Part 1: Getting Started with the “Pitch” (10% of final grade)

A “pitch” is a concise presentation of an idea, usually used to sell that idea to a publisher, producer or investor. You should begin by brainstorming and envisioning what the future might look like – but this does not necessarily have to be what you expect the future is likely to look like. Your future vision does not have to be a prediction – it can be more like asking yourself “what if” and describing how the trends we’ve been discussing could evolve into the future.

Your future vision story must have a protagonist, an antagonist, a technology and its institution, a conflict and a resolution that is told in paragraph-form. Your future vision can describe a utopia or a dystopia, a call to action or a warning, or anything in between. You can treat your future vision as if you are telling a story about particular people (speculative fiction or speculative fabulation), or by describing a particular technology or interface design and how people will use it (design fiction).
Your future vision should be grounded in the ideas, concepts and technologies we’ve read about and discussed in class. This means it should be clearly related to digital privacy.

You may write a first person narrative of a fictional action necessarily full of anonymous communication and trusted networks that gets coronavirus vaccines from pharmaceutical factories in Mexico to undocumented residents of the United States, or a person convicted of a crime they didn’t commit based on faulty facial recognition software, or you may detail something more common like using a white face mask to get into your office at MSU (a la Coded Bias) or gleefully receiving a package 3 hours after ordering it via Amazon drones. But remember, you should discuss technologies and privacy concerns in writing these fictions. What technologies or social norms and community-building is needed in your story to protect privacy? What are the core privacy issues? What do these stories tell us about the possible future of privacy?

Once you have some ideas for what your vision of the future of privacy might look like, generate a “pitch” for what your future vision will look like in paragraph form – sell it to me! For credit of this portion your pitch Your “pitch” should focus on the privacy issue your project will address, include details about the following, and will be evaluated based on its relationship to digital privacy, and quality of writing:

Main Details of the story:
Protagonist
Antagonist
Technology and its Institution
Conflict
Resolution
Who? What people will be affected?

What? Is there a specific technology you are addressing? Describe it.

definition of “privacy”? Explain it.

When? How far in the future?

Where? What is the physical environment like? What about the digital environment?

Why? Why would people use the technology – good reasons, benefits? Is it compulsory or by choice?

How? How will the technology affect privacy, digital footprints, people’s lives? Any negative side effects?