During the peer review session, I was hoping to get feedback on my first 3 paragraphs because I felt like they were too wordy for my introduction and definition of the shift. Ironically, I told my peer reviewer to look more closely at my analysis, but she told me that she liked the analysis and it was the introduction paragraphs that she felt threw the essay off. She confirmed my suspicion that my introduction was poorly written which made me more confident to make changes to it. It was helpful that someone other than me recognized the problems with it on their own because it emphasizes how that is the biggest problem with my essay.
As I researched my topic, I found a lot of surprising information about what companies like Facebook and Google do. I found one instance where Facebook was hacked and decided not to notify its users which was a little terrifying that they were even allowed to do that. Another article I found was an experiment that showed Google continued to track someone’s location even after they turned off the location history setting and the true setting to turn off tracking was hidden even deeper in another app. I am continually surprised by what lengths companies will go to in order to secure themselves a little bit more money. While I could not really express this opinion in my essay, I am hoping that their convoluted and questionable privacy decisions erode consumer trust to the point that when a worthy competitor appears, it will wreak havoc on their business-model. Ultimately, that’s somewhat unlikely because competitors have appeared against Facebook, Amazon, Google, and other tech companies and up till this point, most of them have either been bought out (ex. Instagram and WhatsApp being bought by Facebook) or they simply could not compete.
The most important thing that a reader should take away from my paradigm shift is that privacy is not a lost battle. I hear a lot of conversations where people say they do not care if companies collect all this data because they have become so used to the idea of the collection process, especially younger people (myself included). However, I tried to emphasize in my essay that privacy matters for a lot of reasons whether those reasons are financial or free speech. We are fortunate to not have government surveillance programs that put many people at risk, but that does not mean we never will because the government has already violated the Constitution constantly through their surveillance efforts after 9/11. At the end of my essay, I present a few simple solutions that I hope will make people realize that privacy is only being violated because Americans let it happen. There could easily be new laws that rework privacy in America and fix the problem.
The paradigm shift paper helped me learn how to connect multiple themes throughout an essay. I do not think I have ever had to write a paper where I had to evaluate more than one main theme. For example, a lot of essays for high school were simply just analyzing the causes for a problem. In this essay, I had to connect both the causes and the effects those causes/the shift will have on society. It was challenging to do that, but I think that may be the strongest area of my essay because privacy has such a large connection to everyone’s daily life right now so that makes it more powerful to readers.
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