Yes, yes, wasting time. Shup.
Apr. 2nd, 2004 05:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brinshannaraI'm actually pausing to let various things percolate in my head. I'm getting into my subject and I should have plenty of stuff to say. I have about three hours before I have have have to leave for school. I should be fine.
It's kind of neat, this paper thing, in general. Now that I've written... well, one and a half of them, I'm fascinated by the different ways there are to view things that were in my every day life.
Example: my first paper was about the concept of master status and how a non-straight person's master status tended to be their sexuality. Like, I'm not just a university student or a web designer or a writer. I'm the lesbian student/designer/writer. Or at least, I tend to be those things to those who don't really know me well. Looking into the consequences of being defined by one's sexuality rather than one's accomplishments (lesbian as opposed to doctor or lawyer) minimizes the accomplishments and highlights the differences between the people involved in the interaction. That's just neat.
For hacker/computer criminals being a subculture, one would think yeah, that's a no brainer. But what is the line between a geek and a hacker? Geeks know the language, geeks have the knowledge. But they don't have the same intent, the same motivation or the same attitude that hackers tend to. And it's neat to see how the general population is so clueless that they misuse a lot of the terms coming from these subcultures. "Hackers" don't break into computer systems, those are "crackers", but a different kind of "cracker" will remove copy-protection from a piece of software. It's something that sets the hackers/criminals apart from culture as a whole.
<rereads this>
Oh, man. I'm really going to become an academic, aren't I?
<sobs and goes back to her paper>
It's kind of neat, this paper thing, in general. Now that I've written... well, one and a half of them, I'm fascinated by the different ways there are to view things that were in my every day life.
Example: my first paper was about the concept of master status and how a non-straight person's master status tended to be their sexuality. Like, I'm not just a university student or a web designer or a writer. I'm the lesbian student/designer/writer. Or at least, I tend to be those things to those who don't really know me well. Looking into the consequences of being defined by one's sexuality rather than one's accomplishments (lesbian as opposed to doctor or lawyer) minimizes the accomplishments and highlights the differences between the people involved in the interaction. That's just neat.
For hacker/computer criminals being a subculture, one would think yeah, that's a no brainer. But what is the line between a geek and a hacker? Geeks know the language, geeks have the knowledge. But they don't have the same intent, the same motivation or the same attitude that hackers tend to. And it's neat to see how the general population is so clueless that they misuse a lot of the terms coming from these subcultures. "Hackers" don't break into computer systems, those are "crackers", but a different kind of "cracker" will remove copy-protection from a piece of software. It's something that sets the hackers/criminals apart from culture as a whole.
<rereads this>
Oh, man. I'm really going to become an academic, aren't I?
<sobs and goes back to her paper>
