[p2p-research] Digital Icons Issue 4: War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Sat Dec 11 13:39:46 CET 2010

Hi Michel

Life with baby: a shift in reality to put it mildly, I dont know if
Sebastian's photo would reach you but I attach (this is an accidental photo
I took, I am not very good), he is louder than his mum, if that is possible.
Thanks for getting the word out re journal. Final corrections were submitted
a day before I gave birth lol
You sound busy in the right way.
Hope everyone on list is enjoying Wikileaks (so rich in issues for p2p
research)
Here are a couple of paragraphs of what I did for Digital Icons.

*Blame it on the Russians: Tracking the portrayal of Russians during
cyberconflict incidents*

This article tracks the portrayal of Russian hackers in relation to various
cyber conflicts

and cyber crime incidents. It employs cyber conflict theory (Karatzogianni
2006; 2009a;

2009b; 2010) to engage with various aspects of cyber conflicts implicating
Russian hackers,

such as the cyber conflicts involving Estonia and Georgia. Further, its
purpose is to identify

and analyze the continuities in the coverage of Russian hackers, and links
made in the global

media between intelligence, cyber espionage, cyber crime and patriotic
hacking, which even-

tually and inevitably also implicated Russian hackers and Russia in the
Climategate hack.

The article is not written in defence of Russians or the Russian government.
The intention

here is to simply demonstrate that although Russians *are* involved in cyber
crime and cyber

conflict incidents - as are other nationals by participating in cyber crime
gangs, ad hoc patri-

otic assemblages, or even hacking dissident media organisations to reinforce
the government

line - they are also portrayed by the majority of the global media as
*the*perpetrators of every-

thing under the sun (unless the crimes are attributed to China or Chinese
hackers).The paper

demonstrates that the Russians were accused relentlessly of the Climategate
hack under a

new Cold War rhetoric spurred on by Russia's energy interests and
motivations. In contrast

to the overwhelming blame that Russian hackers are made to bear, there are
other possible

competing explanations: involvement of oppositional bloggers and scientists
invested in the

Climategate debate, or computer security failure at East Anglia University's
network.

The first element of my analysis in this article is mapping the real events
and the envi-

ronment of cyber conflict. The Estonian and Georgian cyber conflicts are of
the ethnonation-

al type, revealing also cultural struggles, due to Russia's alleged
continuing intervention in

the political life of these countries. The hacker groups involved in these
conflicts and their

systems of belief and organisation aspire to hierarchical apparatuses
(nation, ethnicity, identi-

fication with parties and leaders). The Climategate hack case, on the other
hand, has sociopo-

litical and economic aspects, as it is an issue that is global in nature in
terms of content.

However, the Climategate case also points to ethnic and national issues in
the coverage, as

geopolitical narratives involved the main protagonists in the Climategate
debate and the ac-

tual groups blamed for the hack. In mapping the environment of cyber
conflict, the relation-

ships between military and security, politicians and media, and geopolitical
dimensions need

to be addressed.

In the process of building my argument, I surveyed approximately 130
articles collected

between 2007 and 2010. The articles were sampled by using the keyword
'Russian hackers',

while also snowballing to include other items that followed the initial
searches. The articles

discussed here include sources from mainstream media (online versions of
newspapers,

magazines and TV outlets, such as *The Guardian, New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, The *

*New Scientist, The Independent, Le Monde, BBC, AFP, Reuters*); country- and
incident-

specific media and blogs (such as the *Georgian Times, Russia Today *and
climate sceptic

blogs); and IT business, security, and military sites and blogs commenting
on cyber security

and on technical aspects of the cyber conflicts discussed (such as *National
Defence Maga-*

*zine, Wired Magazine, Asian Computers, PC World, *Villeneuve's blog). An
effort was made

to include an equal number of articles out of these three types of sources.

My analysis is also based on my previous research, where I integrated
elements of social

movement, conflict and media theories into a single analytical framework of
'cyber conflict',

in order to explain the empirical evidence of various cyber conflicts.
Elements of social

movement theory were adopted to discuss sociopolitical cyber conflicts;
conflict theory was

used to address ethnoreligious cyber conflicts; and media theory was
deployed as a compo-

nent for both, deriving a single integrated analytical framework for
understanding cyber con-

flicts. This framework has been applied when analysing ethnoreligious and
ethnonational cy-

ber conflicts (i.e. Israeli-Palestinian, pro-Islamic-anti-Islamic conflicts
related to the Iraq war,

Indian-Pakistani and American-Chinese) and sociopolitical cyber conflicts
(such as anti-

globalisation, anti-war movements, dissidents in authoritarian regimes and
Internet censor-

ship in different countries (Karatzogianni 2006). Lastly, I have used
framework analysis of

content, similar to Juyan Zhang and Shahira Fahmy's (2010) approach in their
comparative

analysis of American and Russian press coverage of political movements in
Ukraine, Belarus

and Uzbekistan. The authors chose the sourcing, causality and moral judgment
frames to ap-

ply to their empirical evidence. This type of frame analysis is taken into
account when look-

ing at discourses and analysing the Internet as a medium.

The first section of this article is an overview of cyber attacks; the
second discusses the

global media coverage of Russian cyber crime; the third explains the
connection of cyber

crime and politically-motivated cyber attacks in the post-Soviet cyber
space; the fourth sec-

tion looks at cyber security and geopolitics discussions; the last section
dwells on the new

Cold War rhetoric and the framing of Russians as responsible for the
Climategate hack. Al-

though the global media often portrays individuals and groups of Eastern
European or post-

Soviet origin as a uniform category, the main focus here is on the media
portrayal of Russia

and the Russians.

