…come on down to the American Educational Research Associate conference (some 30,000 intl attendees!) and catch PI Dr Megan Boler discussing our SMRT research team’s preliminary findings on a panel titled “DIY Media & Youth Engagement.”
WHEN: Saturday April 27 at 2:15 pm. WHERE: Building/Room: Grand Hyatt, Ballroom Level – Grand Ballroom West http://tinyurl.com/c78aptk
Dr. Boler’s talk,”From Apathy to Occupy Wall Street to 4th Wave Feminism: Youth Practices of Social Media and Participatory Democracy” will discuss new findings from our 20 interviews with women activists from the west and east coasts. Our research questions include: How are social media shaping new, hybrid (on and offline) social movements? How is “horizontalism” as an organizational structure effecting the successes and challenges of movements such as Occupy Wall Street? What are the gender dynamics and women’s roles in Occupy movement? She will presenting alongside wonderful colleagues:
**This panel talk delivered by PI Dr Megan Boler comes Thanks to the superb and engaged collaborative work of the fabulous 2012-13 SMRT team of graduate researchers!
Come out this Friday and catch one of our SMRT Boler team members in action!
Jennie Phillips, PhD student at OISE studying disaster response and online communities, will be speaking at the Dynamics of Global Change Workshop this Friday April 26 hosted at Munk School, University of Toronto. She will be delivering a presentation titled “The People vs. The System: An Explanation of How Disaster Transforms Humanity and How The System Gets in The Way.” Discussion will cover the realities of disaster situations, promote the power of social capital and provoke reconsideration regarding how we go about planning for and responding to crisis. The aim of her talk is to encourage the way we think about preventing/mitigating, preparing for, responding to and recovering from crisis.
This workshop brings together doctoral students from across the university to present aspects of the their research, connected by the overarching theme of exploring the sources, structure, and pace—in short, dynamics—of change.
Professor Melissa Williams will deliver a lunchtime keynote address.
Session A (10am-12pm): Student Presentations
Ushnish Sengupta (OISE): Entrepreneurship as an Alternative Pathway to Self-Determination for Aboriginal Young Adults
Lameck Zingano (Anthropology): EcoCash Through a Cellular Technology
Jeff Myers (OISE): The Institution of Becoming Canadian and Global Justice: Incompatible?
Lunch and Keynote (12pm-2pm): “Glocalizing” Global Justice: Democratic Translations of Human” by Professor Melissa Williams
If there is such a thing as global justice, it demands two things of us, argues Melissa Williams (Political Science, University of Toronto): first, that we advance the real protection of human rights; and second, that we redress unjustifiable inequalities in the global distribution of wealth and opportunities. In general, philosophic perspectives on the problem of global justice (all of which are rooted in Western philosophic traditions) enjoin us to understand human rights as universal and distributive justice as contextual; that is, mediated by our membership in bounded political communities. But we might also adopt the perspective of the “glocal” citizen-activist who is trying to advance human rights and distributive justice in theord context of a globalized capitalist economy and networked transnational public space. If we do, we find a dynamic process of democratic translation taking place in which the polarities of human rights and social justice, universalism and contextualism, are reversed. Human rights now appear as contextual, and social justice appears as immanently) universal. Combining these perspectives opens up new pathways for understanding multiple sites and scales of activism as complementary contributions to a global system of human rights and social justice.
Session B (2pm-4pm): Student Presentations
Jennie Phillips (OISE): The People vs. The System: An Explanation of How Disaster Transforms Humanity and How The System Gets in The Way
Wilfrid Greaves (Political Science): Climate Change, Indigeneity, and Security in the Circumpolar Arctic
Jodi Adams (Political Science): Dynamics of Carbon Sinks in the CDM: Actors, Interests and Ideas
Alicia Grubb (Computer Science): Comparing Temporal and Scalar Aspects of Systems Models
Averie from the Boler Research Team here to post a little update on our progress.
We are headed into the last month of our year-long Graduate Research Assistantships working on Dr. Boler’s SSHRC-funded project about “Youth, Social media, and Social movements” — there are still so many things we would love to accomplish with this project! Here’s an update on some of our exciting progress over the last months.
In our last research update, we were just entering the transcription phase of our project — we had 13 interviews with women (and a few men) who participated in the Occupy movement in California. We started by transcribing all 13 interviews (some with multiple participants) by hand, using some awesome free transcription software called f5.
