Resisting the Hackers: Activism and Metaphor

I knew absolutely nothing about hacking before I tackled the topic for this week’s class. I mean, of course I had heard vaguely about a hacking attack on Pay Pal (I recall I had to change my information afterwards) and it has been a common trope to hear that a site had been hacked, or the ubiquitous, “someone hacked into my Facebook account” to explain embarrassing non sequiturs. As I wrote to a friend Tuesday morning, “I have to go start my reading for my 614 class this week. The topic of the week is hacking – I’m not sure I care! But I’m open to being convinced I am wrong!”

            A few days later I’m not sure I am convinced, but two aspects embedded in the whole discussion of hacking did interest me, and have allowed me a way in to an intellectual curiosity about the issue; activism and metaphor. Activism allows me to consideration a motivation that I otherwise can’t understand for the doing of hacking. Metaphor allows me to consider the issues of communication and rhetoric that underlie the divide between the technology of practitioners who do and the rest of us who seek to understand why.

                        The issue of activism caught my interest since I had never encountered that element as a justification for hacking. I had a fairly naïve, unsubtle understanding (and still do!) of certain motivations for hacking based on mischief-making, monetary gain, and general mayhem. I wish now that I had been more aware of where and when I came to develop these understandings, since I would like to reconsider whether my understandings were the result of my own avoidance of the issue or a legitimate bias in the ways that hacking is reported in the news and is represented in popular culture such as television and film. Is the more altruistic, philosophical, or political agendas for hacking being edited out of the versions of hacking that get reported to the public? From the perspective of someone like myself, with my generally liberal and socially-conscious beliefs, activist sympathy is an easy button to push, and as I read Olson’s chapter on Anonymous, I was noticing how easily I was being pulled into a more sympathetic view towards hacking. Emotional appeals aside, I felt I needed to be more analytical, and of course, at a second glance, all sorts of complexities present themselves. Is this a thoughtful and targeted activism by those concerned? Or is it anarchism and egotism adopting the dress of activism? What are the social goals of such an activism? I think Olson’s ultimate point in the chapter that the large-scale hacking of groups like Anonymous are dominated hugely by the egotism of a few rather than the social ideologies of the many, is a valuable one. But the activism angle did open up the possibility that a few activist-hackers, working as the technological spearhead for a larger social interest group, could engage in what might be a “good” activism via hacking. What troubles me, though, is whether it fits my definition of good activism by being a peaceful act of civil disobedience, or whether it transgresses into damage and aggression.

            The other issue that interested me, particularly in the Parmy Olson chapter we read, was the complex ways in which metaphor featured in the explication of what the hackers were doing. Mediating the exchange between the technological complex and publicly accessible was a wide range of interesting imagery and metaphor that attempted to offer a way in to understanding what hackers do. This chapter and our other readings were riddled with allusions to pathways and roads, tunnels and circuitry, weapons and assaults, hives and pods and all the rest. It left me bewildered because there seemed such a disconnect between what was really happening within these groups and the technologies they were utilizing, and how it was being explained. I fundamentally wanted to know how they did some of these things, not in great depth, but just in a way that would help me understand how the whole process worked. The vehicle for communication made itself very apparent, and the signifier seemed dangerously removed from what was being signified. While I can see why a certain amount of metaphor can help us to conceptualize these complex activities, I am still pondering how the ways in which these things are rendered simple condition how we view them. If we can only understand hacking via certain stereotypical and widely applied imagery, how does our perception also lack in complexity, ideological as well as technological? A stereotypical language of imagery and metaphor, saturated with certain conventional ways of explication probably does indeed narrow our understanding of hacking, possibly in profound ways. Even as somewhat of a technological nitwit, I feel frustrated that I am being controlled by a language that keeps me at a distance while demanding an intellectual and/or emotional response.

Dabbling my toes in the ocean that is Wikipedia...

