Eavesdrop On Experts

“I tend to focus on communities of people and how they mobilise around and interpret technologies,” says Associate Professor Dunbar-Hester, from the School of Communication at the University of Southern California. Her writing and research centres on the politics of technology in culture, especially media and technology activism. “If we take a fairly conventional view that hacking has to do with computers, programming and hardware, the longer trajectory in North America and Europe was that actually women were some of the earliest professional programmers during the war effort in World War II. And when programming was a new occupation, it wasn’t gendered and computers weren’t gendered,” Professor Dunbar-Hester says. She says another of the really interesting things that came up during her research was that if you’re teaching people to program and hack because it’s fun, where does that lead? “I had spoken to people who were saying, well, you can wind up working for Silicon Valley,” Professor Dunbar-Hester says.