- Gatekeeping, both in professional settings and in public spaces. Does gatekeeping *really* help the person withholding a person/group from access to things, places, and communities?
- Free School Lunch. What is with the uproar over if public schools should provide free school lunches to its students. Should lunch debt exist? Should students need to pay for their lunches/
- Anonymity on the internet. Does collective anonymity on the internet do more harm than good? Who deserves the right to browse the internet unsurveillenced?
Two Topics:
- Gatekeeping –
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK593013/#:~:text=The%20role%20of%20gatekeeper%20selects,serving%20because%20they%20can%20be.
- This article is against gatekeeping. From motives of the gatekeeper to different forms of bias and discrimination, this article goes into the social, economic, and political benefits a gatekeeper can obtain by restricting their peers and colleague of resources. Withholding resources from peers, specifically those of a minority background, tend to occur to help maintain a status quo, and when those minorities rise from the cracks to prevent this, anxiety arises, which leaves the gatekeeper firm to their belief and continues to gatekeep. A perpetual cycle.
- “The role of gatekeeper selects for people with status-quo-perpetuating attitudes and encourages those attitudes because they preserve the position’s advantages. The same is true for the gatekeeper’s motives, which are self-serving because they can be.”
- Anonymity –
- https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/student-papers/fall95-papers/rigby-anonymity.html
- This paper shares a defense both for and against anonymity on the internet. Anonymity helps greatly promote individual freedom of expression and speech, almost to a fault. ANonymity can help people find and create communities, rally for societal issues without fear of government involvement and ask embarrassing questions, this power can also be used to commit crimes, share hate speech, and harm others. At the end, however, the pros seem to outweigh the cons, and the solution to this issue seems to be a set of guidelines for internet users to follow, some regulations, but it is wholly up to the individual if they wish to abide by these guidelines.
- “The fact remains that more than 15,000 email messages are sent anonymously each day which shows that there is a significant need for anonymity services on the net. If anonymity service is a truly negative thing for the internet, it will eventually die out by itself from lack of use.”