Developing and Supporting a Thesis

STUDENTS WRITE: Latrisha Wilson’s Working Thesis

STUDENTS WRITE

Latrisha Wilson’s Working Thesis

In the Students Write section of Chapter 5, you saw how Latrisha Wilson narrowed her topic and generated ideas for her essay on surveillance. You also saw how she explored types of surveillance as they affect her privacy. After reviewing her responses to questions about her topic and her freewriting, Wilson drafted the following working thesis.

These new digital technologies have both benefits and drawbacks.

She realized that her thesis was overly general and too broad, so she did more free-writing and brainstorming to help her recall details about types of surveillance. Here’s an excerpt from her brainstorming:

Spies like James Bond are no longer necessary. Movies and video games fool us into believing they are, but mainly spying is done by computers.
The National Security Agency (NSA) watches everything we do on the Internet and everything we say on our phones.
Edward Snowden, a recent NSA whistleblower, is a current newsmaker. He exposed the NSA’s secret surveillance.
Google has access to everything about us, and they sell the information to other companies.
If we want to communicate through a screen or a phone, we have to give up our privacy.
We seldom are asked for our consent to share information about ourselves.
Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and other new media also provide lots of information about our daily lives, and not just to our “friends.”
Because we enjoy sharing our lives and learning about the lives of others, we forget about where the information is going.
In reality, we have very little privacy if we use digital devices.

After brainstorming, she decided that she should focus on the drawbacks of digital communications technology. She narrowed her thesis even further to focus on the subtle forms of surveillance new communications technology enable:

Often advertised as free services, new ways of communicating put us under more invasive but less obvious forms of surveillance.