Then came the coding! We engaged a “Grounded Theory” approach to coding, which we’ve been reading up on as a team. However, our process also bears some resemblance to a more general inductive approach, such as the one described by David R. Thomas in this article.
are concluding a productive second year of her three-year SSHRC funded research project “Social Media in the Hands of Young Citizens,” a qualitative research project featuring semi-structured interviews with young women participants in new hybrid (on/offline) social movements.
Professor Boler has two edited books forthcoming as well as numerous journal articles and chapters:
DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014 (ed. with Matt Ratto)
Discerning Critical Hope, London: Routledge, 2013 (eds. V Bozalek, B. Leibowitz, R. Carollissen, and M. Boler).
Forthcoming essays include:
Megan Boler and Selena Nemorin, Handbook of Propaganda Studies, Oxford University Press, 2013.
Ian Reilly and Megan Boler, “Stewart and Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity, the Pre-political, and the Future of Politics,” forthcoming Communication Culture and Critique.
M. Boler, “Gender and the Politics of Horizontalism in Hybrid Social Movements,” in Martha McCaughey, ed., “Cyberactivism: 2nd edition,” (New York: Routledge 2014).
M. Boler, “Affect and Pedagogy in Neo-Liberal Spaces,” PMLA Journal of the Modern Language Association, 2014.
M. Boler, “Transcending Binaries in Affect Theories,” Response to Kneller Lecture, Philosophy of Education Society Meeting, Philosophy of Education Society Yearbook, 2014.
M. Boler, “#OccupyPatriarchy: Will the 4th Wave Be a Swell or a Ripple?” in “Women in a Globalizing World: Transforming Equality, Development, Diversity and Peace,” ed. by Angela Miles, Inanna Publications and Education Inc. 2013.
On April 12, Dr. Boler presented as an invited panelist at the 4th Biennial Transmedia, Hollywood conference in Los Angeles,
Forthcoming: Invited Panelist, “Gender and Censorship,” Osgoode Forum “Law, Culture, Critique”, May 10-11, 2013 in Toronto, Canada.(hosted by The Graduate Law Students Association) http://glsa.osgoode.yorku.ca/keynote-speakers 2013
Invited Inaugural Keynote, “Education and the Discomforts of Change,” “Teaching in Focus Conference,” Teaching Commons, York University May 27, 2013·
This week, we bring you a special post from a friend of the SMRT Boler Research team, Yelena Gyulkhandanyan, University of Toronto.
Hacking, Cracking, and Hacktivism: the many dimensions of hacker practice
To refer to someone as a hacker often implies that they engage in illicit acts of tapping into secret databases, stealing information, and threatening network security. Law enforcement and security agencies guard against hacker attacks. To them, hackers stand for disobedience, anarchy, and challenge to the status quo order (Nissenbaum, 2004).
More recently, online hacker groups such as Anonymous have been gaining attention for targeted collective action in support of various social causes. From protesting the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to investigating the Church of Scientology, hackers are increasingly emerging from the virtual world and making their presence felt. They are all over the world, act individually, but are connected through webs of social networks and interactions. Academics are struggling to find ways to interpret this emerging phenomenon and understand how it is changing the concept of citizen action and civil disobedience. Perhaps the answers to these inquiries are just as complex and ever-changing as its subjects and this post will not tackle this challenge. Nonetheless, to better position our understanding of what hacking has come to represent, we must look at where it came from and the environment and forces that helped shape its meaning. This analysis takes us to the early days of hacking in the technology labs of MIT and the subsequent Open Source Movement.
The Genesis
The roots of the hacker identity can be traced back to the Tech Model Railroad Club in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1950s. The club members initially began using computers to improve the design of their model railroads. The computers soon turned into a separate obsession for the students, who shifted much of their focus to constructing and programming MIT’s early mainframes. These efforts were in complete agreement with the university authorities. Simultaneously, other hubs of hacker activity spread in other academic institutions and circles, such as Carnegie-Mellon and Stanford, expanding into nearby locales of Cambridge, Palo Alto, and Berkeley (Levy, 1984).
These hackers had the ability to create and debug code with incredible speed. They aided in the development of hardware and software for various functionalities as well as invented many original algorithms and applications. A lot of these were included in new generations of computers. The new developments served to enhance the recreational potential of computing and IT, such as digitized music, gaming, and virtual reality. They also upgraded practical capabilities—for instance, the control of robots. “Hacking” acquired the meaning of finding creative solutions to problems. These solutions often drew outside the realm of conventional theory-driven approaches to programming and involved a mentality of looking outside the box. There was a certain honour tied to being a hacker that came with respect from one’s peers (Nissenbaum, 2004).
