From hackers to hacktivists: speed bumps on the global superhighway?

Taylor, Paul

doi:10.1177/1461444805056009

Cited by 58 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 7 publications

(4 reference statements)

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“…Protest, however, is at once vilified for its subversiveness and extolled for its vital capacity to turn a mirror onto unresponsive, even unaccountable democratic institutions (Rosanvallon and Goldhammer, 2008). Raising an alarm call, Natalie Fenton evoked the documented (Klein, 2002;della Porta, Peterson and Reiter, 2006:5) Historically, a political response to the commodification of computer technologies (Taylor, 2005), hacktivism has highlighted the need to place a technological critique at the heart of contentious politics. Hacktivism has thrown into relief the inextricable materiality of contemporary protest and its communication ecology.…”

Section: Protest Communication and Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Protest communication ecologies

Mercea

Iannelli

Loader

2015

Information, Communication & Society

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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: The flurry of protests since the turn of the decade has sustained a growth area in the social sciences. The diversity of approaches to the various facets and concerns raised by the collective action of aggrieved groups the world over impresses through multidisciplinarity and the wealth of insights it has generated. This introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communication and Society is an invitation to recover conceptual instruments-such as the ecological trope-that have fallen out of fashion in media and communication studies. We account for their fall from grace and explicate the rationale for seeking to reinsert them into the empirical terrain of interlocking media, communication practices and protest which we aim to both capture with theory and adopt as a starting point for further analytical innovation.Key words: protest, communication, media, ecology, social media, social movement Protest communication ecologies is an attempt to pin down a conceptual meeting point for areas of social enquiry addressing increasingly interconnected phenomena. Ecology is a longstanding trope denoting variability. It encapsulates multiple and layered interconnections among component parts and of the latter with their surrounding environment. In information sciences, ecology has been defined as a 'system of people, technologies, practices and values in a local setting ' (O'Day, 2000:36). The term 'system' signifies complexity of organisation where technologies imprint on human action which in turn adjusts technologies to local circumstances. Protest, on the other hand, has become a 1 Corresponding author. Email: dan.mercea.1@city.ac.uk 2 staple albeit non-institutional form of political participation (van Deth, 2014), which is coextensive with a heightened mediation of socio-political intercourse (Keane, 2013).In this special issue, we contemplate the local variability of protest, its expression, appeal, and ramifications. All the while, we keep sight of the participatory cultures that bridge or separate disparate instances of protest. This opening article provides an outline of these conceptual considerations and relates them to methodological conundrums and apposite reflections instigated by the keynote speakers at the international iCS Symposium Media ecologiesThe chief merit of the concept of 'ecology' is that it underscores the need to emplace interconnectedness as its origins, forms, implications and valorisations are pondered. Put differently, an ecology is by definition bounded. Therefore, it is coextensive with many other systems, which stand apart from it in one or more respects. It is this insight that has prompted Olsson (2010) to distinguish between three contemporary media ecologies: the broadcasting, the interactive and the participatory ecology. Retracing his classification back to McLuhan (1964) and the proposition that broadcasti...

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Section: Protest Communication and Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Protest communication ecologies

Mercea

Iannelli

Loader

2015

Information, Communication & Society

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“…Taylor (2005) suggests that hacking had become the pursuit of technological mastery as an end in itself, whereas hacktivism introduced a new kind of political objective. If the EDT are hackers at all, it is in Levy's sense, which he applied to the innovators and designers of the early computer industry.…”

Section: Electronic Civil Disobedience and Hacktivismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The practices of ECD are frequently subsumed under the discourse of 'hacktivism' (Denning 2001a, Jordan 2002, Vegh 2003, Jordan & Taylor 2004, Gunkel 2005, Taylor 2005 In part, the discourse of hacktivism is an attempt to link ECD to the original discourse of the 'hacker ethic' (Levy 1984: 26-36). Taylor (2005) suggests that hacking had become the pursuit of technological mastery as an end in itself, whereas hacktivism introduced a new kind of political objective.…”

Section: Electronic Civil Disobedience and Hacktivismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electronic civil disobedience and symbolic power

Meikle¹

2008

Contemporary Security Studies

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“…This espouses a biased portrayal and a one-sided account of the community. The present research addresses this male-only stereotype, while focusing exclusively on politically motivated hackers, so-called hacktivists (Jordan, 2002;Taylor, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hacktivism and the male-only stereotype

Tanczer

2015

New Media & Society

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This research explores hacktivism as a new form of online political activism. It uses qualitative interviews with a gender-equal sample of ten self-defined hacktivists to address issues of gender and the discursive strategies used by males and females to handle the hacktivist community's male-only stereotype. The semi-structured interviews are analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA). The analysis indicates that male hacktivists relate to this dominant male-only representation through discursive techniques such as the suppression of gender (Male Oblivious Discourse) or mechanisms of vindication (Male Justification Discourse). Female hacktivists use the accentuation of gender and sexism to counteract male-dominant discourses and establish Female Discourses of Resistance (Emphasis Discourse; Negation Discourse). These gender-related argumentative positions and rhetorical mechanisms demonstrate how the male-only stereotype is created and maintained, and how it affects not only hacktivists' talk and sense-making, but also their identity and the hacktivist actions they perform.

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From hackers to hacktivists: speed bumps on the global superhighway?

Cited by 58 publications

References 7 publications

Protest communication ecologies

Protest communication ecologies

Electronic civil disobedience and symbolic power

Hacktivism and the male-only stereotype

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