While I use Wikipedia regularly to check dates, opus numbers for pieces, correct titles and countless other bits of information I need for my work but can’t quite be bothered actually remembering, up until this point I have never edited a Wikipedia article and I had no idea what was involved in doing so. When I saw we had the option this week of doing just that, I figured it was time to get over my hesitation and explore the process.

            Before totally committing to the idea, I wanted to make sure that I felt there was someplace that I could actually contribute something useful. I looked at the entries for some of the composers I know well – Elgar, Vaughan Williams, among others – and topics I deal with, like the English Musical Renaissance. These were long and complex articles, and most of the ones I looked at I felt had been well-written and well-vetted. I simply didn’t see any obvious lacunae, and thought that any contribution would be more political/ideological on my part than substantive. There is a general sense in academic musicology that it is part of our “job” to oversee things like Wikipedia entries, and there seems to be a lot of contribution by my colleagues towards policing things that fall within our realm of expertise.

            Eventually I got around to looking at the entry on the English Masque – a genre I know well and from which I drew case studies for my dissertation/monograph -  and found that there really was nothing there drawing attention to the fact that composers continued to write masques during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and then there was an odd mention of two 20^th century masques by Vaughan Williams and Lambert. I thought I could easily add a paragraph or two, just mentioning that there is more history there to explore.

            The process of creating an account was ominously easy; the choice of a username ‘scholargardener’ and a password granted me almost universal ability to edit anything I wanted. Once I had created my account, Wikipedia suggested I participate in the mundane work of a Wiki of this size by suggesting that I offer to do editing on articles they recommended by improving clarity, adding links, or fixing spelling and grammar. I appreciate that people need to do these things for the system to work, but I was on a mission.

            I chose to return to the Masque entry page, where I had new links and choices on the top I had never seen before. I had a new notification, welcoming me to Wikipedia and giving me a link to control my settings, which I had a quick look at. I had a link for preferences, a “watchlist”, and a “contributions list,” and an edit and history tab.

            I figured the place to start was with the “history” of the article, since I was curious what kinds of edits had been done to the article. I have to say, my expectations were that the article would have been written quite a while ago, and that there would have been a limited number of edits done by a very limited number of editors. I was quite surprised, then, to see a very long list of edits spread over a long period of time. The most recent edits were done in early September, and there were quite a few edits done in May and June, but going back several years. I wonder if the article didn’t come up as one of the “recommended for editing” list, since most of the edits seemed to be about creating links and importing citations. Again, I was surprised at the number of people who had worked on the entry, and relatively few of them had worked on it repeatedly.

            At one point the article had been vandalized, and had been fixed; I didn’t quite get exactly what had happened. And there were some substantive changes and comments made that things needed supporting citation. None of it seemed particularly fractious; this obviously was not a forum for the latest debates on aspect of the English masque. One feature I found interesting is that you could question an editor about a particular point or a particular change. Editing was frequently undone as well!

            I then went back to the entry page and clicked the edit button. I scrolled down to the end, where I was going to insert some of my own material. The original section looked like this:

While no longer popular, there are later examples of the masque. In the 20th century, [[Ralph Vaughan Williams]] wrote ''[[Job, a masque for dancing]]'' which premiered in 1930, although the work is closer to a [[ballet]] than a masque as it was originally understood. His designating it a masque was to indicate that the modern [[choreography]] typical when he wrote the piece would not be suitable.

[[Constant Lambert]] also wrote a piece he called a masque, ''Summer's Last Will and Testament'', for orchestra, chorus and baritone. His title he took from [[Thomas Nash]], whose masque<ref>It was a "comedy" when it was printed, in 1600 as ''A Pleasant Comedie, call'd Summers Last will and Testament''<!--correct as entered-->, but, as a character announces, "nay, 'tis no Play neither, but a show." With Nash's stage direction ''"Enter Summer, leaning on Autumn's and Winter's shoulders, and attended on with a train of Satyrs and wood-Nymphs, singing: [[Vertumnus]] also following him"'' we are recognizably in the world of Masque.</ref> was probably first presented before the [[Archbishop of Canterbury]], perhaps at his London seat, [[Lambeth Palace]], in 1592.

