Fisk-Memo26

__Recontextualizing Youth Internet Safety__ Over the past 10 years, the safety of youth Internet users as they communicate and interact with others has become an increasing concern for parents, teachers, school administrators and legislators. To date, the broad majority of research projects centered on youth Internet safety issues have been based on the collection of quantitative survey data, with relatively little ethnographic work performed on the topic. The survey instruments used for these types of projects are invariably constructed from within dominant discourses of youth Internet safety, largely ignoring the perspective of youth and their everyday use of computers and the Internet. Drawing upon the results of interviews with students, teachers and parents throughout Upstate NY, I recontextualize youth Internet safety survey data from over 40,000 K-12 students in the Rochester, NY area back within the actual practice of youth Internet users. In doing so, I not only provide deeper insight into youth Internet use the risks youth face online, but additionally provide a unique perspective on the dominant discourses of youth Internet safety which pervade news media coverage and legislation.

__Predators, Bullies and Pornography: A Discourse Analysis of Youth Internet Safety Media Coverage__ In the “information society” it nearly goes without saying that children and teenagers have increasingly embraced Internet-based platforms for communication and social interaction following the advent of personal computing in the early 1980's. From the early electronic bulletin board systems and online chat rooms to the social networking sites of today, information technologies have shaped – and been shaped by – youth culture. While the use of such technologies as platforms for social interaction has been generally perceived as positive, the adoption of information technologies by youth has created new possibilities for exposure to and participation in new configurations of socially deviant activities. More recently, concerns over the risks that youth face online have become an increasingly common topic of discussion for the mainstream news media. In this essay, I examine the role of the news media in constructing “youth Internet safety” as a social problem, guiding both legislation and school administrators in attempts to regulate the online spaces in which youth congregate.

__“The World of Data Confronts the Joy of Hacking”__ For over two decades, computer hacking has been portrayed as a criminal activity, with hackers developing viruses, breaking into private computer networks and defacing websites, in addition to being framed as a primary source of problems with information technology. However, by tracing hacking back to its origins in groups of engineering students and hobbyists in the 1960's and 1970's, a very different picture of hacking emerges. While authors of both popular and scholarly works have analyzed the history of hacking, and the shifts in the meaning of the term over time, these analyses focus primarily on deviant computer use, largely failing to explain the breadth of meanings attributed to the terms “hacker” and “hacking.” This presentation reframes the shifting portrayal of hackers and hacking as an encounter between the hacking subculture and dominant discourse. Through dominant discourses of hacking, the hacker subculture is disaggregated and reconstituted, subjugating forms of hacker knowledge and hacking as a way of knowing, while strategically co-opting more useful modes of hacker activity. This process has not gone unchallenged, however, and this presentation will conclude with a discussion of attempts at resisting formal systemization by “hackers.”