Muckraking in the Digital Age: Hacker Journalism and Cyber Activism in Legacy Media (original) (raw)

2014, Nmediac the Journal of New Media and Culture

This article traces the legacies and cultural contexts of the growing hacker journalist movement, combining historical analysis with interviews of hackers themselves. Hacker journalists, computer programmers who assume roles as journalists in order to affect social change, are at once data miners, news producers, and idealistic computer vigilantes pushing a renaissance of cyberactivism. Hacker journalism is becoming institutionalized. Hacker journalists are "hacking" into legacy news establishments. But they are also hacking into cultural tropes of "hacking" itself, re-appropriating the term "hacker." Early hackers operated under a particular moral code, a "hacker ethic," and, steeping their activities in Americanism, they imagined themselves "console cowboys" settling the new digital frontier. Hacker journalists gather at "hackathons" to work toward change in real and virtual worlds. An answer to Silicon Valley's capitalism, hacker journalists pursue non-monetary rewards and seek personal fulfillment through moral interventionism. Hacker journalism exists in a tense relationship to information: Hacker journalists are themselves deregulating information flows, but at a time when economic deregulation is, paradoxically, facilitating the reaction of multimedia conglomerates that are also privatizing information. Hacker journalists emerged in a moment characterized by anti-media and anti-government (Tea Party) and anti-corporate (Occupy Wall Street) movements as well as by idealistic notions of participatory culture and citizen journalism. Traversing many conflicting ideologies-conservative, libertarian, socialist, post-capitalist-these hackers offer informational efficiency, governmental and corporate accountability, and "Do It Yourself" empowerment to citizens but risk changing the foundations of journalism, a historic pillar American democracy.