Hackers: a case-study of the social shaping of computing

The study is an examination of hacking, placing the act in the context of theories of technological change. The account of hacking is used to substantiate those theories that emphasise the societal shaping of technology over the notion of technological determinism. The evolution of hacking is traced, showing how it reflects changing trends in the nature of information: the most vivid of these is the conceptualisation of information known as 'cyberspace'. Instead of simply cataloguing the impact of technical changes within computing, and the effects they have had upon information, the study shows how technical change takes place in a process of negotiation and conflict between groups.The two main groups analysed are those of the Computer Underground (CU) and the Computer Security Industry (CSI). The experiences and views of both groups are recounted in what constitute internalist and externalist accounts of hacking and its significance. The internalist account is the evidence provided by hackers themselves. It addresses such issues as what motivates the act of hacking; whether there is an identifiable hacking culture; and why it is almost an exclusively male activity. The externalist account contains the perceptions of hacking held by those outside the activity.The state of computing's security measures and its vulnerability to hacking is described, and evidence is provided of the extent to which hacking gives rise to technical knowledge that could be of potential use in the fixing of security weaknesses. The division within the CSI between those broadly cooperative with hackers and those largely hostile to them is examined, and the reasons why hacking knowledge is not generally utilised are explored. Hackers are prevented from gaining legitimacy within computing in a process referred to as 'closure'. Examples include hackers being stigmatised through the use of analogies that compare their computing activities to conventional crimes such as burglary and tresspass.Stigmatisation is carried out by the CSI who use it in a process of professional boundary formation to distinguish themselves from hackers. It is also used by other authority figures such as Members of Parliament whose involvement in the process of closure takes the form of the anti-hacking legislation they have passed, an analysis of which concludes this study

Civil Good - A Platform For Sustainable and Inclusive Online Discussion

Civil Good is a website concept proposed by Alan Mandel with the goal of enabling safe, anonymous, productive, and civil discourse without the disruptive behavior and language common to much of the Internet. The goal of Civil Good is to improve the critical thinking and discussion skills of its users while combating the effects of political polarization and misinformation in society. This paper analyzes Mandel\u27s proposed concept, providing additional research to either support or refute the various features proposed, and recommendations to simplify user interactions. It also examines topics mentioned only briefly or not discussed by Mandel, such as data protection methods, the psychology of Web browsing, marketing, operational costs, legal issues, monetization options, and mobile presence

Digital colonialism: South Africa’s education transformation in the shadow of Silicon Valley

This dissertation investigates the social implications of technology choices for the emerging education transformation of the South African basic education sector. In October 2015, then President Jacob Zuma launched Operation Phakisa Education (OPE), an initiative designed behind closed doors to fast-track digital education into all South African public schools. This study identifies and analyses policy choices and perspectives regarding the technology considered and deployed for the national education rollout. It documents the OPE proposal, and examines how e-education policy choices relate to humanitarian objectives. Theoretically, this study draws upon libertarian socialist theory (anarchism) to examine the sociology of education technology policy. Using anarchist theory, it assesses the perspective, aims, and choices of e-education policy at the national level. It also draws on the Free Software philosophy for society as articulated by Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen. Finally, it compares classic colonialism with global power in the digital era, and posits a theory of digital colonialism. Synthesizing anarchism and the Free Software philosophy into a single theoretical framework – placed into the context of colonial relations – it is the first work to apply anarchist sociological theory to education technology policy, and the first doctoral study on digital colonialism. For its methodology, this dissertation utilizes two qualitative methods: document analysis and semi-structured interviews. Interview subjects include high-level e-education policymakers and administrators in government, key stakeholders, and experts at the intersection of technology innovation and human rights. These methods were used to both identify and interrogate e-education policy as it relates to the humanitarian objectives of education policy at the national level. The findings demonstrate that South African education policy is beholden to largely United States-based corporations and models for e-education. The study found that the types of technologies for consideration in education are rooted in surveillance capitalism, which is spreading across the world. It contends that current e-education policy choices will entrench the power and exploitation of US state-corporate power in South African education, economy, and society. It argues that an alternative set of choices, People’s Technology for People’s Power, is consistent with the spirit of South African technology policy, and should be chosen for South African schools in order to counter the power of foreign power and resist surveillance capitalism. This dissertation is the first publication to document and analyze what the new government education policy is about and how it relates to equality and human rights. It argues that present South African e-education policy constitutes a new form of digitally-driven technocratic neoliberalism which ultimately favors ruling class interests in the United States and South Africa. It also argues that OPE violates South Africa’s Free and Open Source policy and the spirit of democracy outlined in the Phakisa methodology and the Batho Pele principles. This study found that OPE replicates the latest trends in e-education implementation popular in Silicon Valley. Tech multinationals are providing both the products and models for use in South Africa. The dissertation concludes that US technological and conceptual dominance in South African education constitutes digital colonialism. It emphasizes the need for public inclusion in the policy process, and proposes alternative policies and technologies for e-education based on the idea of People’s Technology for People’s Power. It also argues that current scholarship on education technology neglects the political and sociological importance of People’s Technology to education, economy, and society, as well as the global significance of Big Tech dominance vis-a-vis digital colonialism, and that subsequent literature would be enriched by addressing these issues

