Abstract
In the 1970s, researchers and engineers built the technical predecessor of today’s global digital networks, but more importantly, they created an “Internet Imaginaire” (Flichy 2007) with the aim of building a global virtual society. In the 1990s, most supporters of the utopian digital community fell silent. The hackers, however, remained, and they still adhere to rules put down in the so-called “hacker ethic” (Levy 1984; Coleman 2015), such as decentralization and freedom of information, which contribute to a sociotechnical “Hacker Imaginaire.” With the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) as a research programme, this paper investigates the genesis and perseverance of this imaginary by uncovering technoscientific promises in media documents and interviews, which were formulated in response to the continued development of Internet-based technologies and fuel this imaginary; and by describing its phenomenal structure.
Highlights
In the 1970s, researchers and engineers built the technical predecessor of today’s global digital networks, but more importantly, they created an “Internet Imaginaire” (Flichy 2007) with the aim of building a global virtual society
Once commercial and political actors entered the Internet in the 1990s, most supporters of the utopian idea of a digital community fell silent; largely, only open source advocates and hackers remained
Research on hackers and hacking has been conducted in various disciplines, such as anthropology, media research, communication studies, cultural studies, criminology, computer sciences, law, economics, and various sociological subfields in the Anglo-Saxon, German, and French traditions, including STS, Internet sociology, sociology of crime, sociologie des usages (“sociology of usages”), and sociologie des réseaux (“network sociology”)
Summary
In the 1970s, researchers and engineers built the technical predecessor of today’s global digital networks, but more importantly, they created an “Internet Imaginaire” (Flichy 2007) with the aim of building a global virtual society. 2 http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack.html, accessed on March 14, 2019 This definition can be traced back to the “philosophy” of students at the MIT, especially at the MIT model railroad club, who used the term “hack” to describe sophisticated pranks they would play on others. By framing hackers, hacking, and hacker “culture” as parts of such an imaginary, and by assuming a theoretical perspective based on the sociology of knowledge, it is possible to overcome the methodological limitations imposed by focusing on only one of these aspects To develop this approach, I will briefly refer to the original “Internet Imaginaire” (Flichy 2007) and derive a “Hacker Imaginaire” from it.
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