The other set of presentations I saw at ASIS&T that were very interesting to me were included in a session called Anarchists, Pirates, Ideologists, and Disasters: New Digital Trends and Their Impacts. It was great fun. I did feel some obligation to go, as one of the presentations was about trolling in Wikipedia, and another was about Hacktivism, which is a subject near and dear to me as I studied and wrote a great deal about it in undergrad. The other presentations, interestingly, were about ICT response to disasters, such as telecom response to Hurricane Katrina, where the presenter focussed on the clash between "ad-hoc" responders, such as community wireless advocates, and formal military/telco respondants. All of these stories are about the conflict between marginalized and mainstream, about disruptive voices and whether they are productive, and about the fine distinctions between a hactivist and a black-hat hacker, or a legitimate complainant and a troll, or a helpful presence and someone in the way. These stories are also about the ways that outsiders can use ICT to take matters into their own hands that both intrude into and are impossible in the physical world. It was fascinating, and it reminded me that I have unfinished research on hackers that is still interesting to me, and perhaps more relevant now than ever.
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