University of Toronto Relevance of Social Media on Strategic Communication Paper

Review the questions and instructions for the paper and choose one of the topics or themes on which to write your paper. (You can always change your mind later, but completion of the annotated bibliography requires you to choose a topic or theme now, partly as an inducement to prepare well in advance of the paper’s due date.

Draft a one- or two-sentence thesis or question that you want to explore in the paper, e.g., “In this paper, I will consider the relationship between ‘fake news’ and social media platforms during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and argue that platforms like Twitter and Facebook should be regulated in order to prevent the spread of misinformation.”

Identify and list four (4) academic sources, of which no more than one (1) can be from the course assigned readings, along with their bibliographical information. (Course assigned readings do not have to be used; all four academic sources can be from outside of the course.) An academic source can include an article from a peer-reviewed journal, a chapter from a text published by a university or scholarly press, a paper delivered at a scholarly conference, etc. If you are unsure as to whether a source can be considered sufficiently academic, you should ask the instructor to confirm its acceptability.

An example of an annotation (for a paper for another course) is as follows:

1. Johnston, Josée and Judith Taylor. 2008. Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33 (4): 941-966.

This article will be useful for my paper, which will be on the ethics and politics of Starbucks’ campaigns for corporate social responsibility. Besides providing useful background information on how companies today are trying to build their brands’ ethical profiles, the article identifies some of the problems with corporate social activism. While I will be looking at Starbucks and its promotion of ‘fair trade’ coffee, many of the broader criticisms that Johnston and Taylor direct against Dove can be extended to Starbucks. The article makes a strong case for questioning the motives behind the Real Beauty campaign, but the authors do not really come to any clear conclusion about whether corporate activism does more harm than good.

rigour and depth of annotations, that is, how well they summarize the key arguments or ideas from each source, relate them to the question or topic for the paper they have chosen, and identify their relative strengths or limitations;

choice of academic sources that are relevant and useful for the chosen topic for the paper, have been drawn from reputable and reliable scholarly publications or presses, and could reasonably contribute to their paper;

quality of writing, as reflected both in the attention to proofreading, editing, citations, etc., to limit typographical, grammatical, and other errors, and in the observance of the assignment’s formal and technical requirements, e.g., citation style, spacing and margins, etc.