for a single job track that might one day become a dead end (337).

2)From “Hidden Intellectualism” by Gerald Graff (Ch. 17):

If I am right, then schools and colleges are missing an opportunity when they do not encourage students to take their nonacademic interests as objects of academic study. It is self-defeating to decline to introduce any text or subject that figures to engage students who will otherwise tune out academic work entirely. If a student cannot get interested in Mill’s On Liberty, but will read Sports Illustrated or Vogue or the hip-hop magazine Source with absorption, this is a strong argument for assigning the magazines over the classic (375).

3)From “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better” (Ch. 18):

Every new tool shapes the way we think, as well as what we think about. The printed word helped make our cognition linear and abstract, along with vastly enlarging our stores of knowledge. Newspapers shrank the world; then the telegraph shrank it even more dramatically. With every innovation, cultural prophets bickered over whether we are facing a technological apocalypse or utopia (449).