----------------------------------

2010/12/11 Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

> Dear Athina,
>
> things are ok and even well here, trying to chill out after 3 months of
> intensive international travel, but still involved in co-organizing two
> internet cinema barcamps here with my friend and curator andrew paterson and
> thai activists ...
>
> I put the announcement here on the list, on ning (
> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/profiles/blogs/russian-and-easterncentral)
> and am asking chris pinchen in cc to publish the issue announcement on our
> blog,
>
> for your own particular essay, could you send a few paragraphs that we
> could publish and promote separately?
>
> how's life with a baby?
>
> Michel
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 11:40 PM, Athina Karatzogianni <athina.k at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>
>> Hi Michel
>>
>> Hope all great with you. Quick note this maybe of interest to you.
>> I ve contributed a paper (4.9) on Russian hackers, various cyberconflicts,
>> and media implicating them in the Climategate hack,
>> which I know it was discussed in the list so perhaps of interest to others
>> on the p2p list as well.
>> Cheers, enjoying wikileaks?
>>
>> *--------------*
>>
>> Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New
>> Media
>>
>>
>> *Issue 4: War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital
>>  Reproduction*
>>
>> *
>> *
>>
>> http://www.digitalicons.org/
>>
>>
>> <http://www.digitalicons.org/>
>>
>> This issue of Digital Icons* *explores* **the ways in which wars and
>> conflicts are mediated, commemorated, reported and discussed on the Internet
>> as well as in other forms of new media, including mobile phones, digital broadcasting
>> and computer games. The issue examines the role of new media in
>> understanding, representing, negotiating and remembering (or forgetting) war
>> and terror; the status of testimony, evidence and reportage in the age of
>> digitalreproduction; practices of memory in relation to new information
>> and communication technologies; and structures of feeling that operate in
>> on-line reports and debates around military operations and human suffering.
>> *
>>
>> *
>> *
>>
>> This issue of *Digital Icons* is guest-edited by Dr Adi Kuntsman
>> (University of Manchester).
>>
>>
>> 4.0 Editorial | Vlad Strukov
>>
>> 4.1 Online Memories, Digital Conflicts and the Cybertouch of War | Adi
>> Kuntsman
>>
>> 4.2 The Commemoration of Nazi 'Children's Euthanasia' Online and On Site |
>> Lutz Kaelber
>>
>> 4.3 World War 2.0: Commemorating War and Holocaust in Poland Through
>> Facebook | Dieter De Bruyn
>>
>> 4.4 Past Wars in the Russian Blogosphere: On the Emergence of Cosmopolitan
>> Memory | Elena Trubina
>>
>> 4.5 Deadly Game along the Wistula: East European Imagery in Oshii's
>> 'Avalon' (2001) | Gérard Kraus
>>
>> 4.6 Oshii's 'Avalon' (2001) and Military-Entertainment Technoculture |
>> Patrick Crogan
>>
>> 4.7 'The Weight of Meaninglessness' | Naida Zukić
>>
>> 4.8 'Roma Snapshots: A Day in Sarajevo' | Vanja Čelebičić
>>
>> 4.9 The Portrayal of Russian Hackers During Cyber Conflict Incidents |
>> Athina Karatzogianni
>>
>> 4.10 A Study on a Russian-American Non-Reflexive Discourse | Olga Baysha
>>
>> 4.11 Web Wars: Digital Diasporas and the Language of Memory | Ellen
>> Rutten
>>
>> 4.12 Book Reviews
>>
>>
>> The full issue is available online on http://www.digitalicons.org/.
>>
>>
>>
>> For more information, please visit the website or write to the editors:
>> editor at digitalicons.org
>>
>>
>>
>> Digital Icons Editor: Vlad Strukov (London)
>>
>> Digital Icons Editorial Team: Sudha Rajagopalan (Utrecht), Robert
>> Saunders (New York) and Henrike Schmidt (Berlin).
>>
>> Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New
>> Media (Digital Icons) is an online publication that appears twice per
>> year. The journal is a multi-media platform that explores new media as a
>> variety of information flows, varied communication systems, and networked
>> communities. Contributions to Digital Icons cover a broad range of topics
>> related to the impact of digital and electronic technologies on politics,
>> economics, society, culture, and the arts in Russia, Eurasia, and Central
>> Europe. Digital Icons publishes articles from scholars from a variety of
>> academic backgrounds, as well as artists' contributions, interviews,
>> comments, reviews of books, digital films, animation, and computer games,
>> and relevant cultural and academic events, as well as any other forms of
>> discussion of new media in the region.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Dr Athina Karatzogianni
>> Lecturer in Media, Culture and Society
>> The Dean's Representative (Chinese Partnerships)
>> Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
>> The University of Hull
>> United Kingdom
>> HU6 7RX
>> T: ++44 (0) 1482 46 5790
>> F: ++44 (0) 1482 466107
>>
>> http://www2.hull.ac.uk/FASS/humanities/media,_culture_and_society/staff/karatzogianni,_dr_athina.aspx
>>
>> Check out Athina's work
>>
>> http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3AAthina%20Karatzogianni&page=1
>>
>> China-Google article: http://www.e-ir.info/?p=3420
>>
>
>
>
> --
> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>
> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>
> Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
Dr Athina Karatzogianni
Lecturer in Media, Culture and Society
The Dean's Representative (Chinese Partnerships)
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
The University of Hull
United Kingdom
HU6 7RX
T: ++44 (0) 1482 46 5790
F: ++44 (0) 1482 466107
http://www2.hull.ac.uk/FASS/humanities/media,_culture_and_society/staff/karatzogianni,_dr_athina.aspx

Check out Athina's work
http://www.routledge.com/books/search/keywords/karatzogianni/

Russian hackers
http://www.digitalicons.org/issue04/athina-karatzogianni/
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