LABOR EXPLOITATION

  Compose a word sketch of the hidden, vulnerable, and unpleasant aspect of our digital world, LABOR EXPLOITATION [e.g.: Apple factory in China, Nike Factories in Korea], focusing on how that particular digital environment affects people. As a creative piece of writing, you should use descriptive, vivid details and figurative language to leave an imagistic impression. Focus on immersing your readers in a different world that they may not be familiar with, and use your powers of description to elevate certain sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile elements—what characterizes the environment and how do people act or appear within it? You need to highlight different examples of imagistic, immersive writing and label them using FOOTNOTES (see example below). Use: ALLITERATIONS, ANAPHORA, PERSONIFICATION, SIMILE, & AUDITORY IMAGERY to footnote. The paper will be assessed on how these highlighted literary effects enhance the environment and its effects on the body. Here is an example from Davis that calls up the unique impression of a factory and its workers: “Not even the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed, that goes on unceasingly from year to year. The hands of each mill are divided into watches that relieve each other as regularly as the sentinel of any army.1 By night and day the work goes on, the unsleeping engines groan and shriek2, the fiery pools of metal boil and surge. Only for a day in the week, in half-courtesy to public censure, the fires are partially veiled; but as soon as the clock strikes midnight, the great furnaces break forth with renewed fury, the clamor begins with fresh, breathless3 vigor, the engines sob and shriek like ‘gods in pain.’” (Rebecca Harding Davis' Life in the Iron Mills) While the digital world may not seem as sensory as a 19th-century factory, it relies heavily on visual and auditory signals, and remember that people need to touch keys, trackpads, and screens. Keep in mind how people interacting with tech use their bodies (their hands/eyes), as well as how bodies appear on and react to screens. FOOTNOTES: 1 The simile “as regularly as the sentinels of an army” creates an impression of workers as soldiers with precise, regimented movements and routines. It highlights how their bodies move in predictable, mechanical ways. 2 Auditory imagery of “groan and shriek” enhances the sense of bodily pain and suffering in the environment. 3 “Breathless “: The machines take on a human sense of excitement, which breaks down the barrier between bodies and machines. Breathless can also indicate exhaustion, revealing how punishing the work is on the people running the machines.