It took me a few minutes to figure out what the characters meant and the appropriate Wikipedia marking indications to use when, eventually figuring out how to do italics and how to create links to other entries. In the end, I decided on two things. First, I decided as much as possible not to change what someone else had written, and instead to try to incorporate their material. So the slightly odd, tacked on paragraphs about Job and Summer’s Last Will and Testament I left in, even though I might have talked more generally about VW and Lambert if I was starting the entry from scratch. Second, I decided not to include citations. This was such a basic, brief, and general account of the masque during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, I thought citations would be overkill and overly specific for the information contained. I didn’t want to self-cite, and I didn’t want to open a can of worms by having to offer long lists of citations for general information. It will be interesting to see if I get queried about that in the future!

In the end, here is the new version of that section of the entry:

Later Masques

While the masque was no longer as popular as it was at its height in the 17th Century, there are many later examples of the masque. During the late 17th century, English semi-operas by composers such as Henry Purcell had masque scenes inset between the acts of the play proper. In the 18th century, William Boyce and Thomas Arne, among other composers, continued to utilize the masque genre mostly as an occasional piece, and the genre became increasingly associated with patriotic topics. There are isolated examples throughout the first half of the 19th century.

With the renaissance of English musical composition during the late 19th and early 20th century (the so-called English Musical Renaissance), English composers turned to the masque as a way of connecting to a genuinely English musical-dramatic form in their attempts to build a historically-informed national musical style for England. Examples include those by Arthur Sullivan, George Macfarren, and even Edward Elgar, whose imperialistic Crown of India was the central feature at the London Coliseum in 1912. Masques also became common as scenes in operettas and musical theatre works set during the Elizabethan period.

In the 20th century, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote several masques, including his masterpiece in the genre, Job, a masque for dancing which premiered in 1930, although the work is closer to a ballet than a masque as it was originally understood. His designating it a masque was to indicate that the modern choreography typical when he wrote the piece would not be suitable.

 Constant Lambert also wrote a piece he called a masque, Summer's Last Will and Testament, for orchestra, chorus and baritone. His title he took from Thomas Nash, whose masque^[3] was probably first presented before the Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps at his London seat, Lambeth Palace, in 1592.

When I was finished, I went and checked out the “Watchlist” tab in my commands above, and noted that the masque article was now on my watchlist. I provided an email address, which I am presuming means that I will be notified if anyone edits the entry in the coming weeks. And as a little reward for my efforts, I had my first entries there for me to see on my “Contributions” list!

            I’m glad I took the opportunity to try this out and look behind the scenes a bit. I have a much better understanding of how the process works now, and perhaps an even more heightened sense of anxiety about how fraught the process can be. It is so incredibly easy to edit anything, and things need to be aggressively policed for misinformation not to happen. It all comes down to how much people care, doesn’t it?

Find the entry at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masque

“Yet another item for the collection…”

So, a more personal and chatty blogpost than usual this week….

I found the topic and readings on video game cultures and gaming literacies for the week to be very interesting, and each of the readings gave me plenty to think about from the perspective of an “outsider” who has never played video games. I will confess that most of the time I struggle to see the point of games, apart from FIFA in its yearly incarnation (I like the idea of playing with MY Arsenal team rather than Wenger’s!) and games that are designed to help build children’s skills through another mode of “play.” As someone who really knows nothing about what is out there, I have always worried about the violence many games seem to encourage, the huge amounts of time games like Civilization seem to require, and the real addiction I see among friends and the children of friends. Despite my doubts about the video game “thing,” I came to the readings willing to engage with the issues. In the end, each of the articles made me think about the relevance of theorizing about gaming in a much deeper way, and I thought the readings reflected the richness of the topic through their breadth and scope.

