Actual Lit Review

For my part of the overall class project on anonymity, I will examine the media's perceptions of the group Anonymous. This will involve scouring the Internet for media references of the group, analyzing how they perceive the group's actions against Scientology and many others, as well as examining anonymous responses posted at the end of those stories. I am hoping to find out whether the media comes to a general consensus. As of right now, the perceptions seem to fall under general labels as criminals, but reporters who dive into the world of hackers seem to come to more of a neutral understanding of the hacker culture.

Since there has been little written specifically about the group Anonymous, I broadened my article research to media perceptions of Internet hackers. I came up with a few general historical trends with my two readings. Hackers are alienated by the media and society because of their technological affinity. The media from the emergence of hackers did not understand  the motivations behind hackers' actions and therefore made possibly biased claims about hackers. The final trend I noticed was the snowball effect of the criminal prototype that the media formed while covering hackers' actions.

There are some problems with the selections I read, though. They are not recent, and have not addressed the changing culture of hackers and specifically the group Anonymous. Also, there is no whole-scale examination into just the media perception of hackers - the perceptions are just mentioned in a historical sort of reference.

I plan to fill in that gap by doing what I mentioned before. I will examine as many references to Anonymous in the media as I can and truly see where their ideas align and how similar they are, as well as seeing the interactions between media-types and people who claim to align themselves with the Anonymous movement.