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Answer either A or B

A
The texts in Section A focus on new communication and information technology and how we use it. Write a paper (700-1000 words) in which you answer the following questions. Answer the questions separately.
1. Give an outline of the use of information and communication technology as it is presented in texts 1 and 2.
2. What is Stuart Jeffries' attitude to mobile phones and e-mail in text 3, and how does he express it? Illustrate your answer with examples from the text.
3. On the basis of the review of Mark Bauerlein's book The Dumbest Generation
(text 4), discuss some appropriate ways of using the Internet.

Texts
1. Matt Richtel, "Don't Want to Talk About It? Order a Missed Call", an article from The New York Times website, 2008.
2. Andrew Keen, "Sex, Lies and the Internet", an excerpt from his book The Cult of the Amateur. How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our
Economy, 2007.
3. Stuart Jeffries, "Technophobia - the sign of a born leader?", a comment from
The Guardian website, 2008.
4. Lee Drutman, "Review of Mark Bauerlein's book The Dumbest Generation", a review from Los Angeles Times website, 2008.

B
Write an essay (700-1000 words) in which you analyse and interpret Jo Cannon's short story "Insignificant Gestures". Your essay must include the following points: -

a characterization of the narrator the relationship between the narrator and Celia the narrator's error of judgment the significance of time and place

Text
Jo Cannon, "Insignificant Gestures", a short story, 2007.

Side 2 af 12 sider

A
TEXT 1
Matt Richtel

Don't Want to Talk About It? Order a Missed Call
When Alexis Gorman, 26, wanted to tell a man she had been dating that the courtship was over, she felt sending a Dear John text message was too impersonal. But she worried that if she called the man, she would face an awkward conversation or a confrontation.
So she found a middle ground. She broke it off in a voice mail message, using new technology that allowed her to jump directly to the suitor's voice mail, without ever having to talk to the man - or risk his actually answering the phone.
The technology, called Slydial, lets callers dial a mobile phone but avoid an unwanted conversation - or unwanted intimacy - on the other end. The incoming call goes undetected by the recipient, who simply receives the traditional blinking light or ping that indicates that a voice mail message has been received.
Ms. Gorman used a test version of Slydial that has been available for months. But since the finished product was unveiled to the public last week, more than 200,000 people have used the service, which is supported by advertisers like McDonald's.
The concept may sound antithetical to a digital era defined by ubiquitous communication and interactivity, but Slydial turns out to be only the latest in a breed of new technologies that fit squarely into an emerging paradox: tools that let users avoid direct communication.
Technologies like e-mailing and blogging give the communicator the power to choose the time and manner of expression. Now, some academics, text messagers and creators of technologies say a trend has emerged: We are constantly just missing one another - on purpose. Indirect communication, experts suggest, may be turning some people into digital-era solipsists more interested in broadcasting information than in real time give-and-take.
1

But Ms. Gorman, who works in marketing in Manhattan, said that using Slydial to break off her relationship allowed her to communicate effectively without the potential anxiety-

1

extremely egocentric people.

Side 3 af 12 sider

" I f it's some jerk I went out on a couple of dates with, I can do without that drama," she said. "Text messaging someone 'I would prefer not to see you again' is really not my style," she
30 added. "But at the same time, I wanted to avoid an awkward conversation."
Furthering the popularity of one-way communication are Web sites like Facebook, which have become home to personal news feeds in which users receive updates from friends, acquaintances and colleagues.
2

Or there is Twitter, a messenging service that lets people send updates of 140 characters
35 about what they are doing or thinking to the mobile phones of people who sign up to receive the constant stream.
3

The culture of the veritable Personal News Crawl also includes Radar.net, a Web site that permits users to send photos or video bursts taken with a mobile phone to friends - and notify them of the updates with text messages.
4o John Poisson, the founder and chief executive of Tiny Pictures, the company behind
Radar.net, said the service was designed to cater to small groups of close friends, not a broad audience, partly because he said the model of widely broadcasting personal updates was starting to annoy people.
"We're in this mode where we're telling everybody everything all the time," Mr. Poisson
45 said, adding. "It becomes about saying things - just blathering on. We're at the apex of that trend."
Unlike text messaging or e-mailing, James Katz, head of the center for mobile communications studies at Rutgers University, said, telephone communiques had been seen as requiring a sacrifice of time and energy and a higher level of commitment on the part of
50 the communicator. Not anymore.
4

