Digital Outlaws

Coming from communications backgrounds, many of us are somewhat familiar with the concept of “framing,” or the mental and physical structures we use to present, process, and interpret information. Media present information through “frames” to achieve a desired result. We, in turn, process every bit of information (a smile, text, fashion choice, social situation) through our frames of reference and perspective, which have been built up through a lifetime of enculturation and experience.
Collective action frames attempt to analyze and describe how social movements build and operate within their own frames (how they view themselves and their struggle in relation to the world) as well as how external frames are impressed upon movements and portray those movements to the public. These internal and external frames are often at odds. Take, for example, the “Take a Knee” movement of NFL players. The players claim to be expressing themselves in order to highlight issues of police brutality, but the news often frames the movement as disrespectful to the American military. How individual viewers interpret the movement largely depends on the framing structures they already have, which vary widely across demographics. In the case of Söderberg’s article, he argues that hackers and hacktivists relate their call (or their being called) to action to the labor movements of the post-industrial era. He states that hackers “reinterpret [the labor movement’s narrative] to give meaning to their own existence and the struggles in which they are immersed.”

When John (2013) refers to the shift “from scarcity to abundance” in terms of how sharing (the word and the concept) has evolved in society, he is referring to the shift from pre- to post-industrial society. That is, before the industrial revolution, our largely agricultural and rural society lived such that every member of the family must work the land to eat and survive the day. The labor was divvied up by “sharing” it. Everyone pitched in. Relationships were often cultivated on what one could DO for the family (e.g. having lots of kids for free labor. As industrialization modernized the workforce and people moved into cities, relationships became strong based on interpersonal skills one acquired through business and social settings. Living in a city, the physical labor is minimal: we don’t grow our own food or sew our own clothes, we go shopping. This initiated a restructuring of social relationships that instead valued conversation, intellect, and emotional “sharing.” When resources are scarce, the labor involved in attaining resources is “shared” in the division or distribution sense, so that everyone might survive. When daily resources are abundant, we focus mental energy on “sharing” as communication, so that others around us might (presumably) enjoy life and our company more. This shift in society and definition of the word “sharing” is an integral part of John’s historical and contextual analysis of the issue of “file sharing.”