The ideology associated with the hacker identity came to be informally known as the “hacker ethic”. In Hackers and the Contested Ontology of Cyberspace, Helen Nissenbaum provides an articulate description of the principles embedded in the hacker ethic:
“Commitment to total and free access to computers and information, belief in the immense powers of computers to improve people’s lives and create art and beauty, mistrust of centralized authority, a disdain for obstacles erected against free access to computing, and an insistence that hackers be evaluated by no other criteria than technical virtuosity and accomplishment (by hacking alone and not ‘bogus’ criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position). In other words, the culture of hacking incorporated political and moral values as well as technical ends.”(Nissenbaum, 2004: 3)
Up until the mid-1980s there was never a single organization or agency that could be attributed to hackers as a group nor was there any formal entry or initiation to being a hacker. Hackers were scattered across the digital terrain connected by loose networks of peer association (Nissenbaum, 2004). However the significance of free access to information embedded in the hacker ethic led to many hackers becoming involved in the open source movement (Taylor, 2005).
The Free and Open Source Software Movement
Between the 1960s and 1970s, software programming was primarily done by scientists and engineers in both academic and corporate environments. These early programmers openly exchanged and modified software. However by the 80s, software programming became increasingly appropriated by the private sector. The open source movement was a reaction to the commodification of information technology (Carillo, Okoli, 2009).
In 1984, Richard Stallman established the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to challenge the encroachment of copyrights and patents in the software industry. The foundation was based on the principles Stallman, himself a hacker, had acquired among the MIT hackers, in particular: the sharing of scientific knowledge; cooperation; and pedagogy (Coleman, Golub, 2008). He set out to create a free alternative to UNIX, a popular operating system that was becoming inaccessible to many due to the high licensing fees. Stallman created a free version of UNIX that he called GNU (which stands for Gnu’s not Unix). The GNU operates under the GNU General Public License (GPL) which introduced the concept of the “copyleft”. The license guarantees:
The right to access the source code which enables the computer programmer to understand the way the software functions and be able to modify it.
The right to alter the source code
The right to use the program for any purpose
The right to the distribution of the software both in its original and modified form
The right of all users to be aware of their open source rights (Carillo, Okoli, 2009)
Furthermore, while everyone is entitled to the outlined rights, no one is permitted to disallow the ongoing distribution of the software. In particular, no one is allowed to use the modified software for proprietary means (Stallman, 1985). This ensured that the software remained in the public domain and was safeguarded against exploitation for corporate profit even while the sale of copies of the program was permitted (Benkler, 2011). Stallman made the comparison of free software to free speech, not free beer, which implies that it can be written, rewritten, used, and reused by anyone as many times as they like (Benkler, 2011). The principles vested in the FSF were elaborated by Stallman in the GNU Manifesto. The manifesto also became a call to other software programmers to join the FSF efforts. In it Stallman states:
“I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.”
In 1991 Linux Torvalds initiated the Linux Project. Torvalds distributed a source code he was working on as a hobby over a mailing list. The action sparked the first mass-scale, long-distance collaborative software platform. The project combined a free UNIX kernel with the GNU software to create the GNU/Linux operating system (Coleman, Golub, 2008). The software was released under the GPL (Carillo, Okoli, 2009). By the end of the 1990s, the free software movement spread to become a cross-continental network of collaborators working together on thousands of projects (Coleman, 2008).
In 1998 many software developers within the free software movement became keen on mainstreaming their software and making it more attractive for investors (Coleman 2008). They conceived the concept of open source software (OSS), which included all of the previous licensing criteria and the aim of making information accessible, but differed from free software by being less ideological. Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond advocated for this change, stating that the movement required a more business-oriented approach. According to proponents of OSS, the concept of free software came across as too radical and anti-corporate which could detract investment (Carillo, Okoli, 2009).
As it was intended, OSS experienced a mass adoption by corporations that spend millions of dollars on the development and promotion of OSS (Coleman, 2008). These corporations include Netscape that created Mozilla and made the Mozilla Firefox 1.0 web browser available to the world, and IBM which announced in 2000 that it was going to invest a billion dollars into free software (Benkler, 2011). The Apache, another OSS project that began in 1995, became the most used web server in the world (Carillo, Okoli, 2009).