Missed or indirect communication can often actually be preferable, Mr. Katz said. "You pretend to be communicating, when you're actually stifling communication," he said.
Slydial may turn out to be just a fad. Still, Mr. Katz understands why people may be tempted to use it.
55 "A phone conversation is like wildfire - you don't know where it's going to go," he said.
The company behind Slydial is not denying its duplicitous implications. The company's
Web site, MobileSphere, suggests several appropriate uses of Slydial, including leaving a
2

3

4

constant notifications. letters. communications.

Side 4 af 12 sider

message for a girlfriend who is a "talker" to avoid a long conversation, and for a wife when her husband does not want to talk about how much he lost at the tables in Las Vegas during a business trip.
An array of recent innovations by other companies has encouraged the use of technology to deceive. One development, for instance, allows the employee who is running late to add background noises resembling heavy traffic to a mobile phone call. Another service places an automated call at a predetermined time so that the recipient can be extricated from a situation (a work meeting, or bad date) under the auspices of taking the "urgent" call.
MobileSphere's co-founder, Gavin Macomber, said the tool was a time-saver in a world in which conversations could waste time, whereas voice mail can get directly to the point.
Part of the reason people are so overwhelmed, Mr. Macomber said, is because they are connected to devices and streams of data around the clock.
"We're slaves to our devices - BlackBerries and phones, reachable 24/7," he said. Mr.
Macomber declined to say precisely how the technology bypassed the traditional calling system, noting that the concept was covered by a pending patent.
5

Slydial is free but users must listen to several seconds of advertisements before going into a voice mail.
It is a small price to pay, said Manny Mamakas, 34, a consultant who lives in the Astoria section of Queens and who said he had been using the test version of Slydial to call family members, like his cousins and two brothers.
"I don't want to get into 'hey, what's going on, how you doing?'" Mr. Mamakas said. "I just get to the point, like, ' I ' l l meet you at 3."'
He said he had also used it to call in sick to work - without facing follow-up questions from his boss.
"I don't want 50 questions," Mr. Mamakas said. "I just say, T won't be coming in; I'm under the weather.' By the time he hears voice mail, it's already noon."
He acknowledges that the technology encourages a perhaps not-so-valiant character trait.
"It does make you more cowardly," he said.
(2008)

5

a handheld e-mail device, also called a smartphone.

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TEXT 2
Andrew Keen

Sex, Lies, and the Internet
In early September 2006, a Seattle-based techie named Jason Fortuny posted an ad under an invented female identity in the "casual encounters" section of Craigslist - the virtual marketplace for one-night stands and anonymous sex partners. Fortuny received 178 responses and proceeded to post them on his Web site - including the men's names, photos of them naked, even the identities of their wives. With the click of Fortuny's mouse, reputations were destroyed, careers ruined, marriages and families shattered, all for a petty prank. Yes, some of the victims were going behind their wives' backs, and perhaps they deserved what they got. But others were simply lonely people looking to make a connection.
This case underscores the dangers inherent in an editorless medium where the only rules are that there are no rules. With a few simple keystrokes, Fortuny was able to create a false identity and publish the fruits of his deceit to the world. Like too much of what is on the Web today, his prank was both dishonest and harmful. The irony of the case, of course, is that the very people who seek anonymity in the Web 2.0 were done in by it. The
Web's cherished anonymity can be a weapon as well as a shield.
The fact is that rumors and lies disseminated online can tarnish reputations and ruin careers. In the summer of 2005, a woman named Julie posted a horrific tale on the Web site dontdatehimgirl.com, a message board that invites scorned women to vent about egregious behavior of ex-boyfriends. According to Julie's posting, a man named Guido had gotten her drunk earlier that summer, raped and sodomized her, infected her with a sexually transmitted disease, and left her so humiliated and depressed that she attempted suicide. This tragic story, accompanied by a photograph of the alleged offender, was viewed over 1,000 times, prompting one visitor to write, "This son of a bitch deserves to be in jail.
We need to circulate his picture everywhere and let everyone know what he did."
Had the story been true, most of us would be inclined to agree. The problem is, not a word of it was. "Guido" was actually Erik, a friend of "Julie" (shockingly, not her real name). She eventually admitted she had posted the sordid tale "as a joke."
Where content is unvetted, no proof or evidence is required to back up one's claims (on dontdatehimgirl.com, users only have to check a box declaring the information to be truthful), and anonymous postings are allowed, wild exaggerations and fabrications are not uncommon. As "Julie" told the Miami New Times, "There is nothing to stop [someone] from slandering a guy with impunity ... I would guess the vast majority of the 'stories' posted are completely full of shit."
(2007)
6

