Text Set for NSA Mass Surveillance

Text Sets are a tool teachers can use to scaffold instruction for struggling learners. They generally focus on one topic or theme and are a very useful tool for improving comprehension and literacy. Text sets popped into my head when I found this article about the NSA and its mass surveillance. The author does not use the term "text set," but that is what he's proposing to provide context for the journalistic coverage of the NSA following the revelations by Edward Snowden last summer.

Anyone familiar with the Snowden/NSA story has no doubt read an article in which a journalist has compared the NSA to Big Brother in George Orwell's novel "1984." It's a metaphor with legs (is that a meta-metaphor?). Mr. Berlatsky points out that 1984 is not a book that paints the most relevant picture of the current government-sanctioned surveillance of the citizenry. He argues that other works do. He even goes so far as to say that 1984 can "enslave thought." I think he may be referring to the phenomenon of journalists who repeat what other journalists have already tweeted or written, even after a statement has been found to be unsupported by the facts. On The Media is all over this case.

On to the text set, culled from the article. A caveat: this text set might not be appropriate for scaffolding.

• Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Franz Kafka, The Trial
• Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming
• Maureen F. McHugh, China Mountain Zhang

to which I would add these nonfiction works:

• Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter
• Bruce Schneier, Secrets & Lies
• James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace