George Ryan Jones

Mrs. Thomas
UWRT 1101-103

Ethnography- 3d Draft
This ethnography is discussing the IT (computer science, security, AI development, etc.)
discourse community of peers, educational employees, and computing professionals that I am
part of. I picked this because it is the community I consider myself closest to currently, and plan
to participate in the future with. The peers in question in said community I was actually close to
before discovering we had similar educational interests, and now besides interacting socially,
we also have classes and projects together. While many goals of IT workers are commonly
known or seen in todays society (iPhones and laptops were once just a dream), not a lot of
people understand the other characteristics that only people in the field see, so Ill be going
over an explanation of each to make sure its clear for those with little knowledge of the
subject. Initially I had planned to discuss the 49th security division as my subject, but various
reasons convinced me otherwise, and since people seem interested in understanding what the
misconceptions about hacking were, so Ill be discussing that and the reasons for my subject
change.
Obviously in IT discourse communities the participatory methods in this field are mostly
digital. Within my community, we usually text or email each other unless were together.
Participation is different than most think because people today can land high-paying IT careers
without a degree, just from learning from interactive informational sites like CodeAcademy, and
can participate in the projects from home or travel by using a code-publishing site such as

GitHub. If you manage to land a project developing software, youre going to be working in a
team with other specialists thatll help you work to the best of your abilities. Since computer
science is a new area, its lucky that people decided not to capitalize on the distribution of the
knowledge, so its actually free for anyone to learn to become a developer due to systems
companies have created to find new employees. In reality the rapid improvement of students
in this field is due to the ability and willingness of experts to provide feedback from anywhere
at any time due to the internet. People still use email and social media to discuss the work, but
usually they just send a link to a site thats more suited to collaboration on software. Theres
many terms and lexis only developers know, like programming languages, and tools most
people dont have to ever encounter. Right now at UNCC we use Moodle to learn and upload
our work, and our own choice on how to do it. A cool thing about this field is that its very
personalized to you, working on a project you get to choose your IDE (application that includes
many tools to develop software), your OS (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc.), and usually companies
will give you leniency of time to finish your work, because they want an optimal product at the
end.
Within my discourse community, were all looking to earn our own degrees in our individual
specializations, though most of us are learning the same basic knowledge right now before we
determine which we think would be suited for, and we help each other do the projects
proficiently. Since we eventually work in teams our goal is usually the completion of the given
project, or to create individual theories to be employed in an industry. In a team of developers,
there will usually be people that have knowledge of specific programming languages, systems
integration, business practices, etc. depending on what is being done to collaborate and

provide feedback. For example, developing a robot like in iRobot would require knowledge in
various areas, most likely it would be a programmer (knows a language to code in) to write the
interactions, an AI developer (understands programming and psychology) to create the mind,
and an engineer (can create physical products) to make the hardware.
There are many specializations of the IT field right now, and many conceptual career paths
for the future. In my discourse community for example, my friend Austin wants to be a Java
programmer, James wants to be a computer engineer, my younger brother wants to be a game
designer, and I want to develop AIs and security programs. Right now were in the BS degree of
computer science, so were basically taking a class on each subject to understand an overview
of the different genres, but once you pass the basic knowledge you study much more
conceptual ideas and pick a specialization. Its true that your ability does affect what you can
become, so some of the more complicated studies take another level of cognitive ability that
provide high-paying careers to researchers with the knowledge. Nowadays with the
simplification work done by researchers to create educational methods, and development tools
many people can become successful programmers as long as you have a basic understanding of
algebra, and Im sure in the future these harder specializations will have had a similar thing
happen. Last year, an IDE concept for game design was written, but AI development, security
methodology, and OS development are still fairly difficult to work with though with the recent
advances of mobile hardware I expect that to change within a few years. Something I was asked
to explain was why many people mistake hacking for destructive methods used to steal data,
while in computer science thats actually what we label as cracking. Most people think this
because a journalist labelled an MIT study as such in the past, and theyve been incorrectly

labelling it since then, which is very frustrating for many developers that work in that field. In
reality hacking is usually used to describe OS/application development, so Google, Microsoft,
Apple etc. employees that write all of the applications you use are hackers. Basically the
concept is that once you understand how these programs are written, you can easily
manipulate the processes to steal information or cracking open the machine, and hacking is
an old term created to describe the tedious process of programming, just like hacking wood in
a forest. You cant learn to develop as one without also understanding the other side and its
more complicated than it appears (like with Apple pay, if they didnt have security practices in
major companies, the programmers that made that program could probably take your
information).
Whats unique about the computer science field, is that its completely full of people that
could be outsiders in another field but are able to flourish with proper skills. For example, Steve
Jobs had many interpersonal issues, and bullied his employees into making products perfect,
but his work and conceptual mind was phenomenal so he was the reason for his companys
success over their competition. There are obviously some lexis now for my group, I can think of
a few people I prefer not to work with, but you can usually avoid them for these assignments
another person can do just as well, though itll probably be different in my career. Newcomers
and old-timers always have a huge gap in ability, a person who has no knowledge of a coding
language couldnt look at a program and instantly find the syntax errors (typos) that an
experienced programmer might be stuck on, like some experienced people can. There are also
outsiders besides people with interpersonal issues, in the early years youll see many people
that begin the BS degree without preparation and drop out of the program. The reason I didnt

want to do the 49th security club was that most of them were outsiders, and it wouldve been
difficult to describe their intents without getting too technical.
In all honesty, Ive found many people in this community I havent gotten along with, but
Im fairly careful about who I work with so I havent gotten stuck with any interpersonal
problems yet, and with the proper skills I can choose who Ill be employed by. I like the people I
work with now in the UNCC area, we have a great program though many people arent aware
of it. Ive been doing freelance programming work to develop my skills, and will probably try to
have a programming job over the summer. Im happy with my situation now, I have friends that
are farther along in the path Im on now, and are able to help me with my projects (or have the
same work) so this is a satisfying community to be a part of.
Bibliography

"Computer Science Degrees." Top Universities. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Nov. 2014.

Perrin, Chad. "Hacker vs. Cracker." TechRepublic. N.p., 17 Apr. 2009. Web. 20 Nov. 2014.
<http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/hacker-vs-cracker/>.

CS Head. "Computer Science Careers." Computer Science-GWU. George Washington

Taylor, Chris. "Steve Jobs, Human Being: 10 Quirky Details From the Bestselling
Biography." Mashable. N.p., 27 Oct. 2011. Web. 18 Nov. 2014.

SR Education Group. "Complete Guide to an Online Computer Science Degree." Guide to