6

a term used about interactive pages on the Internet such as Facebook.

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TEXT 3
Stuart Jeffries

Technophobia - the sign of a born leader?
Hedge-fund billionaire Carl Icahn, who has this week been given three seats on the board of internet company Yahoo, does not, it has been revealed, have a computer. Email, Icahn suggests, is a distraction. Republican presidential candidate John McCain doesn't email or know how to use the net. He told the New York Times recently: "I am learning to get
5 online myself." Instead, the senator currently has the cyberspace equivalent of food tasters, namely aides who direct him to happening sites such as the Drudge Report and his daughter Meghan's blog.
7

Democrats argue this shows that McCain, who turns 72 next month, is out of touch with the modern world. "My five-year-old niece can use the internet," said one gloating Barack io Obama strategist. Obama, by contrast, is regularly photographed in-flight hunched over his BlackBerry.
But is McCain's admission really damaging? Like the Queen not carrying money, only really powerful people don't do cyberspace. They sit at computer-free desks thinking outside the inbox, while their crack team of microserfs battle with spam or Google their way is through virtual forests of information.
8

After Tony Blair left No 10, he had to adjust to a baffling new world of mobile phones (he didn't have one as PM), texting ("Who are you?" was the reply to his first message) and email. The Bill Clinton Archive in Little Rock, Arkansas, has nearly 4 million emails from the former president's staff and only two from the president himself. Admittedly,
2« one of the latter was to astronaut John Glenn, who was aboard the space shuttle at the time, but even then Clinton's staffers had to help him.
9

True, some titans of business reply very quickly to emails, as their inboxes are uncluttered by spam. Three hundred emails a day is the curse of the middle manager. But, as Stanford professor Donald Knuth, one of the world's leading computer scientists, writes, "Email is
25 a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration."
Knuth hasn't checked his emails since 1990. Maybe McCain shouldn't bother to familiarise himself with the web and, if elected, perhaps Obama should check " his BlackBerry at
30 the Oval Office door.
1

(2008)

7

8

9

at the time of publication, the Republican John McCain was running against the Democrat Barack
Obama for President of the United States. young workers in the computing industry.
British Prime Minister from 1997-2007.

in i

Side 7 af 12 sider

TEXT 4
Lee Drutman

Review of Mark Bauerlein's book The Dumbest Generation"
How dumb are we? Thanks to the Internet, dumb and dumber, this author writes.
In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your
Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!
[...]
12

The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America's youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of "enduring ideas and conflicts."
Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that
America's youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a "brazen disregard of books and reading."
Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, "never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater," writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts . But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize - they've actually made us dumber.
13

14

The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. "Social life is a powerful temptation," Bauerlein explains, "and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out."
[...]
Bauerlein also frets about the nature of the Internet itself, where people "seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort." In entering a world where nobody ever has to stick with anything that bores or challenges them, "going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits."
(2008)

11

12

13

14

the full title of Mark Bauerlein's book from 2008 is: The Dumbest Generation. How the Digital Age
Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. [Or Don't Trust Anyone Under 30]. spent. an independent agency of the American federal government funding the arts. nromoted. Side 8 af 12 sider

B
Jo Cannon

Insignificant Gestures
When I returned from Africa I retrained as a psychiatrist. I never wanted to smell blood again. Or the sweet nail-varnish odour of starvation. Or any other reek of human suffering. I couldn't bear to witness another death. Of course it is different here. Some people die quietly, with family beside them and a syringe driver releasing regular pulses of
5 heroin through a needle beneath the skin. Do they float in opium dreams, or does the involuting mind fasten on a last image: the one that makes sense of a life? If so, mine would be Celia. Her face has been with me every day for ten years.
As though in a marble-run , the slightest nudge sends my thoughts sliding down and round to their invariable end-point: Celia's death. From every possible angle, again and io again, I have seen her head arched back; bruises that bloomed beneath her skin; her clenched hands. If I could peel back time, I would do things differently. But you don't get second chances.
I barely recognise the man I was then. A thin strand of consciousness is all that connects us. As though from a distance, I see myself step between patients on their straw is mats, believing I could make a difference. And I remember evenings spent drawing by oil lamp in my little white-washed house, while an African sunset poured itself out on the sky and music drifted from the bars in the market. As I sketched my intricate pictures my mind moved like a firefly in loops and ellipses away from the day's work. I remember how it felt, even though I haven't drawn anything for ten years.
20 The first time I realised Celia was watching I was several hours into a drawing. Since my teens I had covered sheet after sheet of paper with interwoven figures: birds, flowers, fantastical creatures. That evening I suddenly became aware of somebody's warmth and quiet breathing.
Beginnings start like this, with insignificant gestures: a woman's hand on the back of
25 a chair. But Celia was barely a woman. Nobody knows their age there, but she was about sixteen, eighteen at most. She was the servant who came with the house that came with my job: district health officer, at the absurdly young age of twenty-eight.
Things were clearer then; I have lost my old certainty. Servants were a symbol of inequality and exploitation, and I didn't need one - until the hospital matron took me aside,
30 as she did many times that first year, and explained.
"You have lots of money, doctor. You are a single man. Celia's brothers and sisters and mother depend on her."
1

2

3

4

1

2

3

4

medical equipment used to give a patient continuous medication through a tube inserted under the skin. shrinking. a game played with small balls of coloured glass. a piece or part of something.

Side 9 af 12 sider

So Celia stayed. She slept on a mattress in a little room in the garden, and walked home to her mother's thatched mud-brick hut at weekends. I grew accustomed to her amiable presence, her toneless humming and faint aroma of wood smoke. I asked little of her; my life was simple and working long hours, I didn't make much mess. Celia swept the red dust from the concrete floors and washed and ironed my clothes. She grew vegetables in the garden, but, ashamed to let a servant prepare my meals, I cooked them myself. She spent time by the gate, chatting to passers-by on the way to market or hospital. And later, she would sit on the back step sketching with the drawing materials I gave her.
It was a small shock that first time, a few months after I arrived, to feel her watching with such concentration. I pulled a chair up beside me and pushed pens and paper towards her. She understood immediately and began to draw a flower, in such exquisite detail that
I was astonished. For an hour she was completely engrossed. And so it went on, month after month, with no words exchanged between us, no judgments or calculations. I remember how every object on the table leaked a black shadow away from the lamplight; the occasional brilliance of a firefly; Celia's strange buzzing hum as she drew. I am no longer capable of such absorption, and the medication that helps me sleep makes my fingers tremble. But I would take anything not to wake at three in the morning with my thoughts heaving round and around like caterpillars along the rim of a glass, endlessly circling the same regrets.
I knew what the hospital staff said, but they were wrong. An African hospital is as much a gossip factory as a British one. Pregnant nurses were the worst, rolling their eyes at me and suppressing laughter.
Celia was my companion; our elbows at the table never touched. I marvelled that with only three years of schooling she could draw so well. She was a natural.
I had developed an aversion to cockroaches. At night I imagined them chewing through the mosquito net to hang from my lips or gnaw my foot soles. Hearing their sinister rustle in the kitchen, I would lie awake until the tension became unbearable. Then I would spring from bed and smash them with a shoe, disgusted as much by my violence as by the white sticky glue that oozed from the splattered bodies. But the next night they were back, extending feelers from beneath the toilet seat, or jostling in the teapot, or moving together like a glistening carpet inside the wardrobe.
One evening a gecko ran across the ceiling with a cockroach in its mouth.
Pausing above my head, it devoured the insect with such gusto that legs and shredded carapace showered my drawing. My chair crashed to the floor as I leapt backwards. Celia covered her face and laughed until she rocked. But afterwards she seemed to feel it her duty to protect me from cockroaches. Every day she sought them out, stamped on dozens with her strong bare feet and swept the crushed bodies into the dust outside. The carnage appalled me, but I was secretly touched.
Sometimes the medical assistants called me at night. In the absence of phones or bleeps they sent the ambulance, a battered land-rover, to fetch me. The vehicle would rattle round the back of the house and park with its headlights flooding my bedroom. Even now, when a passing car lights up my wall I jerk awake with hot rivulets of anxiety running through my limbs.

