Publications

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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The Harvard Business Review

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OneZero

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JSTOR DAILY

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THE VERGE

Now downloadable: Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation

Now downloadable: Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation

As announced today on Civic Minded:

I’m making my complete dissertation available for download, beginning today. Depending on your interests, you might want to download the whole enchilada, or to look at selected chapters:

  • Chapter 1: Introduction provides an overview of the dissertation & methodology; it’s useful for folks who want a quick overview
  • Chapter 2: A taxonomy of hacktivism is a beast (65 pages) but provides a very comprehensive picture of the three main types of hacktivism: political cracking (like site defacements), performative hacktivism (like the Yes Men’s work), and political coding (like folks trying to circumvent Chinese firewalls)
  • Chapter 3: Collective action among virtual selves looks at hacktivism in the context of political science research on political participation; this is the research that most directly shaped my thinking about how to encourage citizen participation in online communities
  • Chapter 4: Hacktivism and state autonomy looks at how hacktivists get around policy and legal decisions with the real effects of code; it’s useful for organizations trying to understand how the Internet changes the bounds of their effective authority
  • Chapter 5: Hacktivism and the future of democratic discourse looks at how hacktivism illuminates hopes for an online “public sphere”; it’s useful for folks thinking about issues like free speech and anonymity online
  • Chapter 6: Conclusion pulls it all back together and reflects on how hacktivism has been wrongly conflated with cyberterrorism as part of of the post 9/11 age of anxiety; it may interest folks who want to understand the impact of security anxieties on the space for online expression

I hope these files will be useful to a wide range of people who are trying to understand the more colorful and innovative elements of online participation — including its latest incarnation at Halliburton Contracts.

Attached to Accuracy

Attached to Accuracy

Tonight's bout of vigilante fact-checking was prompted by a story on the web site of Attachment Parenting International (API). API is a nonprofit that advocates for what is these days the ascendant philosophy of child-rearing. Best known through the works of William...

On Civic Minded: Jane Jacobs drew the map on online community

On Civic Minded: Jane Jacobs drew the map on online community

From my Civic Minded blog on Corante: 

Today marked the end of Jane Jacobs' life, but not of her work. Jacobs' pioneering work in urban planning changed the way we think about cities — and by redefining our ideas about how cities work as communities, she set the stage for the best thinking about online community today….

Jacobs' death reminds me how much my own work in online community, and the work of Internet community-builders in general, owes to that earlier generation who reclaimed urban centres as living communities. The most important principles of online community building and online dialogue grow out of the experiences of urban community planners and participation planners: Communities are about people, not structures. Healthy communities are owned and shaped by their members, not by some team of expert planners. Communities thrive on activity and diversity. And if many of the most influential experiments in online community are those that tie online communities to real-world towns and cities — projects like Die Digitale Stadt, MeetUp or even craigslist — they also owe a debt to Jacobs for helping to keep those real-world communities vital.

Read the whole post on Civic Minded.