DS ANGLAIS N°5 PSI* 2021/2022

THEME :

Arrivé sur l'île fin novembre, il écrivit à Hada une première lettre pour lui dire qu’elle lui manquait,
qu’il en souffrait à chaque instant, qu’il ne pourrait pas vivre longtemps si éloigné d’elle, et qu'il
était tenté de tout laisser tomber. Dans une deuxième lettre, postée en février 1914, il se plaignait
d'être continuellement malade ; à coup sûr, il ne passerait pas sa vie entière dans cette île ! que son
épouse ne soit pas surprise si, un jour, elle le voyait revenir ! Mais dans une troisième lettre, écrite
en mai, il lui apprenait que le travail, finalement, ne lui déplaisait pas, qu'il s’entendait bien avec
Gebrayel, et que celui-ci envisageait de lui confier des responsabilités, en lui doublant son salaire
initial. Dans la quatrième, il lui annonça sur un ton euphorique qu'il était devenu le bras droit de son
beau-frère, lequel ne pouvait plus se passer de lui ; à présent, son choix était fait, il vivrait à Cuba
pour toujours, et il était sur le point de louer un grand appartement au centre de la capitale, tout près
des magasins La Verdad — installés à présent dans l'ancienne demeure du général Gómez.

Amin Maalouf, Origines (2004)

EXPRESSION : AU CHOIX

A - Type Mines-Ponts : Lire l’article adapté de The Converstation au verso, puis répondre aux
questions suivantes :

1 – What has been the effect of the pandemic on the digitisation of our lives, according to the
speaker ? Answer in your own words. (80 words)

2 – Is privacy a thing of the past ? Justify your answer. (180 words)

B – Type X/ENS : Rédiger un éditorial en réponse à l’éditorial de Simon Jenkins dans The Guardian
(500 words)

PTO
Type A

The coronavirus pandemic has sped up changes that were already happening across society, from
remote learning and work to e-health, supply chains and logistics, policing, welfare and beyond. Big
tech companies have not hesitated to make the most of the crisis.
In New York for example, former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt is leading a panel tasked
with transforming the city after the pandemic, “focused on telehealth, remote learning, and
broadband”. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has also been called in, to help create “a smarter
education system”.
The government, health, education and defence sectors have long been prime targets for “digital
disruption”. The American business expert Scott Galloway and others have argued they are
irresistible pools of demand for the big tech firms.
As author and activist Naomi Klein writes, changes in these and other areas of our lives are about to
see “a warp-speed acceleration”. All these transformations will follow a similar model: using
automated platforms to gather and analyse data via online surveillance, then using it to predict and
intervene in human behaviour.
Growing surveillance combined with algorithmic interventions in human behaviour constrain our
choices to an ever greater extent. Being nudged from an 80% to an 85% chance of doing something
might seem innocuous, but that diminishing 20% of unpredictability is the site of human creativity,
learning, discovery and choice. Becoming more predictable also means becoming more fragile.
The pandemic has pushed many of us into doing even more by digital means, hitting fast-forward
on the growth of surveillance and algorithmic influence, bringing more and more human behaviour
into the realm of statistical probability and manipulation.
Concerns about total surveillance are often couched as discussions of privacy, but now is the time to
think about the importance of obscurity. Obscurity moves beyond questions of privacy and
anonymity, it is is a buffer zone – a space to be an unobserved, uncategorised, unoptimised human
– from which a citizen can enact her democratic rights.
The onrush of digitisation caused by the pandemic may have a positive effect, if the body politic
senses the urgency of coming to terms with the widening gap between fast-moving technology and
its institutions. It’s time to address the real implications of digital technology.

Zac Rogers
Research Lead, Jeff Bleich Centre for the US Alliance in Digital Technology, Security, and
Governance, Flinders University

The Conversation May 29, 2020

Type B

Lectures are rubbish education. They should have gone out when printing was invented and
students learned to read. The vanity of monks and preachers kept them going and set them up for
university education ever since. Lectures have nothing to do with teaching, which is an interactive
process. They are academic showbusiness.
Yet 3,000 Manchester University students have signed a petition to save their lectures after the
pandemic and stop them going online under what is called “blended learning”. They seemingly
prefer to have to attend a draughty lecture hall at a fixed time and snooze through a ritual hour of
note-taking, as if attending high mass. They are sceptical of the university’s statement that a new
“online default model of teaching” will not diminish their “contact time”, even if it offers the
comfort and convenience of tuning in to lectures wherever and whenever they choose.
For universities, lectures have always been cheap and easy, and now they have become more so.
The pandemic has shown what anyone could have told them: that online saves room space and,
horror of horrors, allows lecture quality to be monitored. The London School of Economics – like
apparently 80% of universities that have lecture recording technology – has become a virtual video
production company.
What the Manchester students really want – and have sorely missed during the pandemic – is not
the lecture, but proximity to a live academic. They want classes, seminars, debates, tutorials and
conversation with teachers and like-minded students. Having benefited from a tutorial education
myself, I find the idea of a university without such regular human interaction not unthinkable but
immeasurably less rich.
Great institutions traditionally need traumas – wars or pandemics – to force them to change. To
those who went to university before the digital revolution, it is astonishing how little the upheaval
in information retrieval and communication has altered academic methodology: the term, the
lecture, the essay, the exam, the gown, the “degree”. It seems absurd for a course to still need to be
spread over three seven-month years, to allow for the harvest and church festivals. To watch a
university react to a changing world is like watching the medieval papacy react to Luther’s
Reformation – with horror and antagonism.
The live lecture may be dead, and if it means more teaching, all to the good.

Simon Jenkins The Guardian Fri 9 Jul 2021