1e Persuasion Essay Topics

1E Persuasion Essay Topics

Pick three topics from below and briefly explain what interests you personally about each one. List in the order of your preference along with the (don't lump the explanations all together, do it separately). Identify them by the number and title. Some of the ideas below are explained in more detail than others; some have been purposely left unexplained.

1. Politics and Technology: Politicians are usually the ones who play the biggest role in advancing technology because they provide funding for research and implementation. Business also plays an important role, but they don't really decide things like what gets taught or which technologies are the focus of scientific exploration, or even how they are used.

2. Video Gaming and Politics: Politicians, at the insistence of various concerned citizens groups, have gotten heavily involved in restricting video games, especially regarding sales to minors. Video games now have a rating system similar to movies, music, and magazines.

3. Technology and Society, Part 1: The internet has permanently changed the ways in which most societies function. Every industrialized and developing nation has become part of a global landscape where jobs, information, and people travel from one side of the planet to the other; some of this is good, some of this is not. In part one of this issue, what does the advent of this technology (the internet) mean in terms of being literate, and the impact that has on traditionally non-literate sectors of society?

4. Wikipedia: Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia, has become very popular, but still lacks credibility as an authoritative source of information. What are the pros and cons of open-source information-bases? Also, what about the idea of being a credible source of information, especially on the internet?

5. Viruses: As more and more people develop programming skills and more and more people are using the internet, viruses have become a big issue. Some of the "hackers" that have been jailed claimed they were serving a purpose by showing people that the internet "is not a safe place." Discuss the pros and cons of viruses and the reasons people may have for creating and spreading them.

6. Behavior Warning Systems: Security services and forces across the world are beginning to rely more and more on "smart surveillance systems". "Smart" cameras in public, and not so public, places classify an people's behavior as friendly or potentially violent. These systems are getting more sophisticated, but what are the positive and negative sides of this issue?

7. Tower of Babel? A bilingual translator is under development by Carnegie Mellon University that senses sub-vocalized speech, recognizes it, translates it and then synthesizes the translation. The overall effect would be to dub