COMP6044   Just another ECS Blogs weblog

I’m interested in how the web could offer more effective ways for people to come together to solve tricky problems.

This is a pretty broad concept, but as such it should offer a lot of contact points to explore the basics of the two nominated subjects.

My first subject will be complexity science (CS). A fair bit of CS is about how systems composed of independent agents (e.g. real ants, or simulated people) adapt to challenges presented by their environment.

My primary source of info on this are the “Introduction to CS” lectures I am attending.

The identity of my second subject hangs on a final chat with our “ambassadors” from each: sociology, psychology, economics or innovation studies.

On the topic itself, I’m starting here:

http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/CollectiveProblemSolving/CollectiveProblemSolving

Cyber Warfare, known as the fifth domain, has developed in scale and sophistication. The new US Air Force manual describes it as a “shadowy, fast-changing world where anonymous enemies can carry out devastating attacks in seconds and where conventional ideas about time and space do not apply” (Telegraph, 2010). As never before has the World Wide Web created so much prosperity and opportunity from all echelons of society, but never before have we been exposed to so much risk from anyone, anywhere in the world. 

According to Michael Chertoff, former head of the US Department of Homeland Security, he mentions how it is the least understood threat and the one where our doctrine is least developed”. Therefore, we have only just touched the surface from what is known now, into what is possible. The threat is a real one. Hospitals can be shut down, Power Grids closed and Children targeted. It raises the notion of what is sociologically acceptable within the 21st Century of Cyber Warfare.

Therefore, I hope to find individual ethical stances from governments and societies from different cultures across the world. For example, targeting children at Schools could be deemed unanimously unethical. Similarly, there will be different national stances of perceived legitimacy. Subsequently, this information could be used to help nations understand the repercussions of going against another nations ethical stance, which may be enough to deter the oppressor.

In conclusion, the 21st Century calls for a new multi-lateral agreement, with the unanimous codes of conduct between international communities ratified; similarly, the code of conducts between individual nations could be used as a deterrent if met by a Tit-for-Tat response. Therefore, I plan to understand these existential threats and incorporate them into my study of Moral Philosophy, touching other disciplines such as Sociology and International Relations.

Reading

Tanenbaum, A. (1985) Computer Networks, 4^th Ed. US: Prentice Hall.

Clarke, R. (2010) Cyber War: The next threat to national security and what to do about it.  US: Ecco.

Singer, P. A. (1993) Companion to Ethics. US: Wiley- Blackwell

Williams, B. (1993) Morality: An introduction to Ethics. UK: University Press.

Welcome to COMP6044, the Independent Disciplinary Review for the Web Science MSc.

This blog allows you (the registered students) to provide a weekly update of the reading that you have undertaken. Partly it is a way of being disciplined and making sure that you are putting in the required hours, and partly it is a way of recording your emerging understanding by explaining it to your fellow students so that your “dissertation” writes itself over the period of the module.

Those of you who have chosen sociology as a discipline should have had some individual comments from Cathy on your reading. Here are some more general comments for everyone to think about:

1. Most have chosen a mix of books ranging from the general (e.g. Giddens Sociology) to the advanced (Castells Networked Society). It is probably helpful to refer to at least one of the more basic introductory texts as well even if the specific ones look like they are more ‘on topic’ – this is because the module is about understanding what (if anything) the broad disciplines might have to offer.

2. Some of the better blogs are starting to critically appraise what they are reading. I would expect masters level students to be able to do this even when working outside their home discipline- so would encourage critical thought around this reading. i.e. just because it is in the text book does not mean it is right /useful. Within sociology there should be examples of very different/conflicting viewpoints about the same phenomena…and I would like to see some assessment of the arguments.

3. As the blogs progress hopefully they will begin to refine their questions. Many of the topics are helpfully broad at the start but the reading should help reframe the questions. I found it easier to direct this by thinking ‘how does the discipline understand x (my topic) in the offline world and how would it explain x on the web’. It is worth noting that most of the disciplines and reading will not necessarily be directed at the web.

4. the thing that is not coming across at this stage which I would hope to see in later posts is the potential areas of debate/challenge/conflict between the disciplines. Do the two chosen disciplines sit neatly next to each other and offer no challenges to each other? I’d like a sense of where the gaps are in a discipline compared with another, or the strengths of one discipline compared with another; and of any fundamental areas of disagreement (e.g. is identity explained by individual psychology alone???)

Overall I enjoyed reading the blogs – I’d encourage you to keep them going.