In 2002 the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) conducted a survey of OSS community members that use SourceForge.net, the biggest Open Source development website in the world. The study that included 526 users was presented at the Linux World meeting that took place in New York City. All study participants identified themselves as hackers. The study had the following key findings: participants specified that they were highly creative with their current OSS projects; having fun (43%), enhancing skills (43%); support for the OSS community (34%); and user needs (30%) were listed as top motivators for participation—desire to challenge corporate software companies was not mentioned as a chief influence; the survey participants came from 35 different countries; on average, participants spent at least 10 hours a week on OSS programming; 56% of the participants were IT professionals, others being students and academics (PR Newswire, 2002).
Hackers and Crackers
According to Eric Raymond a self-identified hacker and a prominent spokesperson for the open source movement, a hacker is an individual that is interested in discovering the functions of programmable systems and who programs well at a fast pace. The term “cracker” is reserved for the malevolent individual that threatens online security (Raymond, 1997). Nonetheless, this distinction does not seem to exist outside hacker circles and those that are aware of their culture.
Select hackers that committed criminal acts by penetrating into sources of sensitive information caused the increasing defacement of what it means to be a hacker (Papadimitriou, 2006). Hackers acquired a bad reputation. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and the subsequent Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 enforced stringent measures and punishments to deal with such actions. The 1980s involved a series of sting operations which resulted in the arrest of notorious hackers and Phreaks (hackers that infiltrate telecommunication systems). Some of these individuals include Kevin Mitnick, Robert Morris, and Craig Neidorf (Nissenbaum, 2004).
Hacktivism
The 1990s saw the beginning of hacktivism, which incorporates acts of hacking with a political position or social stance (Taylor, 2005). “Hacktivism” comes from combining “hacking” with “activism” (Papadimitriou, 2006). Just as other activists, hacktivists aim to spread their message within society. Their tactics include virtual sit-ins, protest websites, mail bombings, and the virtual vandalism of websites (e-graffiti) (Auty, 2004).
The Hacktivismo group that formed out the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) hacker group in 1999 is one of the earliest instances of hacktivism (Papadimitriou, 2006). The group was organized by Oxblood Ruffin, a member of the cDc, to advocate for information rights (Ruffin, 2013). The Hacktivismo Declaration states, “People have a right to reasonable access of otherwise lawfully published information. If our leaders aren’t prepared to defend the Internet, we are” (Hacktivismo, 2001). The declaration relies on Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which states that: “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” The declaration maintains that, “denying access to information could lead to spiritual, intellectual, and economic decline, the promotion of xenophobia and destabilization of international order” (Hacktivismo, 2001).
While Hacktivismo concerns with issues of internet censorship and access to information, hacktivists do not solely deal with ICT related issues. The online support garnered by the Zapatista movement in Mexico is a striking example of deliberate and coordinated political action by hackers. The movement began on a grassroots level when the Chiapas peasants and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) engaged in a protest against the increasing marginalization of the Chiapas indigenous community and the exploitation of their land. The Zapatista campaign used the internet to spread their message through websites, email lists, online petitions, and discussion forums. The online outreach effectively gained the support of international human rights activists and groups (Lunat, 2008). One of these was the Electronic Disturbance Theatre (EDT), which is a group of cyber activists and artists that engage in the practice of electronic civil disobedience. EDT describes its work as being at “the intersections of radical politics, recombinant and performance art, and computer software design” (Wray, 1998).
In 1998, the EDT organized multiple web sit-ins in support of the Zapatistas using Flood Net, a URL based software created by EDT (Wray, 1998). After being downloaded, Flood Net connects the browser to a predetermined website and automatically activates the browser’s reload button every seven seconds. When thousands of people use Flood Net in the same day targeting the same website, they effectively block it (Taylor, 2005). EDT’s targets were the Mexican President Zedillo’s web site, five web sites belonging to Mexico City’s financial institutions, and the Clinton White House web site (Wray, 1998). Online based tactics and activism on the ground succeeded in challenging state authority by creating international pressure over the Mexican government to democratize and recognize the rights of its indigenous population (Lunat, 2008). What came to be known as the Zapatista effect, demonstrated the potential of virtual public spheres to affect change in the physical public sphere, contributing to the concept of the Global Civil Society (Amoore and Langley 2004; Goodhart 2005).