Untangling the Web: A Guide To Internet Research

[Excerpt] Untangling the Web for 2007 is the twelfth edition of a book that started as a small handout. After more than a decade of researching, reading about, using, and trying to understand the Internet, I have come to accept that it is indeed a Sisyphean task. Sometimes I feel that all I can do is to push the rock up to the top of that virtual hill, then stand back and watch as it rolls down again. The Internet—in all its glory of information and misinformation—is for all practical purposes limitless, which of course means we can never know it all, see it all, understand it all, or even imagine all it is and will be. The more we know about the Internet, the more acute is our awareness of what we do not know. The Internet emphasizes the depth of our ignorance because our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. My hope is that Untangling the Web will add to our knowledge of the Internet and the world while recognizing that the rock will always roll back down the hill at the end of the day

The Queer Eternal September: LGBTQ Identity on the Early Internet and Web

This dissertation examines the expression of queer identity and community on the early internet and web, and suggests a methodology for working with archived internet and web sources when exploring the history of marginalized groups. I argue that the explosion of new users which accompanied the popularization of networking technologies between 1983 and 1999 changed and diversified the ways that individuals expressed their own identity, even as these users mediated a codified vocabulary for expressing what it means to be queer. By combining computational methods with traditional close reading, this dissertation suggests a methodology for working with large-scale archived web and internet sources, which can ethically maintain context and significance without losing individual voices. I use a combination of text and network analysis in exploring user interaction and self-narrative within archived internet and web collections. Part one of this dissertation examines the distributed newsgroup service Usenet and the movement of users from one unified “gay and lesbian” newsgroup to hundreds of specialized groups for a multitude of identity categories, including specific sexual orientations and preferences, as well as gender identities. Using text analysis and topic modelling to delve into these large-scale sources, I argue that these archived Usenet materials reveal group tensions, as well as trends in labelling and social organization, during a period when the number of new users and new groups was growing at exponential rates. Part two of this dissertation follows these communities on to a new technology: the web. Faced with a seemingly unlimited platform to gather and communicate, we see user choices constrained by issues of discoverability and monetization, which helped to perpetuate existing queer hegemonies. Through a combination of text analysis and network analysis on large-scale sources like GeoCities.com’s “WestHollywood” community, I examine the implications of the proliferation of an Anglo lexicon for describing queer identity on an increasingly-global stage. This dissertation contributes to the historiography on gay and lesbian history, and suggests methods for researchers engaging with queer and gender theory along with computational methods

