Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: At the current critical juncture in media, technology, and politics, communication infrastructure is becoming politicized. This paper describes the emergence of discourses and practices of “policy hacking” at locations where geeks and hackers encounter media reform advocates. In particular, it draws from participant observation at Community Wireless Networking Summits and Media Reform Conferences – network forums where actors with different types of technical and political expertise created a common language and practice that politicized WiFi and internet technologies. In turn, ideas about “policy hacking” contributed to the politicization of Net Neutrality that focus on the desirability of an open internet – despite the practical constraints limiting this vision. Finally, the paper concludes with a reflection on the limitations of “policy hacking” as a way of framing political interventions. At the intersection of media and politics, communication and technology, this paper presents a critical assessment of new keywords for understanding a techno-political society.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper demonstrates how networked individualism has become an important component in the merchantability and design of new technologies. As co-production increasingly becomes a recognized lifestyle for technology users, industry will have to change the way new technologies are produced and marketed worldwide. I argue that the TIVO digital video recorder (DVR) is being co-produced by a small but committed group of loyal home DVR enthusiasts, who use online forums to disseminate hacking tips, in order to modify this new technology. I discuss how the DVR industry has responded to user innovations through designs that allow them to re-assert control over the technology. Industry has failed to recognize the culture of co-production among DVR enthusiasts by working to subvert the network potential of new technology.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Consistent with Robbins and Webster (1999) and Dean (1999), this article argues that the logic of capitalist technoculture is an anti-revolutionary extension of Taylorism and governmentality, and that such logic is present in the information systems theories of Shannon and Weaver (1949) and Wiener (1948). Within such a framework, the noise produced by early radio amateurs and computer hackers can be seen as “alternating” within the “direct” flows of capitalist information systems, a perspective that reveals a consistent historical context for adaptations of radio and computer technologies and their cultural significance. Nevertheless, acts of alternation themselves are seen as problematic in that they are mostly a-political attempts to control technology and its spaces that affirm the secrecy, surveillance, and private interests of capitalist information systems. Forms of alternation are identified through the extensive use of historical and secondary sources, and are grouped according to their adaptations of technologies (hard) and of technologically-enabled spaces (soft). The exclusive analysis of radio and computer hackers is justified through a common foundation in the shenanigans of telephone switchboard operators of the late 1870s.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Currently, children who are born intersexed (having some characteristics of both males and females, either genetically or physically) have no constitutional right to choose whether to remain intersexed or to “become” male or female. The current practice allows parents to “choose” to set their child’s physical sex at birth. Assuming that by raising a child in a specific gender that child will grow up “normal,” parents make the tragic decision to create a vagina, shorten a clitoris that is “too large,” remove gonads, or change a penis that is “too small” to function into a clitoris.
This Article will transform the typical arena for the intersex rights debate by focusing attention on the fundamental rights of the intersexed. By infusing constitutional law principles into the informed consent doctrine, the rights of the intersexed (and not their parents) can be formulated and protected. Through its protection of fundamental rights, the informed consent doctrine is given the capacity to protect the only party that can give truly informed consent for genital mutilation/reconstruction surgery on an intersexed child: not the parents, not the doctors, not the judges, and not society, but the intersexed individual him/herself.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In this presentation I will focus on the results of an ethnographic study of a 'competing model' of professionalism for computer programming: the 'open source' movement which includes 'free software' such as Linux. Over the past decade, an 'occupational community’ of open source programmers has grown from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of participants.

The programming profession has suffered many challenges to establishment including problems accurately certifying programmers’ skills and in training programmers with the practical knowledge that they need when they enter the job market. It appears that the open source movement is an emerging solution to many of the problems faced by 'professionalization projects' for programming.