Hacking and Photos: Far apart, yet so close

Nature photography and hacking, completely different and yet both are outlets of creativity, community, and communication. Both of these can be examined using socio-cultural frameworks to examine how they interact with our society. By looking at hacking through the lens of a Discourse Community framework, and photography through developing Rhetorical Situations, we can dive deep into how community, audience, and many other aspects, influences how I and many others interact with and help build these communities. A large part of Photography is about how i influence my photos. However photography is not only dictated by the person taking the photo, but as well as the rhetoric and the situation in which the rhetor finds themself at the time of the photo. Hacking as part of a Discourse Community relies on internal/technical language, norms, and ethical considerations that is why my focus will be on a specific discourse community that I had found at UCF called Hack@UCF which is a Cybersecurity Blue-Team club.

Language in Cybersecurity

The world of cybersecurity is massive with tons of different ideals, motives, etc. In Dan Melzer’s Understanding Discourse Communities, he talks about when he first got into Guitar, about how there was a bunch new vocabulary and the like “At first, the vocabulary the online guitar teachers used was like a foreign language to me—terms like major and minor chords, open G tuning, and circle of fifths. I was overwhelmed by how complicated it all was” (Melzer, 100). Cybersecurity also was a vast pool of internal lingo that could confuse a lot of new people. As much as I dislike it, people in cyber love to shorten things into acronyms, you can see some example of these acronyms in my artifact, where I am seeing what our team member for a cyber competition knows. There are two acronyms in this conversation being “FTP” and “SSH”. These stand for File Transfer Protocol and Secure Socket Shell respectively. There are many other terms that I personally like to use like “I just caught a shell” or “OpSec”. If I spend too much time on this I can easily get carried away but here is a dictionary I found if you want to look at more “Hacker” words: https://spyscape.com/article/hacking-glossary. Anyhoo, we use these terms mostly to shorten down words or phrases, for example OpSec stands for Operational Security which is an concept in which during a secure operation those trusted with the knowledge should keep as much of the operations’ information as secure as possible, as well as keep their Personal Identifiable Information off the web (we shorten this too to PII). Not only does our language help define where you are in the many subcategories in cybersecurity (Both the offensive “Bad hackers” and Defensive “good” hackers have individual lingo) but helps deliver a large amount of information in a short amount of time, thus improving efficiency and team building.

Groups in Cybersecurity

Many look to join these cyber groups and like Mathew Chen said in Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts “I had to accomplish three main tasks: adapting to their way of communicating, understanding their professional motives, and building their trust.” (Seeley, Xu, and Melzer, 289) With many different groups, there is a wide range of ideals and thoughts on cyber ethics. Finding where you belong is hard, and fitting into that community can be even harder. learning how to fit in can be a challenge but, in the end, a well worthy one! Most ethics in the cyber world, however, are in the gray zone with mixed ideals with most people living in that grey realm. Many view hacking as either defending systems or breaking into them, however I view them as more of a language. One where the speaker flows between the defenders and attackers.

Photography and Rhetoric

Photography is very much built like writing a poem. The rhetors intent, audience, context, and constraints dramatically affect how a photo can come out. I could take a beautiful picture of a sunset to highlight the waters or turn 180 degrees and photograph the dark brooding storm clouds the last rays of sunlight highlight or ignore the landscape completely and take a macro photo of the humble fiddler crab trying to burrow into the sand to avoid a predator.
There is so much that goes into making a photo, just like the text Rhetorical Situations and their constituents by Keith Grant-Davie say, “define constraints, then, as all factors in the situation, aside from the rhetor and the audience, that may lead the audience to be either more or less sympathetic to the discourse, and that may therefore influence the rhetor’s response to the situation” (Grant-Davie, 273). Photography is always defined by constraints: your lenses, camera, location, weather, and lighting can all change and especially so for a nature photographer like me. One picture I am fond of took me a couple of hours to set up in 40-degree weather in upstate New York. It was a long exposure so, I had to wait about 3-4 mins after every photo to slightly adjust my focus or to change my camera position just a few feet to the side. This constraint affected me physically, but also helped shape the overall photo, not to mention it makes the final photo so much more important.Or waiting for the perfect lighting during a waterfall. Another quote from the reading that really resonated with me was from Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis by Laura Bolin Carroll, “Rhetorical messages always occur in a specific situation or context” (Carroll, 48). Most of the time when I grab my camera and head out to explore, I don’t think “ok, so I will find his interesting praying mantis, wildflowers and to round it off a good sunset with a plane in the sky”, 90% of my photos are completely random encounters which builds off the quote since all of my “Rhetoric” is based on specific context, but its really up to me on how to frame those contexts. As explained with the sunset example, you can be given all the situations or contexts in the world, but it is up to you to make the story of the photograph.

Conclusion

While completely different, both hacking and photography utilize literature frameworks making and shaping how both communities react within each other and the outside world. Understanding how and why these Literature frameworks influence and affect their respective communities can help you become a much better member. Together, these analyses show how both hacking and photography serve as powerful tools for communication and resistance, reflecting and challenging societal norms in their own distinct ways. Through Photography, Hacking, or whatever you do by utilizing these concepts we can truly change the world in a big way!

Works Cited:

• Melzer, Dan. “Understanding Discourse Communities.” Writing Spaces, writingspaces.org/?page_id=387. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024.
• Grant-Davie, Keith. “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents.” JSTOR, Wikimedia Foundation, 9 Sept. 2024, ucf-flvc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?context=PC&vid=01FALSC_UCF:UCF&tab=Everything&docid=cdi_crossref_primary_10_1080_07350199709359219.
• Carroll, Laura Bolin. “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis.” Writing Spaces, writingspaces.org/past-volumes/backpacks-vs-briefcases-steps-toward-rhetorical-analysis/. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024.
• Seeley, Sarah, et al. “Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts.” Writing Spaces, writingspaces.org/read-the-room-navigating-social-contexts-and-written-texts/. Accessed 21 Oct. 2024.

Photo Gallery

please enjoy some of my favorite photos i took over the years!