Now downloadable: Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation | Social Signal

As announced today on Civic Minded:

I'm making my complete dissertation available for download, beginning today. Depending on your interests, you might want to download the whole enchilada, or to look at selected chapters:

• Chapter 1: Introduction provides an overview of the dissertation & methodology; it's useful for folks who want a quick overview
• Chapter 2: A taxonomy of hacktivism is a beast (65 pages) but provides a very comprehensive picture of the three main types of hacktivism: political cracking (like site defacements), performative hacktivism (like the Yes Men's work), and political coding (like folks trying to circumvent Chinese firewalls)
• Chapter 3: Collective action among virtual selves looks at hacktivism in the context of political science research on political participation; this is the research that most directly shaped my thinking about how to encourage citizen participation in online communities
• Chapter 4: Hacktivism and state autonomy looks at how hacktivists get around policy and legal decisions with the real effects of code; it's useful for organizations trying to understand how the Internet changes the bounds of their effective authority
• Chapter 5: Hacktivism and the future of democratic discourse looks at how hacktivism illuminates hopes for an online "public sphere"; it's useful for folks thinking about issues like free speech and anonymity online
• Chapter 6: Conclusion pulls it all back together and reflects on how hacktivism has been wrongly conflated with cyberterrorism as part of of the post 9/11 age of anxiety; it may interest folks who want to understand the impact of security anxieties on the space for online expression

I hope these files will be useful to a wide range of people who are trying to understand the more colorful and innovative elements of online participation -- including its latest incarnation at Halliburton Contracts.