Respawn

In Respawn Colin Milburn examines the connections between video games, hacking, and science fiction that galvanize technological activism and technological communities. Discussing a wide range of games, from Portal and Final Fantasy VII to Super Mario Sunshine and Shadow of the Colossus, Milburn illustrates how they impact the lives of gamers and non-gamers alike. They also serve as resources for critique, resistance, and insurgency, offering a space for players and hacktivist groups such as Anonymous to challenge obstinate systems and experiment with alternative futures. Providing an essential walkthrough guide to our digital culture and its high-tech controversies, Milburn shows how games and playable media spawn new modes of engagement in a computerized world

The Trouble with Knowing: Wikipedian consensus and the political design of encyclopedic media

Encyclopedias are interfaces between knowing and the unknown. They are devices that negotiate the middle ground between incompatible knowledge systems while also performing as dream machines that explore the political outlines of an enlightened society. Building upon the insights from critical feminist theory, media archaeology, and science and technology studies, the dissertation investigates how utopian and impossible desires of encyclopedic media have left a wake of unresolvable epistemological crises. In a 2011 survey of editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, it was reported that 87 per cent of Wikipedians identified as men. This statistic flew in the face of Wikipedias utopian promise that it was an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Despite the early optimism and efforts to reduce this disparity, Wikipedias parent organization acknowledged its inability to significantly make Wikipedia more equitable. This matter of concern raised two questions: What kinds of knowing subjects is Wikipedia designed to cultivate and what does this conflict over who is included and excluded within Wikipedia tell us about the utopian dreams that are woven into encyclopedic media? This dissertation argues that answering these troubling questions requires an examination of the details of the present, but also the impossible desires that Wikipedia inherited from its predecessors. The analysis of these issues begins with a genealogy of encyclopedias, encyclopedists, encyclopedic aesthetics, and encyclopedisms. It is followed by an archeology of the twentieth century deployment of consensus as an encyclopedic and political program. The third part examines how Wikipedia translated the imaginary ideal of consensus into a cultural technique. Finally, the dissertation mobilizes these analyses to contextualize how consensus was used to limit the dissenting activities of Wikipedia's Gender Gap Task Force. The dissertation demonstrates that the desire and design of encircling knowledge through consensus cultivated Wikipedias gender gap. In this context, if encyclopedic knowledge is to remain politically and culturally significant in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to tell a new story about encyclopedic media. It must be one where an attention to utopian imaginaries, practices, and techniques not only addresses how knowledge is communicated but also enables a sensitivity to the question of who can know

Entre trivialité et culture : une histoire de l’Internet vernaculaire: Emergence et médiations d’un folklore de réseau

