Pete Sherman
7/20/16
Maj. Garriott
Project 3
ERH 101-03
Anonymous
Anonymous is a hacktavist organization that addresses issues of the world and has become famous with attacks on ISIS and its involvement with world events. Recently they have been talking about Hillary and have been addressing the world and America to tell them about the distress of the world. This group mainly focuses on electronic, specifically computer coding and hacking into databases and organizations. This group takes on a perspective that fuses both politics and computer science to address issues that are brought up around the world, while lately focusing on what has been happening in America. Anonymous successfully created a blog that allows people of all levels to read about politics and hacking while also being able to understand what they are reading. Anonymous uses Swales characteristics of a discourse community to assert themselves as a strong group that breaks the barrier between civilian and political hacker.
The specific articles and documentaries that will be analyzed, talks about Operation Harambe and the Movement of Anonymous. Operation Harambe was a movement to bring retribution to Michelle Greg and the Cincinnati Zoo after Michelle Greg fail to parent her child and allow her son to climb into a gorilla enclosure and ending with the zoo shooting and killing the gorilla, after it had taken the child to a corner to protect it from any other harm. Anonymous’ purpose of Operation Harambe was to bring attention to the world about the unawareness of the public on true issues that affect the world as a whole. One specific issue arises as the Cincinnati Zoo took no extra measures to try and secure the child’s safety and decided to go to the last resort by killing the gorilla, which was an endangered silver back gorilla. In addition, they ask for support on having Michelle Greg being investigated by child protective services in a rare case where it truly should be used in a good and reasoned way. In Anonymous’ movement video, the narrator talks about the movement of technology and the incursion of privacy around the world and how a group have appointed themselves as guardians for the people to protect them from an “oppressive” government, while maintaining anonymity.
The first characteristic of Swales conceptualization of a Discourse Community is that “a discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. From the two articles that were looked at by Anonymous, a reader can see specifically that one of the main public goals of the community encompassed around Anonymous is that they can only talk about issues that make a true impact on the world or society. In such cases, with Project Harambe, the fact that the zoo had gone and taken final resorts as their first choice tactic for handling the situation with something that was endangered shows that they disregarded the fact that the animal had a life too, even if it was in an enclosed space. Anonymous took this specific case especially hard, as it was a situation/event that was not handled properly by the media and was being falsified by the news and the zoo. In addition to this “viewed” rule, a few other standard public goals of Anonymous are listed out in their the Movement video explaining what Anonymous is all about and what their purpose for creating themselves was. Some of these include the common goal to create a better international community and society.
The second characteristic of a Discourse Community is that “a discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members.” Just by looking and clicking a few of the blogs/vlogs that Anonymous gets information around to its discourse community through documentaries about issues that have risen in the world and also by creating reports about these issues. In the post about Project Harambe, Anonymous also uses sharing the information learned from the post through social media to communicate between the people of the community and also to connect people outside of Anonymous’ community. Since Anonymous is a hacktavist group, it is also apparent that a mean of intercommunication among the members is through code, the universal language of hackers.