Toward a Hacker Literacy: How Reactions to Facebook Privacy Snafus Illustrate Empowered Digital Practices

• In Event: Critical Digital Literacies as Social Praxis: Intersections and Challenges

Abstract

In May 2007, a young man named Alex Harbinger led a protest in the virtual world of Teen Second Life called “The Walk for Intergrid Commerce”, advocating that the teen-only space be merged with the “main grid” of Second Life, where adults engaged in a virtual economy more robust than its teen counterpart (Harbinger, 2010). In August 2007, Chris Messina, an open web advocate proposed a way people might self-organize on Twitter using “hashtags,” pound signs followed by a distinct signature placed at the end of posts (Messina, 2010). In early May 2010, a software developer named Matt Pizzimenti created an open source tool that showed Facebook users a visual display of the information in their profile that was currently public (Singel, 2010). Each of these actions directly or indirectly resulted in important changes to the key socio-technical spaces that now mediate modern life.
This presentation will highlight an emerging set of empowered media practices, called Hacker Literacies, which are both critical and participatory in nature. Hacker Literacy practices, themselves natural responses to a shifting new media landscape, have echoes of existing media literacy paradigms, though they are not fully encapsulated by them. In many ways, they represent a synthesis of the Critical media literacy tradition (NAMLE, 2010; Buckingham, 2003) and the more recent Participatory or “New” media literacy tradition (Jenkins et al., 2006; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003).
Hacker Literacies, which draw their name from computer programmers who take existing code and reconfigure it for their own purposes and in line with their own values, are distinct from existing media literacy practices in that they are not only empowered by participatory new media tools, but empowered in relation to these tools as well. In this presentation, I explore the theoretical space around Hacker Literacy practices and share empirical data evidencing their current manifestation in real world contexts.
An analysis of public reactions to Facebook privacy policy and feature changes that took place in the Spring of 2010 illustrate the ways that the users of new media displayed Hacker Literacies by not taking for granted the design of the sociotechnical space they used, and the intentions and interests of that space’s creators. Their understanding of the malleability of this space and consequent actions resulted in its reformulation, an outcome that might be considered the apex of Hacker Literacy practices.
Ultimately, these reformulations, or “hacks”, of the sociotechnical spaces that mediate contemporary life to bring it more in line with the values of participants, are the reason that Hacker Literacy practices warrant attention. These hacks are increasingly linked to privacy issues (Boyd & Hargittai, 2010; Wall Street Journal, 2010), unexamined norming of social practices (Mackay, 1991; Lenhart et al., 2010), and exploitation of labor (Sholz & Liu, 2010; Peterson, 2008). I argue that Hacker Literacies, the processes and practices that lead to changes in the ways these spaces function, will be crucial if there is to be a more fluid and democratic distribution of media power in the digital age.

Author

• Rafi Santo, Indiana University - Bloomington