Tracking the development of the Anonymous Network
I figure since this week's book could relate directly to what I'd like to write my thesis about, I'd take the time to formally track how the Anonymous network of commmunication developed over time.
Anonymous started on the website 4chan.org. On that site's message boards, instead of having unique login and screennames to identify individual users, users were instead all given the username "Anonymous" and posted anonymously. This counterintuitively developed a strong user community.
One of the first activities the Anonymous collective executed was a protest of the church of Scientology over perceived human rights violations. Protesters in the real world dressed in Guy Fawkes masks and played Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" on repeat outside of Scientology offices and churches. The group organized when a video was released explaining the operation (dubbed "Operation Chanology" after the 4Chan message board the group originated from).
So far I count several genres: internet message boards, a video uploaded to YouTube, the boom boxes and Rick Astley, and the holding a sign in front of Scientology offices. These genres worked together to have people from all over the world unitedly protesting with a single message. All of this was done through genre ecologies.
Later protests and activities would spread to be used on other message boards (Reddit being a significant player here) as well as unofficial "official" Twitter accounts and blogs. One of the defining characteristics of the Anonymous group is the lack of any sort of single leadership, and so this makes authoritarian models of network theory difficult to adapt. There are inherent "leaders" in the group--those who actually make the videos, flyers, blog posts and tweets--but they are impossible to identify (unless they mess up and leave metadata in the files they upload to the internet).
I'm trying to figure out how to approach this from a theoretical standpoint. I think this type of organization would be more actor-network theory than activity theory since it's not centralized and isn't very structured (Spinuzzi [45] claims that "activity networks are much more structured than actor-networks"). However, activity systems and activity network approaches seem to work because if the linkage through shared tools, resources, or communities (43). They also cast nonhumans as objects of labor through actants by implementing software tools to take down websites. For example, the LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) tool is what was used by several participants to take down several websites. I think. Right?
i'm sorry that i did not see your post last week, matt. i swear that i looked at my google reader feed several times on monday and your post was never recognized as new. moreover, i did not see your tweet. sorry.
ReplyDeletei wonder if the "genre" might not be social protest, with various sites, channels, and media forming the ecology?
and, while i think that you could readily apply either activity theory or actor-network theory to this particular organization, i think that ANT might be more applicable because of its emphasis on power and ad hoc alliances. activity theory might be too development oriented for your purposes, and it may require you to identify an object of the activity system.