It has been a while (April to be exact) since I posted an update about what I’ve been up to in my research. As we head into the fall semester, I suppose this is a good time to provide an update about what I’ve been doing.
I haven’t actually done a lot of new writing over the summer. Instead, I have been working to revise my dissertation and send out book proposals based on that revision. This has pretty much taken up the entire summer. I have one more chapter to revise before I can move on to my main project for the fall, which is to begin writing a book about cyberwar.
Even though I have not done a lot of new writing, I have had some publications “hit” over the summer. In July, an essay that I wrote last fall was accepted and published at First Monday. That essay is titled, “Putting the ‘War’ in Cyber War: Metaphor, Analogy, and Cyber Security Discourse in the United States” (Full text).
I recently had another essay accepted that I submitted for review last summer. That essay is titled, “The U.S. Military’s Social Media Civil War: Technology as Antagonism in Discourses of Information-Age Conflict.” It will be published by the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Here is the abstract:
This essay uses the controversy within the U.S. military over the use of social media by individual military professionals as a window into larger debates about the nature of information-age conflict. Information and associated technologies are now central to the U.S. military imaginary. But an examination of the controversy over social media is one indicator that the dominant discourse of information-age conflict is neither stable nor total. The introduction of a new technology can serve as an antagonism that turns latent, potential contradictions into substantive differences for policymaking. Thus, though the U.S. military generally has embraced information and communication technologies (ICTs), the introduction of a particular ICT can still be a source of controversy. Military imaginaries, technologies, and the relationships between them remain dynamic, contingent, and sometimes contentious.
In June, I had the opportunity to write a review of Patrick Crogan’s new book, Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture. That review will appear in an upcoming issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.
Finally, I was honored to have the paper that I wrote originally for the Mercatus Center, “Beyond Cyber-Doom: Cyber Attack Scenarios and the Evidence of History,” selected for inclusion in a book being released at the end of this month. The book is Cyber Warfare: Critical Perspectives. The book is this year’s installment of the Netherlands Annual Review of Military Studies, which is a contribution of the faculty of the Netherlands Defence Academy. The book is being published by Asser Press and will be available at the end of August.