One of the most recent and talked about examples of hacktivism pertains to Anonymous, an online group that describe itself as, “a decentralized network of individuals focused on promoting access to information, free speech, and transparency.” (Anonymous Analytics). Operating on an international level, Anonymous has no centralized leadership or agency. The group made a shift to political activism in 2008 when it initiated a protest against the Church of Scientology (Sengupta, 2008). The protest was sparked by the Church’s forceful attempts to take down the infamous Tom Cruise Scientology video from the internet. Members of Anonymous went on to conduct an investigation of the Church of Scientology, uncovering allegations of abuse and human rights violations (Anonymous, 2011). Since then Anonymous has engaged in multinational campaigns including taking part in the Occupy movement, Arab Spring, and activism against Internet censorship (Sengupta, 2008).
With the digitization of sensitive government and corporate information, hacktivism is a perceived threat much like hacking (Sengupta, 2012). However, as opposed to being compared to cracking, hacktivism can be viewed as an embracement of the fundamental principles of the hacker ethic, concerned with the reappropriation and reengineering of technology in support of the original message of access to information content and resources (Taylor, 2005).
The Zapatista movement has demonstrated that online activism can facilitate participatory democracy by democratizing channels of communication and political activism (Auty, 2004). Hacktivism is an effective tool of civil society activism, having the ability to spread awareness and call for mass action against political and social injustice; leading to positive political change and social empowerment.
Auty, C. (2004). Political hacktivism: tool of the underdog or scourge of cyberspace?. New Information Perspectives, 56(4), 212-221.
Carillo, K., & Okoli, C. (2009). The Open Source Movement: a revolution in software development. The Journal of Computer Information Systems, 49(2), 1-9.
Coleman, G., & Golub, A. (2008). Hacker Practice: Moral Genres and the Cultural Articulation of Liberalism. Anthropological Theory, 8(3), 255-277.
Goldin, I. (2009). Evolution of Development Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Intersimone, D. (n.d.). Survey Provides New Insights Into ‘Hacker’ Culture. Embarcadero Developer Network . Retrieved February 26, 2013, from http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/28300
Lopung Hsu, L. (2007). Hacking Development: how geeks do good in the Digital Age. (Doctoral Dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest database.
Lunat, Z. (2008). The Internet and the Public Sphere: Evidence from Civil Society in Developing Countries. The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries, 35(3), 1-12.
Nissenbaum, H. (2004). Hackers and the Contested Ontology of Cyberspace. New Media & Society, 6(2), 195-217. Retrieved January 16, 2013, from the Sage Journals database.
Papadimitriou, F. (2006). A geography of ‘Notopia’ Hackers et al., hacktivism, urban cyber?groups/cyber?cultures and digital social movements. City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 10(3), 317-326. Retrieved January 16, 2013, from the Taylor Francis Online database.
Taylor, P. (2005). From hackers to hacktivists: speed bumps on the global superhighway?. New Media & Society, 7(5), 625-646.
Wray, S. (1998, June 17). The Electronic Disturbance Theater and Electronic Civil Disobedience. thing.net. Retrieved February 26, 2013, from http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/EDTECD.html
In follow-up to the “Event Summary: “Hacktivists, Cyberwarriors and International Relations” post, we thought we would share the audio for this event. In this recording you will find Stefania Milan’s talk along with the Q&A session with her and Gabriella Coleman that followed. Special thanks to Yelena Gyulkhandanyan for sharing it with us.
You can download the file from WeTransfer.com HERE
Recently two members of the SMRT boler team attended a talk hosted at Munk School of Global Affairs titled “Harassmap: Social Mapping Sexual Harassment and Violence in Egypt.” The presenter, Rebecca T. Chiao, is Co-Founder and Director of HarassMap. Combining community activism with mobile and internet technology, Harassmap is a volunteer initiative that strives to end the social acceptability of sexual harassment in Egypt.
Introduction to the Harassmap website – http://harassmap.org/ – the tool is accessible for everyone here to add/view reports
Harassmap is an instance of Ushahidi, a crisis mapping platform used around the world to gather and aggregate citizen reports with maps. Examples include: Eleccion Ciudadana, an initiative in used to plot suspicious activity around the recent Venezuelan election; Uchaguzi – used to track election violence related to the present Kenyan election
The initiative provides the opportunity for both men and women to report any instances of harassment they may have experienced or witnessed
Reports are geo-tagged and plotted on a map of the region for global viewing. Number of reports for a region are depicted by a red circle stating the number of reports received.
