Publication

Cyber-noir: Cybersecurity and popular culture

New article on popular culture influences on cybersecurity experts, available Open Access at Contemporary Security Policy, part of a special issue edited by dr. Myriam Dunn Cavelty.

Author: James Shires
Date: 23 September 2019
Links: Go to the article

Abstract

Cybersecurity experts foster a perception of cybersecurity as a gloomy underworld in which the good guys must resort to unconventional tactics to keep at bay a motley group of threats to the digital safety of unsuspecting individuals, businesses, and governments. This article takes this framing seriously, drawing on film studies scholarship that identifies certain aesthetic themes as associated with moral ambiguity in noir films. This article introduces the term “cyber-noir” to describe the incorporation of noir elements in cybersecurity expert discourses. It argues that the concept of cyber-noir helps explain the persistence of practices that blur legal, moral, and professional lines between legitimate and malicious activity in cyberspace. Consequently, changing cybersecurity requires not only institutional and technological measures, but also a re-constitution of cybersecurity identities themselves.

Read the entire article at Contemporary Security Policy.