For evaluation purposes I will be using an article that I used as part of my concepts assignment. The details are:

URL: http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0507/176.html

Author: Sherry Turkle

Title: “Can You Hear Me Now?”

Appears on Forbes.com on the 05/07/07

(Note: I used aspects of this article to address the concept “Human Computer Interfaces”)

Annotation For this Site/Article

This article appeared on Forbes.com, a website whose content is aimed at mainly providing information related with finance and business issues. From the web site itself it is not clear if this article was exclusive to the web site, or is a transcription of an article in the parent company magazine publication Forbes, although the article is found in the ‘Special Report’ section of the web site. Brief information on the author is provided at the end of the article saying that “Sherry Turkle is professor of the social studies of science and technology at mit”. A web search on Sherry Turkle shows, from an MIT profile page, that the author is also “the current director of current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a center of research and reflection on the evolving connections between people and artifacts.”

The main ideas of this article are the questioning of aspects of identity in an increasingly networked world, where people are never out of reach of contact through the use of technology. Turkle considers the placement of the self when the individual subject is “wired into society through technology” and how statements such as “I m on the Web” or “I am on my cell” speak about a new state of the self. Other social aspects are considered, such as privacy concerns and blending of the real and virtual world.

The article has the tone of a ‘think-piece’ in that the language is not overly academic or the content dense with theory, even though the author is university professor. Also, anecdotal evidence for the author’s assertions are conveyed in the text, although there are no references provided on the web site, reinforcing the tone of a personal (though very well informed) point of view. The business and financial context of the web site seems a little at odds with the subject matter addressed in the article. The article is headed as a ‘Special Report’ which gives the article a context that falls outside the usual financial reportage of the majority of the web site.

Future Use

Comparing apples with oranges here, as I have used a different source for this task rather than leading on from the source in the previous task! For future use the detailed annotation would be more useful to refer back to, as the source has been evaluated and the a brief content description is provided. The only issue here would be how this annotation is stored or organised in such a way that would provide easy retrieval (maybe a Diigo annotation would do).

For external users, just looking at the URL of this information would not provide enough information, or could be potentially misleading in the user evaluation, because the context is a financial web site. Further supporting information, particularly author, would be more useful here to an external user.

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