From Cybercultural studies to new Web science, Media and Communication theory engage in analyzing scientific models of the Internet that are mostly homogeneous : models built on the faith in the universal language of networked information and tending to creating norms and/or rules for network communication. There are new cultural, economical and even political institutions appearing that rely on a vehicular model that is widely accepted, although criticized.In my thesis I come back to the sources of this criticism by opening a vernacular perspective, which is a concept borrowed from socio-linguistics and reinterpreted under the light of network culture. It allows to think about the relation between values (the vulgar, the popular, the trivial) and media practices of groups manifested as Internet folklore. From the point of view of a local theory (Jacques Perriault), the vernacular perspective opens a field of analysis understood as composite (Joëlle Le Marec), that is a complex of unstable relations between discourse and matter, technologies and their uses, practices, representations and norms. Folklore, by definition formalist and traditional, transforms itself within network culture to become a media process based on appropriation and commentary, two of the most crucial characteristics of the Internet thought of as meta-medium (Philip Agre). Folklore and vernacular provide important elements to sketch a cultural theory of information and communication in terms of « triviality »‘ (Yves Jeanneret) – a culture defined by is mediations and transformations. This thesis, by investigating archeologically the archives of Internet’s micro-history to dig out its folklore, analyzes dynamically contexts that have allowed the social information of contemporary network culture.Studying two periods of network history that are defined partly by the tools of access to the Internet (Usenet in the 80’s and early 90’s and the Web 1.0 in the 90’s and the 2000’s), my research takes a close look at how Internet folklore is invented, experiment, produced and reproduced interacting with content-management media (emailing and newsgroups, homepages, blogs). These apparatuses are seen as « architexts » (following French semiology in media interfaces), which content cannot be understood without an analysis of their system and forms (their « metaforms ») and the process of computer and cultural codes that defined their context of production.A first series of case studies dig out the roots of Internet folklore, its emergence within the first large-scale virtual community : Usenet – and in particular the alt. newsgroup hierarchy. From ASCII Art to Flame Wars and through the pantheon of Net.legends, I show how the leisure and experimental use of communication and information processing rules allow the users to confront the difficulties and dead-ends of collective regulation. The Usenet public, celebrating and participating in network folklore, is testing instruments that give power in writing and expressing opinions. These situations are named « metatexts » : they develop commentaries and folkloric theories on the complex problem of « metarules ». From an Internet micro-historical point of view, they are the basis of a sub-culture that reinvented public discourse within a network context : commenting, conversing, evaluating and filtering, all through the computer media.A second series of case studies approaches network folklore from another angle. Through and experience of participant-observation, I borrow the outlook of two generations of Internet artists on Web popular creativity. The first generation, net.art, considered as pioneer in art happening on the Web in the mid-90’s, starts a process of valuing and mediating amateur creativity in the homepages. The second generation, the surfclubs, recipient to the net.art heritage in the context of Web 2.0, give a new understanding and context to network cultural practices within collective blog networks inspired from image forums, the new territories of emergence for network folklore. The eye of Net art channels the observation of a specific evolution of network vernacular : conflicts about the value and the legitimation of this cultural « popular » matter seem to resolve in the new mainstream tendencies of the social Web. New leisure figures appear, between amateur and professional network practices, inspired by the aesthetic and the informational value of Internet folklore. This issue opens up new discussion on the socio-economics of network culture.The vernacular perspective updates the conflictual relations between, technology, society and culture that have built the Internet and marked its history. Its shows that they are dialogic articulations between users’ creativity and institutional norms that structure the network environment. It uncovers little known archives that reveal the voices of the actors of this cultural micro-history. it signals epistemological problems about material and methods for network culture analysis by suggesting that this should be handled from the bottom up, accompanying the emergence of media practice in the cultural economy of today’s Web.De la perspective cyberculturelle aux nouvelles sciences du Web, les Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication étudient des modèles scientifiques d’Internet marqués par une forme d’homogénéité : celle portée par la croyance en un langage universel de l’information et tendant