rearranging forms
16:15 | 06-01-2013 | Culturology | No Comments
Габриэлла Коулман, антрополог, провела три года, изучая хакерскую культуру — вот отрывок из ее интервью журналу Wired:
WIRED: What did your peers in the academic world think about your work?
COLEMAN: They, I think, thought that it was interesting and kind of great that someone was moving forward. But I think there was this idea that the geek hacker world, especially in the context of the west, was culturally thin and anemic. “Oh very interesting politically — they’re coming up with these alternative licenses — but isn’t it just about white men tinkering with their computers?”
And in some ways, I think I thought that too. But then, I was like, wait a minute, when it comes to the culture of computer hacking and the aesthetics of hacking, I was blown away by how culturally deep it was.
There’s a whole chapter on joking, humor and cleverness among hackers. And that, to me, was one of the fascinating areas. And I feel that I’ve just scratched the surface with that chapter — to how deep and complex their oral histories are and their folklore is. And how they record it in everything from how they name pieces of software, which are often historical references to the past, to just the enormous amount of writing that computer hackers do in the non-technical sense: manifestos and zines and science fiction, you know
And I was just kind of astounded by that at some level. And astounded by the way in which on the one hand the hacker world was the place where the culture of civil liberties was on fire. And that’s something that anyone can relate to because people beyond the hacker world know about free speech and privacy. And on the other hand, there was this aesthetic world that was intensely focused on itself and was very difficult to translate to the general public.
And so that kind of melding of the deep pleasures of hacking and the cultures of civil liberties were something that I thought was quite anthropological. But my peers were really unconvinced of it.