Knowledge is an essential source of competitive advantage in modern society and is particularly important in the current on-line environment due to increased business interactions throughout the world. Knowledge sharing initiatives taken by organisations to improve technicalities to tackle cyber threat have been extensively investigated. A particular focus of this study was on the security professionals sharing their learning experience in order to help address and mitigate identity theft. Multiple case studies were employed to interpret the triangulated data collected. ShoppingCo, PaymentCo, TeleCo, and NetworkingCo participated in this investigation. Semi structured interviews were scheduled and conducted in conjunction to company reports, personal communication, presentation slides and related materials was gathered to ensure trustworthiness and authenticity. Pattern matching analysis was employed to draw conclusions by evaluating 30 transcripts and 11 internal documents. The major theoretical contribution of this study was the proposal of a conceptual framework that adapts for private sector organisations knowledge sharing elements in the security profession. Lack of knowledge of the manager’s role is addressed. Current knowledge sharing and corporate communication practices are synthesised. Formal and informal communication, social forums and networking events are evaluated. Thus, improving the current understanding of identity theft. This empirical study contributes to an improved understanding of inter-organisational knowledge sharing practice within three retailers and an official networking forum. Because of this evaluation, an extended framework is proposed and components synthesised into a new framework. Recommendations are drawn based on an evaluation of what is working and what does not seem to be providing benefits with regard to knowledge that address and mitigate identity theft. The framework suggested that the key to improved knowledge sharing was to persuade a range of security officials working for different private sector organisations to share their knowledge of identity theft prevention.

Evoking his early personal experiences, computer art pioneer Paul Brown wrote in the mid-1990s that to work with computers was akin to a ‘kiss of death’. According to him, as a result of sheer prejudice, the majority of people in the art world did not acknowledge such artworks as interesting, valid or important. Although recurrent in the literature concerned with such art, Brown’s claims must be confronted with the relative success of artistic practices interchangeably labelled as computer, new media, cybernetic, electronic or simply digital art. However, as attested by this proliferation of labels as well as by the development of numerous dedicated awards, degrees, galleries, museums, awards and publications, the success of such practices cannot be explained by artistic merit alone. Since many in the art world do not accept these artworks, as Brown and others suggest, how can we explain the works’ success in securing and developing their own space over the course of fifty years? This thesis investigates the emergence, development and institutionalisation of the field termed here as ‘art, science and technology’ (AST) between 1965 and the mid-1970s in Europe and North America. Also recognised by the aforementioned labels (among others), AST is an umbrella term that arguably designates the artistic practices interested in the adoption, theorisation and dissemination of post-war technologies and, particularly, information technology. Yet, despite this shared interest, here I argue that it is the particular institutional arrangement of AST that best distinguishes it from other artistic practices. A direct consequence of its rejection, AST’s emergence as a separate field is here explained via a revision of its initial social and cultural contexts. Arising from the technophile cultural climate of the long 1950s, and alongside the massive investments in technology made by Western governments in the same period, early AST developed not within traditional artistic spaces but within industries and universities. In the late 1960s, however, with the rise of economic, political and social uncertainties alongside escalating international conflicts, it became increasingly difficult to justify an art produced with the tools and support of the military– industrial complex. If on the one hand artists such as Brown understood these new artworks as central to art and its history, a normative development of a new technological era, on the other hand opponents located at the centre of contemporary art lambasted these new artworks for their supposedly scientific, commercial and aesthetic pretensions. Differently from previous attempts aimed at justifying the artistic worthiness of art produced with post-war technology, this thesis presents the history of such practices from the point of view of its own struggle – that is, its fight for survival. Ultimately, here I explain and describe how AST became detached from art while claiming its status. This is an effort not interested in the merits of these practices per se but, instead, concerned with AST’s development as an autonomous and prosperous field.

This thesis presents an ethnographic study of the role of users in user-centered design. It is written from the perspective of science and technology studies, in particular developments in actor-network theory, and draws on the notion of the assemblage from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The data for this thesis derives from a six-month field study of the routine discourse and practices of user-centered designers working for a multinational microprocessor manufacturer. The central argument of this thesis is that users are assembled along with the new technologies whose design they resource, as well as with new configurations of socio-cultural life that they bring into view. Informing this argument are two interrelated insights. First, user-centered and participatory design processes involve interminglings of human and non-human actors. Second, users are occasioned in such processes as sociotechnical assemblages. Accordingly, this thesis: (1) reviews how the user is variously applied as a practico-theoretical concern within human-computer interaction (HCI) and as an object of analysis within the sociology and history of technology; (2) outlines a methodology for studying users variously enacted within design practice; (3) examines how a non-user is constructed and re-constructed during the development of a diabetes related technology; (4) examines how designers accomplish user-involvement by way of a gendered persona; (5) examines how the making of a technology for people suffering from obesity included multiple users that served to format the designers’ immediate practical concerns, as well as the management of future expectations; (6) examines how users serve as a means for conducting ethnography-in-design. The thesis concludes with a theoretically informed reflection on user assemblages as devices that: do representation; resource designers’ socio-material management of futures; perform modalities of scale associated with technological and product development; and mediate different forms of accountability.

Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo entender as diferentes dinâmicas estabelecidas entre contracultura, economia e ciência a partir da noção de matriz de entrelaçamento. A empresa Google Inc e o objeto que melhor permite analisar as zonas fronteiriças que entrelaçam esses três elementos, preservando seus referentes e suas fronteiras.Assim este e um trabalho que tenta explorar por meio de quais processos as praticas e valores da contracultura e da produção de conhecimento científico que, ao mesmo tempo em que não eram frontalmente anti-mercado, mas que inicialmente não estavam subordinadas à produção capitalista, acabam muitas vezes se impondo aos objetivos de mercado, à forma de produção de conhecimento do capitalismo flexível, por provarem sua eficiência tecnica e sucesso comercial. Irei me referir a esses três elementos dentro de uma perspectiva dos regimes, que estabelece que cada regime tem sua base histórica, possui sua própria divisão de trabalho, seus próprios modos de produção cognitiva e de artefatos e tem audiências específicas. / This research aims to understand the different dynamics between established counterculture, economics and science from the notion of entanglement matrix. The company Google Inc. is therefore the best subject for an analysis of edge cases that intertwine these three elements, preserving their referents and their boundaries. In this manner, this research attempts to explore which processes the practices and values of counterculture and the production of scientific knowledge that, while they were not outright anti-market, but initially were not subordinated to capitalist production, often end up imposing marketing objectives, influencing the production of knowledge in a flexible capitalism for proving its technical efficiency and \"commercial\" success. I will refer to these three elements within a perspective of the regimes, which states that each regime has its historical basis, has its own division of labor, their own modes of cognitive production and has specific audiences.

This research investigates the complexities of artistic authorship under the production conditions of the web. It is driven by a fascination with the possibilities of expanding the authorial sphere of the artwork to include the productive capacities of other subjectivities, entities and processes. I offer the neologism ‘extra-subjectivity’ to reflect on this emerging form of production, in which the ultimate manifestation of the artwork often exceeds the author’s intentions. As well as the written thesis, it comprises seven artworks that represent a distinctive approach characterized by playfulness, humour and the use of generative computational processes. Several early works explore my authorial agency in relation to algorithmically generated variations of texts, including William Blake’s poem The Fly and the song Puff the Magic Dragon. Later, algorithmic generation is combined with the appropriation of content shared on social media, as in Infinite Violets, which displays variations of a Shakespearean verse along with images from Flickr. I draw on digital sociological methods to create a hybrid approach in which the web is understood as an evolving medium made up of digital objects and devices that can be repurposed for art practice. This approach underpins 'Flickr Nude or Noodle Descending a Staircase', which uses images programmatically accessed through Flickr’s application programming interface to remake a Marcel Duchamp painting for the web. 'Selfie Portrait' displays Instagram photographs tagged with ‘Selfie’ alongside users’ biographical information, which drives the ‘Copyright Episode’, an extended account of the legal contexts surrounding web-based art practices. Here, I demonstrate how such practices are entangled socially, ethically and legally with the distinct production conditions of the web. I argue that authorship is a question of responsibility as well as ‘ownership’, which is why ethics are as important as the law.

