Final Assignment

“Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.”
Niels Bohr.

"There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong."
H.L. Mencken

Your assignment for the final paper is to ask and answer an interesting question about the future of our media and/or our democracy.

You are welcome to choose one of the questions I have listed below, or to come up with your own question. In either case, I would like you to write a post to the class blog before Wednesday - in which you:
1) State your topic question (you can always change it later), and then list at least 2-3 questions you need to research to answer your question.
2) Find at least a couple of relevant sources online, and include links in your post. Describe each source in a sentence or two.
You may choose the same topic question as somebody who has posted before you, but you should come up with different research questions, and different links.


Here are some examples of questions that I think are interesting:

1) What impact are social media such as Facebook or myBarackObama.com likely to have on American politics in the future?
2) What impact will the digital revolution have on how government functions (at either the local or national level)?
3) What impact will the digital revolution have on the American two-party system?
4) What did EPIC 2015 get right – and wrong in its predictions about the future of news?
5) Will newspapers survive until 2018 – and how will they evolve?
6) In the brave new digital world, how can we know whom to trust and what to believe?
7) Can “citizen journalism” fill the gap created by the decline of legacy media?
8) What is crowd-sourcing, and what role can it play in the future of journalism?
9) Is the digital revolution really empowering ordinary citizens, and is that a good thing?
10) Who has been disenfranchised by the digital revolution, and what can we do about it?
11) Can there be such a thing as “too much democracy?” Is there a danger that the digital revolution will give too much power to citizens who aren’t competent to use it?
12) Marshall McLuhan once said that “every new technology is an amputation.” What is the downside of the digital revolution, as it pertains to journalism or democracy?

Good luck,
Jeremy