Two competing anxieties can be discerned in public debate and both are reflected in a large research literature. On the one hand the media are often seen as fundamentally subversive threat to law, on the other as a more or less subtle form of social control. Some researchers tacitly imply that media images of crime do not have significant implications because the establishment of the causal relationship between images and effects is too complicated.

Content of media images of crime

Deviant news

Richard Ericsson and his colleagues: their concern was “social deviance and how journalists participate in defining and shaping it”. Deviance in its broadest meaning, can be defined as “the behaviour of a thing or person that strays from the normal…not only..criminal acts, but also..straying from organisational procedures and violations of common-sense knowledge”. More importantly, deviance is the essence of news and which journalists consider newsworthy.  It can also be questioned on what is included in common-sense knowledge which directly affects the representation of crime reported.

Ericsson et al. also found that “popular” media focused overwhelmingly more often on “interpersonal” conflicts and deviance, but “quality” ones included many items on such official deviance as rights violations, or on policy debates about criminal justice or corporate conduct.

The pattern of crime news

Content analyses have found systematic differences between the pattern of offences, victims, and offenders represented by the news and in official crime statistics or crime surveys. Whilst statistics and surveys may represent the “real” world of crime, they are open for interpretation, depending on the context.

An implicit assumption that the gap between media representations of crime and the actuality supposedly disclosed by official statistics causes significant problems – they are accused of exaggerating the risks of crime, cultivating an image of the world that is “scary” and “mean”.

Fear of crime and the coping strategies it leads to (such as not venturing out at night) are deemed disproportionate to the actual risks, and thus irrational and problematic in themselves (Sparks 1992).

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Success of police and criminal justice: there is also the exaggeration of police success in clearing-up crime (resulting largely from Press reliance on police sources for stories). Summed up in a review of fifty-six content analyses in fifteen different countries between 1960 and 1988, “the over-representation of violent crime stories was advantageous to the police…because the police are more successful in solving violent crimes than property crimes”. The media generally present a very positive image of the success and integrity of the police and criminal justice more generally.

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Characteristics of offender: there is a clear pattern to news media portrayal of the characteristics of offenders and victims. Most studies find that offenders featuring in news reports are typically older and higher-status offenders than those processed by the criminal justice system.

Characteristics of victims: there is a clear trend for victims to become the pivotal focus of news stories in the last three decades. This parallels the increasing centrality of victims in criminal justice and criminology. News stories exaggerate the risks faced by higher status, white, female adults of becoming victims of crime, although child victims do feature prominently. The most common victims of violence according to official crime statistics and victim surveys are poor, young, black males. However, they figure in news reporting predominantly as perpetrators.

There is a predominance of stories about criminal incidents, rather than analyses of crime patterns or the possible causes of crime. There is a concentration of events rather than exploration of the underlying causes. As summed up in one survey of the literature, “crime stories in news papers consist primarily of belief accounts of discrete events, with few details and little background material. There are very few attempts to discuss causes of or remedies for crime or to put the problem of crime into a larger perspective”.

Content of crime fiction

Frequency of crime fiction: while there have been important changes over time in how crime is represented in fictional narratives, crime stories have always been a prominent part of popular entertainment, usually accounting for about 25% of output.

The pattern of crime in fiction

While crime fiction presents property crime less frequently than the reality suggested by crime statistics, the crimes it portrays are far more serious than most recorded offences.

The clear-up rate is also high in fictional crime. Overwhelmingly majority of crimes are cleared up by the police but an increasing majority where they fail.

Consequences of media images of crime

Most research has sought to measure two possible consequences of media representations: criminal behaviour (especially violence) and fear of crime.

There are several logically necessary preconditions for a crime to occur and the media play a part in each of these, thus can affect levels of crime in a variety of ways. The preconditions are as follows:

1. Labelling: for an act to be labelled as “criminal”, the act has to be perceived as “criminal” by the citizens and the law enforcement officers. The media plays an important role in shaping the conceptual boundaries and recorded volumes of crime. The role of the media in helping to develop new (and erode old) categories of crime has been emphasised in most classic studies of shifting boundaries of criminal law within the “labelling” tradition. The media shape the boundaries of deviance and criminality, by creating new categories of offence, or changing the perceptions and sensitivities, leading to fluctuations in apparent crime.
2. Motive:
   1. Social anomie theory: the media are pivotal in presenting for universal emulation images of affluent life-styles, which accentuate relative deprivation and generate pressures to acquire ever higher levels of material success regardless of the legitimacy of the means used.
   2. Psychological theory: it has been claimed that the images of crime and violence presented by the media are a form of social learning, and may encourage crime by imitation or arousal effects. It has also been argued that the media erode internalised control by desensitisation through witnessing repeated representations of deviance.
   3. Means: it has been alleged that the media act as an open university of crime, spreading knowledge of criminal techniques. However, the evidence available to support this allegation remains weak.
   4. Opportunity: the media may increase opportunities to commit offences by contributing to the development of a consumerist ethos. The domestic hardware/software of mass media use e.g. TVs, radios, PCs, have become common targets of property crime and their increase in popularity has been an important aspect of the spread of criminal opportunities.
   5. The absence of controls: external control – police, law-enforcement officers; internal control – small voice of conscience; both of which may be enough to deter a ready-to-commit offender from offending. A regular recurring theme of respectable anxieties about the consequence of media images of crime is that they erode the efficacy of both external and internal controls. E.g. ridiculing law-enforcement agents, negative representation of criminal justice or potential offender’s perception of the probability of sanctions.

The media and fear of crime

Signoriello (1990): Fearful people are more dependent, more easily manipulated and controlled, more susceptible to deceptively simple, strong, tough measures and hard-line postures – both political and religious. They may accept and even welcome repression if it promises to relieve their insecurities and other anxieties. That is the deeper problem of violence-laden television.

Causes of media images of crime

The immediate source of news content was the ideology of the reporter, personal and professional and this view is supported by most of the earlier studies. However, a variety of organisational and professional imperatives exerted pressure for the production of news with the characteristics identified by content analyses:

1. The political ideology of the Press: majority of the press intend to remain politically neutrality. Traditional crime reporters explicitly saw it as their responsibility to present the police and the criminal justice system in as favourable a light as possible. However, the characteristics of crime reporting were more immediately the product of a professional sense of news values rather than any explicitly political ideology.
2. The elements of “newsworthiness”: the core elements of “newsworthiness” are: immediacy, dramatisation, personalisation, titillation and novelty (hence, most news are about deviance). This explains the predominant emphasis on violent and sex offences, and the concentration on higher-status offenders and victims, especially celebrities.
3. Structural determinants of new-making:   e.g. concentrating personnel on courts is economical use of resources but has the consequence of covering cleared-up cases, creating a misleading sense of police effectiveness. The police and criminal justice system control much of the information on which crime reporters rely and this gives them a degree of power as essential accredited sources.

Relevance to cybercrime

Deviance is the essence of news; it is the key virtue that makes something newsworthy. This means that the selection of reported incidents depend heavily on how the media’s definition of deviance. In addition, the success of police, the characteristics of the offender(s) and victim(s) involved in the incident are major factors that affects the amount of coverage an incident will receive in the media.

With regards to cybercrimes, it is interesting to find out the difference between the amount of coverage of cybercrimes in the media and the actual number of incidents in cybercrime statistics. My guess is that cybercrimes are heavily under-reported and the reasons for this under-reporting are made apparent by the findings given above. Cybercrimes are often carried out by more than one offender on a global scale and often anonymous. In some cases, they are carried out by highly-skilled but ordinary looking males (who are usually classified as social excluded or “geeks”) with little valuable newsworthy characteristics. The victims of cybercrimes most often are not aware they have become victims or the impact is so insignificant that it is not newsworthy. In other words, it is hard for the media to find newsworthy stories to tell with regards to the victims of cybercrimes (with the exception of online child offences).  In addition, I believe that people are generally not interested in cybercrime-related news items because there is an a-priory assumption that cybercrime issues are too difficult to gain a visualisation in their head, as one would normally see in a picture capturing an act of violence for example.

This part has given me new insights into looking at the failure in promoting awareness of cybercrime in a climate where crime is often exaggerated by the media. Traditional crimes such as theft and violence are often exaggerated to an extent that the level of fear is irrational. Yet, the attitude towards cybercrime is opposite. The level of fear and the precautionary measures in response to the fear is not enough for the average internet users to protect themselves sufficiently. I strongly believe that content analysis of news reports is an important area in the research into raising public awareness to cybercrime.

Welcome to COMP6044, the Independent Disciplinary Review for the Web Science MSc.

This blog allows you (the registered students) to provide a weekly update of the reading that you have undertaken. Partly it is a way of being disciplined and making sure that you are putting in the required hours, and partly it is a way of recording your emerging understanding by explaining it to your fellow students so that your “dissertation” writes itself over the period of the module.