Esta pesquisa tem por objetivo entender as diferentes dinâmicas estabelecidas entre contracultura, economia e ciência a partir da noção de matriz de entrelaçamento. A empresa Google Inc e o objeto que melhor permite analisar as zonas fronteiriças que entrelaçam esses três elementos, preservando seus referentes e suas fronteiras.Assim este e um trabalho que tenta explorar por meio de quais processos as praticas e valores da contracultura e da produção de conhecimento científico que, ao mesmo tempo em que não eram frontalmente anti-mercado, mas que inicialmente não estavam subordinadas à produção capitalista, acabam muitas vezes se impondo aos objetivos de mercado, à forma de produção de conhecimento do capitalismo flexível, por provarem sua eficiência tecnica e sucesso comercial. Irei me referir a esses três elementos dentro de uma perspectiva dos regimes, que estabelece que cada regime tem sua base histórica, possui sua própria divisão de trabalho, seus próprios modos de produção cognitiva e de artefatos e tem audiências específicas. / This research aims to understand the different dynamics between established counterculture, economics and science from the notion of entanglement matrix. The company Google Inc. is therefore the best subject for an analysis of edge cases that intertwine these three elements, preserving their referents and their boundaries. In this manner, this research attempts to explore which processes the practices and values of counterculture and the production of scientific knowledge that, while they were not outright anti-market, but initially were not subordinated to capitalist production, often end up imposing marketing objectives, influencing the production of knowledge in a flexible capitalism for proving its technical efficiency and \"commercial\" success. I will refer to these three elements within a perspective of the regimes, which states that each regime has its historical basis, has its own division of labor, their own modes of cognitive production and has specific audiences.

Novelty is a widespread notion that has not been given commensurate critical attention. This research is an ethnographically-inclined exploration of practices surrounding the accomplishment of novelty in an institution for which novelty is a central notion: the patent system of the United Kingdom. The research is based on interviews with patent examiners at the UK patent office, interviews with patent attorneys at various legal firms, and documentary analysis of legislation and numerous legal judgments. The thesis brings to bear themes from Science and Technology Studies and ethnomethodology to assess the extent to which they can account for the practices surrounding novelty in the UK patent system. As a fundamental legal requirement for the patentability of inventions, novelty is a central part of the practices of patent composition, assessment and contestation. Rather than being a straightforward technical criterion, however, novelty is shown to be a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon emerging from interwoven legal, bureaucratic and individual practices. The local resolution of whether or not a given invention is new, and the cross-institutional coherence of novelty as a practicable notion, raise questions concerning ontology, accountability, scale and inconcludability, and provide an opportunity for empirically grounded engagement with these longstanding analytical concerns.

Personal space is a human’s imaginary system of precaution and an important concept for exploring territoriality, but between humans and technology because machinic agencies transfer, relocate, enact and reenact territorially. Literatures of territoriality, violence and affect are uniquely brought together, with chatbots as the research object to argue that their ongoing development as artificial agents, and the ambiguity of violence they can engender, have broader ramifications for a socio-technical research programme. These literatures help to understand the interrelation of virtual and actual spatiality relevant to research involving chatrooms and internet forums, automated systems and processes, as well as human and machine agencies; because all of these spaces, methods and agencies involve the personal sphere. The thesis is an ethical tale of cruel techno-science that is performed through conceptualisations from the creative arts, constituting a PhD by practice. This thesis chronicles four chatbots, taking into account interventions made in fine art, design, fiction and film that are omitted from a history of agent technology. The thesis re-interprets Edward Hall’s work on proxemics, personal space and territoriality, using techniques of the bricoleur and rudiments (an undeveloped and speculative method of practice), to understand chatbot techniques such as the pick-up, their entrapment logics, their repetitions of hateful speech, their nonsense talk (including how they disorientate spatial metaphors), as well as how developers switch on and off their learning functionality. Semi-structured interviews and online forum postings with chatbot developers were used to expand and reflect on the rudimentary method. To urge that this project is timely is itself a statement of anxiety. Chatbots can manipulate, exceed, and exhaust a human understanding of both space and time. Violence between humans and machines in online and offline spaces is explored as an interweaving of agency and spatiality. A series of rudiments were used to probe empirical experiments such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Tucker, 1950). The spatial metaphors of confinement as a parable of entrapment, are revealed within that logic and that of chatbots. The ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments (Milgram, 1961) were used to reflect on the roles played by machines which are then reflected into a discussion of chatbots and the experiments done in and around them. The agency of the experimenter was revealed in the machine as evidenced with chatbots which has ethical ramifications. The argument of personal space is widened to include the ways machinic territoriality and its violence impacts on our ways of living together both in the private spheres of our computers and homes, as well as in state-regulated conditions (Directive-3, 2003). The misanthropic aspects of chatbot design are reflected through the methodology of designing out of fear. I argue that personal spaces create misanthropic design imperatives, methods and ways of living. Furthermore, the technological agencies of personal spaces have a confining impact on the transient spaces of the non-places in a wider discussion of the lift, chatroom and car. The violent origins of the chatbot are linked to various imaginings of impending disaster through visualisations, supported by case studies in fiction to look at the resonance of how anxiety transformed into terror when considering the affects of violence.