Lecture 4 Flashcards
Media
Any form of communication that targets a mass audience in print or electronic format.
What does media do?
Defines social problems, shapes public debates, and defines boundaries between groups.
Administrative approach to media:
Effects of media messages on individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Scientific approach.
Critical approach to media:
Structures of power and processes of social control. How the media constructs events, issues, and identities. Power relations. Who’s telling us that something is deviant?
Framing
The overall way that an issue is depicted in the media. Affects what we notice about reality.
Framing of ethnicity:
Invisible, stereotypes, social problems, adornments, white-washed.
Framing of gender:
Feminine touch, ritualization of subordination, licensed withdrawal, and infantilization.
What game was released in the 1980’s leading to moral panic?
Dungeons and Dragons.
What was Dungeons and Dragons linked to by activists?
Linked Dungeons and Dragons with suicide, drug use, and satanism.
What is the modern moral panic in media?
Attention is now brought on what role playing violent video games do towards violence in real life.
What is ironic about the Dungeons and Dragons moral panic?
What once caused moral panic is now seen as a solution to a young generation that does not use their imagination enough.
GamerGate
- Social movement.
- Implicated in broader critiques, particularly with respect to gender and sexuality.
- Pro-GamerGate and Anti-GamerGate.
Pro-GamerGate
There is lots of collusion and corruption in the video game industry.
Anti-GamerGate
This is a distraction, and what we needs to be concerned about is sexism in video games (in culture and in the games).
Which view says that:
- Gets picked up by media more often.
- Gamers are behind the times.
- Says that Pro-GamerGate has gone to war against women under the hashtag #GamerGate.
Anti-GamerGate.
Explain the Pro-GamerGate perspective:
- Video game makers have a history of colluding with those who review video games.
- Reviewers were forced to resign or fired when writing a negative review of a particular video game.
How does the media skew the Pro-GamerGate perspective?
This is not the narrative that makes its way to media. Media portrays this as white men who want to protect their hobby from women.
Media ownership is characterized in 3 ways:
Convergence, conglomeration, and concentration.
Convergence
Company owns multiple forms of media.
Conglomeration
Merging of media companies.
Concentration
Small number of companies own the majority of media products.
Media causes deviance. It constructs deviance and normality. However, it…
Can also be used as a tool for deviance.
How can media be used as a tool for deviance?
Using mostly new media.
Cyber-deviance is a form of new media that includes:
- Cyber-crime.
- Cyber-piracy.
- Cyber-bullying.
Cyber-Crime
- Credit card fraud.
- Identity theft.
- Hacking.
What are the 5 elements of being a hacker?
- Emerges at a young age.
- Quest for and level of knowledge being foundational to hacker identities.
- Commitment to persist in doing what they do despite obstacles they may encounter in pursuit of this knowledge.
- Authenticity.
- Debates over the forms of hacking that are acceptable/unacceptable.
What are the 3 points of the hacker philosophy?
- Ingenious use of any technology.
- Tendency to reverse-engineer technology to make it do the opposite of its intended design.
- Desire to explore systems.
Categorizations of hackers:
- True hackers.
- Hardware hackers.
- Crackers.
- Microserfs.
- Hacktivists.
True Hackers
Computer pioneers of 1950’s and 60’s. Toyed with capability of computers.
Hardware Hackers
Innovators of 1970’s.
Crackers
Hackers in the 1980’s who exploited systems for malicious purposes.
Microserfs
Hackers in the 1990’s who sold out. Were Crackers, but identified with certain aspects of hackers, but wanted pension plan. Involved with corporate cultures.
Hacktivists
Hacker + activist. Big into conspiracy theories, obsessed with privacy and secrecy, membership is fluid, big into political philosophies, general anti-capitalist sentiment, culture of humour and creativity; embrace absurd and offensive.
Hackers have started to see themselves as social and political warriors in recent years. True or false?
True.
How did hackers become social and political activists?
- Wanted to be accepted as legitimate members of society where they could move away from deviant and rebellious side.
- Current political and economic context is characterized by income inequalities, unfair labour laws. Increase of corporate and state power.
- Hacker-activist culture emerged from state and corporate attempts to control intellectual property.
- Continuous with artistic communities and their attempts to manipulate the mass media to create alternative meanings.
Culturegen.
Artistic communities and their attempts to manipulate the mass media to create alternative meanings.
Example of culturegen.
Graffiti.
What is the reasoning behind a lot of graffiti?
Purpose is not to vandalize, but to challenge state and corporate power.
Cyberlibertarianism
Unconstrained progress in digital technology to solve social problems.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Unrestricted security and privacy on the internet.
Anonymous
A hacktivist group against class inequality. Socio-economic justice. Internet should be controlled by civil society.
4Chan
A place on the internet that started with anime sharing, but is now a place where adolescents post pornographic, violent, or basically anything.
What are some Anonymous activist actions in recent years?
Organized the blockage of Habbo Hotel. Campaign against Hal Turner. Serious action when Church of Scientology tried to suppress video of Tom Cruise.