Hovering over a report allows the public to view the details of the report
Reports are validated by hand through Harassmap prior to public post
Awareness raising is the result of this ongoing expression online and communities are starting to create “harassment free zones”
Until recently Harassmap has been strictly volunteer based. At present they have just received funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and have started to hire staff in country and at headquarters to progress the initiative
With hired staff they plan on developing reporting mechanisms that will allow them to better measure their impact
It was an excellent talk to an audience full of hope and enthusiasm. Thanks Rebecca for the inspiration.
Recently two members of the SMRT boler team attended a talk hosted at Munk School of Global Affairs titled “Harassmap: Social Mapping Sexual Harassment and Violence in Egypt.” The presenter, Rebecca T. Chiao, is Co-Founder and Director of HarassMap. Combining community activism with mobile and internet technology, Harassmap is a volunteer initiative that strives to end the social acceptability of sexual harassment in Egypt.
Introduction to the Harassmap website – http://harassmap.org/ – the tool is accessible for everyone here to add/view reports
Harassmap is an instance of Ushahidi, a crisis mapping platform used around the world to gather and aggregate citizen reports with maps. Examples include: Eleccion Ciudadana, an initiative in used to plot suspicious activity around the recent Venezuelan election; Uchaguzi – used to track election violence related to the present Kenyan election
The initiative provides the opportunity for both men and women to report any instances of harassment they may have experienced or witnessed
Reports are geo-tagged and plotted on a map of the region for global viewing. Number of reports for a region are depicted by a red circle stating the number of reports received.
Hovering over a report allows the public to view the details of the report
Reports are validated by hand through Harassmap prior to public post
Awareness raising is the result of this ongoing expression online and communities are starting to create “harassment free zones”
Until recently Harassmap has been strictly volunteer based. At present they have just received funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and have started to hire staff in country and at headquarters to progress the initiative
With hired staff they plan on developing reporting mechanisms that will allow them to better measure their impact
It was an excellent talk to an audience full of hope and enthusiasm. Thanks Rebecca for the inspiration.
Recently, our team had the privilege of meting with activist and author Dr. Chris Hables Gray a visiting scholar at OISE. Dr. Gray is a lecturer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and at California State University at Monterey Bay. He is also onminds the leading minds on cyborg culture, and author of The Cyborg Handbook, The Cyborg Citizen,and Peace, War, and Computers.
Unfortunately, a major snowstorm prevented Dr. Gray feach sitting on public panel that was to beheld at OISE, but luckily, his ideas gained some added Canadian exposure on CBC’s popular tech program “Spark”
We encourage you to take a listen to the interview, he is a really fascinating speaker and has helped us immensely by sharing his experiences as a revolutionary.
Check it out!
WeRallCyborgs’ interview, Dr Chris Hables Gray, CBC Spark [@16:00] http://tinyurl.com/bb28qr6
3rd printing, Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, ed. Megan Boler, MIT Press, 2013.
Matt Ratto and Megan Boler, DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and Social Media, MIT Press, 2014.
Ian Reilly and Megan Boler, “The Rally to Restore Sanity, Pre-politicization, and the Future of Politics” Communication, Culture and Critique (forthcoming 2013)
Megan Boler, “Social Media and Global Protest: Hybrid Social Movements and Politics as the ‘Redistribution of the Sensible,'”ed. Martha McCaughey, Cyberactivism 2.0 volume, Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture series (forthcoming 2014)
Megan Boler, “Truth and Sensemaking in Digital Dissent,” Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media, ed. Chris Atton (forthcoming 2014)
Upcoming Talks:
Respondent, Kneller Invited Lecture, Philosophy of Education Society, Portland, OR, March 2013
M. Boler, Invited Plenary, Transmedia Hollywood 4. UCLA Campus, April 12th, 2013 (conference co-directors Henry Jenkins and Denise Mann). http://www.liquid-bass.com/conference/panel-3-through-any-media-necessary-activism-in-a-diy-culture/
M. Boler, Invited Keynote, “Social Media and Horizontal Politics,” ‘Transforming Audiences‘ Fourth International conference, 2-3 Sep 2013 University of Westminster’, London September, 2013
To refer to someone as a hacker often implies that they engage in illicit acts of tapping into secret databases, stealing information, and threatening network security. Law enforcement and security agencies guard against hacker attacks. To them, hackers stand for disobedience, anarchy, and challenge to the status quo order (Nissenbaum, 2004).