Exercise: Annotating a Passage Instructions: Read the following excerpt then reread the passage carefully, underlining and highlighting key ideas and inserting annotations in the margins. from TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE Evgeny Morozov The author of two books, Evgeny Morozov has written for a variety of publications, including the New Republic and Slate. He frequently explores the dangers that technology, particularly the Web, may pose to the social order. Think of it this way: all of us have a right not to have a cell phone or a Facebook profile. But that right means little in a society where almost everyone has both those things, for people without cell phones or Facebook profiles are presumed to be weird outliers with their own reasons for staying low – and those reasons can’t be good, can they? Law enforcement agencies already view those without cell phones as potential terrorists or drug dealers – this, if anything, turns your “right” to keep away from certain technologies into a joke. A similar set of interpretations has already emerged around the digital refuseniks who stubbornly resist opening a Facebook account. If just a few years ago, they were seen as Luddites or, at best, as deeply spiritual individuals who didn’t want to bother with the hassle of social networking, today such people are portrayed as suspicious creeps who either have no social life to report or are hiding some dark past from public view. The suspicion of Facebook holdouts permeates our public culture deeply. Thus, following the Aurora shootings in June 2012, the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel pointed out that neither James Holmes, the Aurora gunman, nor the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik had Facebook accounts, implying that the absence of any Facebook activity might itself indicate that a person has problems. The same sentiment was echoed by Slate’s columnist Farhad Manjoo, who suggested, “If you are going out with someone and they don’t have a Facebook profile, you should be suspicious.”
