Hackers: Friends, Enemies, or Frenemies?

This week articles go through the mistification of the hacker, and of technology as a whole. Usually I just percieved hackers as a kind of sub underground group of people hiding in their homes trying to ruin your life with identity theft, or emptying out your bank accounts, or sending you a virus via an email or even a facebook post. Turkle does a great job of trying to add the person back into the image of the hacker. She created a hacker more as an obsessed hobby than as a malicious sub group of people. This kind of destruction of the hacker image is one that I found productive. In exploring the ideas of gender and technology. While I know that I have a set of bias' about hackers as nerdy males this kind of safe environment that the reading was trying to push us to understand the hacking world to be opened it up to a greater genre of people.

Perhaps the evolution of technology as becoming second hand should evolve my belief about hackers. Turkle seems to establish a society of hackers as more anti-social or even socially phobic people. Personally I feel that this reading evolved my reading of the hacker. Thinking of how much technology is apart of our world people who seem to be involved in an obsession relationship with technology doesn't seem so far fetched. Thinking about how people are obsessed with their facebooks, are they that different from computer programmers? I would beg to differ not really.

Adding gender into the mix of technology always leaves me thinking about the lack of the female image in technology now. Even thinking about the simple commercials from Apple "this is a PC, and this is a Mac" being both males leaves me as a female feeling like an outsider. Perhaps programming and hacking isn't so far fetched but they never seem to include me. I may not be a girly girl but I don't feel that the "nerdy image" includes females. The idea of the MIT boy, is one I am familiar with, as some of my friends go there, but the idea of there being a MIT girl to me seems far fetched. While technology seems to advance does the public image of women advance with technology? Will women be finally seen as being able to do as much as men in technology?