That being said, I am not going to write about video games! And yes, that may yet be rooted in my ambivalence still towards gaming. However, one of my the issues I have been struggling with in my teaching this year has been the significant one of striking a balance between teaching content and teaching skills, and the fact that Patrick Gee addresses this issue overtly in his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy seemed fortuitous, given that yet again this week I tweaked my Teaching Philosophy Statement for yet another job application!

The traditional model of teaching music history is similar to other historical disciplines in that it rests on the transfer of content. Particularly in my history survey classes for music majors, there is a huge amount of information that I am expected to impart to my students regarding style, periods, genres, composers, schools, and particular musical works. It is an often overwhelming amount of material, and one that has increased over the past decade with the inclusion of new topics previously considered non-canonical but now necessary, like that of women composers and women’s patronage. The message still predominantly seems to be that our students need to know ALL of this material; somehow we try to get through it, because it is difficult to make the decision to leave something out when there is so much of value to study.

It is an issue that musicology friends and I often talk about, and I am always surprised at how many of them are deeply committed to the idea of content. I am also surprised at how often they transfer the problems of student learning to the students themselves; music history is “hard,” the students don’t work hard enough, they don’t have the writing or reading skills and so on!

So I have been “collecting” challenges to the notion of content over the past nine months or so, due largely to the viewpoints I have encountered in my writing seminars. I use the word “collecting” self-consciously: I am accumulating a master list, I “take items out” and examine each one regularly, I look forward to finding yet another instance of resistance. A lot of the items in my “collection” stress the importance of writing as a way of learning, and the value of allowing time for the processes and transformations that occur when writing is an important part of the classroom experience. From the WID movement, I have “collected” the concept that, beyond content, we need to introduce students to what it means to be a part of a discipline and to encourage them to practice the skills they need to be a member of that community, in this case musicology. My “collection” has challenged me to begin to find new ways of balancing my teaching of content and my teaching of skills. As non-tenured faculty, my risk-taking can only be limited, but things are happening there.

So why am I adding Gee to my collection, and perhaps thinking this might be a more featured, showcased item than some of my others? First, I enjoyed playing with Gee’s concept of social domains and thinking about musicology as a social domain from several perspectives. His discussion of social domains echoes ideas of communities of readers and disciplinarity that are at the forefront of how I think about my field. Beyond this, Gee got me thinking about ways in which musicology participates in multiple social domains and therefore requires multiple literacies. Of course what we do is a product not just of content but also a set of distinctive social practices. I think it would be valuable at some point to list what might be included in the musicology set of social practices! It might be scarily David Lodge-like!

I’m not saying that Gee’s concepts are necessarily new, but they are very clearly stated and supported by good examples. For instance, active learning is not new to my vocabulary, but I feel when I discuss it in the future I can draw on his clarity and common sense approach. I found myself asking questions of how what I do in my classroom to promote active learning relates to points he make.

Gee also validated me as a teacher and my developing attitudes towards content vs. active learning. It is occasionally nice to read something and think that, oh yeah, I’m sort of doing that already - for example, in some new lesson plans I am doing with my 101 students that attempt to give them a perspective on classical music today on the meta-, critical level.

From a less reflective and more practical perspective, Gee provides vocabulary and terms that I feel will be useful for future statements about my current teaching and goals for the future. I only wish I had absorbed his concepts before I wrote my latest teaching statement! Terms such as internal and external views of semiotic domains, affinity groups, design grammars, specialist and lifeworld domains, among others, refer to concepts that I can usefully incorporate into statements of my teaching philosophy.

So far I have focused on Gee’s chapter 4, which I found very pertinent to some of the challenges I have been facing this year. Of course there are incredibly practical things to consider and possibly use in formulating the why, if not the how, of my attempts to reach my students in ways that create more valuable learning situations for them. The eight principles he discusses at the end of chapter 4 and his insistence on the need for embodied as opposed to rote learning are really validating for my attempts at modest experimentation. I found chapter six less specifically applicable to my “collection” but thought provoking.

Usually I love my theory, but it was interesting to see practicality take over in my response to this week’s reading!