Ethics and Law in New Media homework - Week 5

Browse the Jargon File. Write a small blog entry about a term/definition which was the most intriguing for you.

Portrait of a hacker

Education
Nearly all hackers past their teens are either college-degreed or self-educated to an equivalent level. The self-taught hacker is often considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart. Academic areas from which people often gravitate into hackerdom include (besides the obvious computer science and electrical engineering) physics, mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy.

The thing I found interesting while browsing the Jargon File was the way hackers parceive education. The self-learners are more motivated and respected than the educated hackers, who have been shaped by the school system. This kind of attitude could actually be overtaken by many employers from other fields as well. Who says that a degree defines persons skills if today so much information and learning materials are freely available. The person educates himself and forms his own opinions rather than studies the opinions of someone else. The degree should not be a prerequisite of its own to get a job as it is almost everywhere today. Therefore I find the hackers opinion about education fair. Important is to "walk the walk not only talk the talk". :)


Write a short blogged analysis about the hacker ethic found in today's world (is it there of not, how much of it etc).

The research by Steven Mizrach showed that the hackers in the 90s had not forgotten about the original Hacker Ethics conducted in the 60s. But the old ethics were combined with new ones. He also described the new ethics in his research. I believe a form of Hacker Ethics exists to this day, because if it didn't, it would create a chaos and be a great risk for the computerized world. New ethics are probably also just modified old ethics which take into consideration the changes taken place in todays IT world.


Choose a minority group and describe how they can make use of Internet to reduce alienation and prejudice.

Today I found an ad from my mailbox, which included an invitation to the South-Korean culture days. As I clicked on the event's web site I was pleasantly surprised by the site's design and content. I could say that it influenced my opinion of South-Korea in a positive way. Which leads me to the idea that every minority nation in another country can create a positive image of itself by offering quality content in the Internet. Basically it doesn't matter if it is a web site, a social network account, videos, photos or even adequate comments under a news piece, everything creates an image. If the minority representatives represent their country in the right places and in a right way, the image of these specific people will carry on to their entire nation.