New Question:
How can the legislation of social networking alleviate the harmful effects of attention commodification on young people in the digital era? 

Interviews 

Expert opinions

Emails or Linkedin 

Networking

The proposal is well presented and does give a clear idea of what you plan to investigate. However, it could go into a little more detail and you are rather vague about what you plan to cover. It appears from this overview that you have based this primarily on ‘The Social Network’ and I feel you could have gone into more detail in this section of the proposal. The penultimate paragraph on the selling of personal data does show some research but I feel this is going off at a slight tangent. Are you planning to discuss the effects on our attention span or the legislation? Although this is related I feel this may be two topics and if you are using the former to justify the latter this needs to be reflected in the lead question. How can the legislation of social networking alleviate the harmful effects of attention commodification? That sort of thing. At this stage I think it is ok to pursue both but I would be mindful of how much this relates to your lead question.

I would also advise against using surveys and questionnaires as primary research. These require a large sample size (responses) to substantiate your research and this is very rarely the case.   

The research review is comprehensive and compensates for the lack of information given in the previous section. You have demonstrated a clear engagement with an extensive range of sources and this is a good basis for your research over the summer. It would have been better if this had been framed around the ideas for your proposal (rather than just sections of text about each topic) but you have identified and documented a large body of research in the field which will help to inform and shape your progress.

The chapter plan is a little vague but it does show you intentions and how you plan to structure your writing over the coming months. I think this will begin to take shape over the coming months.

 

The paper is well written although some of your sentences are often a little too long and need fragmenting. This is more the case in the proposal rather than the research review. The research review extensively documents your research to date but as I stated before it would be better if you structured and framed this around your ideas. Use paragraph rather than headings. This is ok at this stage but it is important that we hear your voice more in your chapters.

• Think a little about the lead question. The final chapter suggests a slightly different angle (towards the need for legislation).

• Start to shape your chapters. What you have at this stage is sufficient but you need to think more about where your research fits into them.

• Reconsider your primary. As I said, surveys are very rarely successful in research such as this.