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Paraphrasing Assignment

For each quotation, write a paraphrase. Use in-text citations.

Sample:

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley
High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a
party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.”
After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was
“unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder
was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a
result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching
degree. Snyder sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by
penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008, a federal district
judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was a public employee whose photo
didn’t relate to matters of public concern, her “Drunken Pirate” post was not protected
speech. – Jeffrey Rosen, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting”

Paraphrase: Stacey Snyder was training to be a teacher. However, she was not allowed
to graduate because she posted a picture of herself wearing a pirate hat and holding a cup;
the caption for the picture said “Drunken Pirate.” The school said that this picture
encouraged her underage students to drink, and, therefore, refused to let her graduate. She
did try to sue the school on constitutional grounds, but the judge ruled against her
(Rosen).

Paraphrase the following:

1. A 26-year-old Manhattan woman told The New York Times that she was afraid of being
tagged in online photos because it might reveal that she wears only two outfits when out on
the town — a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt or a basic black dress. “You have movie-star issues,”
she said, “and you’re just a person.” – Jeffrey Rosen, “The Web Means the End of
Forgetting”.

2. We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and
inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which
so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and
public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an
almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of
reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts. – Jeffrey Rosen,
“The Web Means the End of Forgetting”

3. The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper
published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer,
which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the
function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today.
The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other
intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our
typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV. – Nicholas Carr, “Is
Google Making Is Stupid?”

4.Yet another problem with government gathering and use of personal data is distortion.
Although personal information can reveal quite a lot about people’s personalities and
activities, it often fails to reflect the whole person. It can paint a distorted picture, especially
since records are reductive—they often capture information in a standardized format with
many details omitted. For example, suppose government officials learn that a person has
bought a number of books on how to manufacture methamphetamine. That information
makes them suspect that he’s building a meth lab. What is missing from the records is the full
story: The person is writing a novel about a character who makes meth. When he bought the
books, he didn’t consider how suspicious the purchase might appear to government officials,
and his records didn’t reveal the reason for the purchases. Should he have to worry about
government scrutiny of all his purchases and actions? Should he have to be concerned that
he’ll wind up on a suspicious-persons list? Even if he isn’t doing anything wrong, he may
want to keep his records away from government officials who might make faulty inferences
from them. He might not want to have to worry about how everything he does will be
perceived by officials nervously monitoring for criminal activity. He might not want to have
a computer flag him as suspicious because he has an unusual pattern of behavior. – Daniel
Solove, “Why Privacy Matters…”