Side 10 af 12 sider

On the short bumpy ride to hospital I used to dread what lay ahead. At night it was never easy. There might be a protracted labour or difficult caesarean in progress and I would scrub up and work in thick surgical gloves that were too big, with blunt instruments and scissors that didn't meet, in the overwhelming metallic smell of blood and ordure.
»o More daunting for my colleagues was the illness, not necessarily serious, of a local politician or his relative. If anything went wrong they could be punished by exile to a hospital in the far reaches of the country. Medical assistants and nurses were moved like furniture, with no consideration for family ties. But in my position, an expatriate doctor working for an aid agency, I could stand between them and the politicians.
85 I couldn't believe it, the night they brought me to the ward for Celia. She was almost unrecognisable: eyes swollen shut, covered in bruises, unconscious. A few hours previously she had gone home early for the weekend, carrying a bundle of cloth on her head that she had bought for her mother in the market.
"What happened?"
90 The nurses were shocked. They had heard the story from the village women.
"Her mother found her like this, behind their hut. Her boyfriend beat her. The police have got him already."
I could feel the sick heat of her through my rubber gloves. My hands trembled but the lumbar puncture needle went in at the third attempt. A racket started up in my head. We
95 couldn't help her here; lacked the skills to treat her brain injury. Perhaps in the capital city hospital, an hour and a half up the road, someone could save her.
The central hospital was a stinking hell-ship where she might not see nurse or medical assistant for days. But what else could I do? As usual the phones were down; there was no-one to ask for advice. I sent the cerebrospinal fluid sample with her in the land-rover, i«« hoping it might help.
The next morning the district chief of police, a fat sweating man in a dark suit, called me to his office and took down my statement in laborious longhand.
"Were there signs of injury on the girl?"
I told him about the coma and the bruises. After I had signed the statement he took io5 from his desk drawer two bottles of Fanta. He opened both and placed one in front of me, adding to his a tot of something from beneath the table. He pointed to mine but I shook my head.
"We've got the boy," he said.
5

6

According to Amnesty International the civilian prisons of this country were the worst in no the world. Matron provided more detail after checking over both shoulders for spies and closing my office door. There were special agents, paid by politicians, everywhere, even among the hospital staff. She told me that convicts rarely survived a year before malnutrition or cholera or casual beatings overcame them. And I was glad. For the first time in my life, desire for revenge set like lava around my heart. I couldn't think straight, couldn't
5

6

the procedure of taking fluid from the spine in the lower back through a hollow needle. watery fluid inside the spinal canal.

