Hacktivists

In Leah Liverouw's book Alternative and Activist New Media, Hacktivisim is referred to as "a wide variety of projects that use computing technologies for political and cultural protest and resistance."  Hacktivists are not in fact hackers of any particular hat and are defined by their objectives rather than there methods as a result.  In the survey responses, I was surprised to find that very few people had heard of hacktivists at all, and while many respondents made fairly well educated guesses as to the meaning of the term there were very few that responded with certainty and with definitions that match.  Hacktivists are a digital representation of the question for our times: 'What is the Difference between a Terrorist and a Freedom fighter?'  A Cracker Hacktivist might destroy a company's website or seek to incriminate officials in some organization or another just like a terrorist might plant a bomb or assassinate a political target, whether that hacktivist is a hero or a criminal depends on whose side they're on and which side you ask.  Adding to this are white-hat Hacktivists (Hacker hats will be discussed next post, I promise) who are akin to demonstrators on the streets.  The entire theatre of our revolutions are playing out in cyberspace just as they do in the world and parallels could perhaps be drawn between more of the various factions in any given conflict to create a full digital picture of our battlegrounds, complete as they often are with civilians that may wind up in the line of fire, protesting mobs, twitchy police officers, the works.

Sorry, I think that metaphor/explanation may have gotten a little sidetracked.  The point is, Hacktivists are either unknown or misunderstood by my survey respondents.  As I said before, many have made claims to the effect that they do not know what hacktivists are but many more have made claims that correlate the word 'activist' and the positive connotations of activism that come with it to hacktivists, ignoring the fact that activists are not limited to activism for 'good causes'.  In the end, Hacktivists are a mixed bag and the term needs more light shed on it so that the public can better understand who they are and what they do.