vers la normalisation et/ou la régulation des outils de la communication en réseau. Ainsi, les nouvelles tendances à l’institutionnalisation de la culture, de l’économie voire de la politique des réseaux reposent sur un modèle véhiculaire prégnant et généralement accepté, bien que souvent critiqué.Je propose de revenir aux sources de ces critiques en les envisageant sous la dimension du vernaculaire, notion empruntée à la socio-linguistique et réinterprétée sous l’angle de la médiation de culture informatique en réseau. Dans ce cadre, cette notion permet de penser l’articulation entre des valeurs (le vulgaire, le populaire, le trivial) et des pratiques médiatiques de groupes qui se manifestent dans un « folklore Internet ». Attachée à une théorie locale des usages techniques (J. Perriault), la perspective vernaculaire ouvre un terrain d’analyse placé sous le sceau du composite (J. Le Marec), c’est-à-dire les relations instables et complexes d’artefacts faits de discours et de matière.Le folklore, par définition formel et traditionnel, se transforme au sein de la culture de réseau pour devenir un processus de médiation fondé sur l’appropriation et le commentaire, deux des grandes caractéristiques d’Internet pensé comme méta-médium (P. Agre). Folklore et vernaculaire fournissent des éléments importants pour envisager une théorie culturelle de l’information et de la communication en termes de « trivialité » (Y. Jeanneret) – une culture définie par ses médiations et ses transformations. Cette thèse se propose, en allant faire l’archéologie des archives de la micro-histoire d’Internet pour y retrouver son folklore, d’analyser de manière dynamique les contextes qui ont permis l’information sociale de la culture de réseau contemporaine.A partir de deux périodes de l’histoire des réseaux marquées par deux réseaux privilégiés d’accès à Internet (Usenet, années 1980-1990 ; le Web, années 1990-2000), j’analyse les contextes de communication dans lesquels un folklore Internet s’invente, s’expérimente, se produit et se reproduit en interaction avec des dispositifs de médiation de contenu en réseau (messagerie, pages personnelles, blogs). Adoptant un point de vue « architextuel » (empruntant à la sémiotique des interfaces et des médiations informatisées), mes études s’intéressent tout aussi bien aux contenus qu’aux formes et métaformes ainsi qu’aux processus de codification informatiques et culturels de ces contextes.Une première série d’études de cas se penche sur les racines du folklore Internet, son émergence au sein de la première communauté virtuelle de grande ampleur, Usenet – en particulier dans la hiérarchie alt. du groupe. De l’art ASCII aux flame wars en passant par le panthéon des célébrités de Usenet, je montre comment l’usage ludique et expérimental des règles de communication et du transfert d’information sur le réseau permettent aux usagers d’affronter les difficultés et les apories de la régulation collective. Le public Usenet, dans la célébration et sa participation au folklore de réseau, teste des instruments qui lui donne un pouvoir d’écriture et d’opinion. Ces situations, je les nomme « métatextes » : des commentaires ludiques et des théories folkloriques sur la question complexe des « métarègles ». En terme de micro-histoire de l’Internet, elles sont fondamentales pour comprendre, à partir de ce qui était à l’origine une sous-culture, le développement culturel du commentaire et de la conversation, de l’évaluation et du filtrage de l’informatique sur le réseau actuel.Une deuxième série approche le folklore de réseau sous une autre forme, et dans une perspective différente. J’emprunte, dans le cadre d’une expérience d’observation-participante, le regard de deux générations d’artistes Internet portées sur la création populaire du Web. Le net.art, pionnier de l’art sur le Web dans les années 1990 (Web 1.0), valorise et médiatise la créativité amateur des pages personnelles. Les surfclubs, héritiers directs dans le cadre du web social des années 2000 (Web 2.0), recontextualisent ces pratiques au sein de réseaux de blogs et s’inspirent des forums d’images, nouveaux lieux d’émergence du folklore Web. L’oeil du Net art permet d’observer une évolution particulière du vernaculaire de réseau : les conflits de légitimation de cette matière culturelle « populaire » semblent se résoudre dans les nouvelles tendances du Web social pour donner lieu à de nouvelles figures du loisir en ligne. Apparaissent alors des professionnels qui s’inspirent de l’esthétique et des pratiques informationnelles des amateurs et les remédiatisent. Cette « résolution » est en fait l’entrée dans de nouveaux enjeux, socio-économiques cette fois, qui pour être compris devront être analysés à partir de cette généalogie historique du vernaculaire Internet.L’approche vernaculaire permet de mettre à jour les conflits techniques, sociaux et culturels ayant joué un rôle crucial dans l’histoire d’Internet : elle éclaire l’articulation dialogique entre la créativité des usagers et les normes institutionnelles qui structurent l’environnement-réseau. Elle fait découvrir des archives peu connus qui révèlent les voix des acteurs micro-historique du réseau des réseaux. Elle signale une série de problèmes épistémologiques sur les matériaux et les méthodes d’analyse de la culture d’Internet en proposant une vision d' »en bas » (« bottom up ») qui accompagne l’émergence des médiations de l’économie culturelle du Web d’aujourd’hui