Side 11 af 12 sider

115 sleep or eat. I was all edges and scalded surface; my colleagues tip-toed round me and nobody mentioned her name. After a few days Celia's younger sister appeared in my house and began sweeping the floor.
Six weeks later I opened my mail to find a discharge summary from the central hospital. Your patient, Celia Dimba, arrived moribund, it read, and died within hours. The lab i2o had processed the lumbar puncture sample, which grew meningococcus .
My body changed temperature as though I had missed my footing at the top of a flight of stairs. Now I remembered: she had gone home early that Friday afternoon because she felt unwell. Celia had died of meningitis - I could have saved her with an injection of penicillin. I had acted on a second hand story from frightened village women who had
125 jumped to conclusions. And then I remembered the boy.
The police chief was unperturbed. "Of course, doctor," he murmured, when I said I wanted to change my statement and that the boy should be released. But he didn't write anything down.
7

It happened a long time ago. Some days I don't think about it. But when I do, heat washes
130 through me again, right into the bones of my face and skull. Sometimes this happens onand-off all day, in the minutes between patients when my mind is unconstrained. Or I wake taut and tingling as though bound in hot bandages.
That's why I don't draw any more - I don't like the places my thoughts go when set free. I am a good psychiatrist and in a few years will be a consultant. Empathising with
135 my patients' inner turmoil is easy; nothing surprises me. They use bold capital letters while my writing is small and secretive, but the content is the same.
One night recently I was called to the psychiatric acute ward to section a man the police had found "wandering in a disturbed state in a public place." It is a dirty business.
You coax someone to reveal the secrets of his inner world, which you then use as evidence
HO to detain him. A necessary violation of course; the poor bastard by then is a danger to himself or others. Only the incontrovertibly i l l get a section these days - psychiatric beds are so few that I spend more time trying to keep people out.
After the police had gone, and the poor disorientated patient escorted to his room to be sedated, I lingered at the nurses' station, too tired to go home. The ward was hot; I want145 ed a crack to open up and let in air. The lamp made a puddle of light on the desk, reminding me of Africa. I began to doodle on a scrap of paper and watched sleepily as a bird took shape beneath my hand. Suddenly a cockroach crawled across the desk. With a grunt I stood up quickly and my chair fell back with a crash.
"You're a big man to be scared of a little beetle. You should see the size of them where i5o I come from." An African nurse stood in the doorway, laughing. Her familiar accent unlocked me; I had to smile. I recognised the neatness of head and delicacy of features, the precise bark-brown shade of skin. She flicked the cockroach nonchalantly onto the floor and crushed it beneath her shoe.
8

7

8

bacteria that cause meningitis. to commit someone to a psychiatric ward against their will.

Side 12 af 12 sider

"Zikomo kwambiri," I hazarded.
"Don't mention it, doctor," she replied. "And when did you learn Chichewa?" Her eyes.
Her smile.
I began to tell her. It was like opening an overhead locker - I didn't expect so much to fall out. The nurse perched on the desk with hands folded, watching my face. Beginnings start like this, with insignificant gestures.
(2007)

Anvendt materiale (til brug for COPY-DAN):
Mike Howard. "Parents: How to Address Your Teenager's Weight". Diet-Blog website 18 June 2008, viewed November 2008. (www.diet-blog.com)
Public Enemy. "Fight the Power". 1989. Rap Lyrics. Ed. Ogg. London: Omnibus Press, 2002.
Matt Richtel. "Don't Want to Talk About It? Order a Missed Call". The New York Times website
2 August 2008, viewed September 2008. (www.nytimes.com)
Andrew Keen. "Sex, Lies and the Internet". The Cult of the Amateur. How Today's Internet is Killing
Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. Andrew Keen. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2007.
Stuart Jeffries. "Technophobia - the sign of a born leader?". The Guardian website 24 July 2008, viewed
September 2008. (www.guardian.co.uk)
Lee Drutman. "Review of Mark Bauerlein's book The Dumbest Generation". Los Angeles Times website
5 July 2008, viewed September 2008. (www.latimes.com)
Jo Cannon. "Insignificant Gestures". The Fish Anthology. A Paper Heart Is Beating A Paper Heart Sets
Sail. Ed. Jock Howson. Cork: Fish Publishing, Durus, Bantry, Co., 2007.