Sean Lawson
Biographic Data
| ID | 4208964 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sean Lawson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sean |
| FAMILY NAME | Lawson |
| SIGNATURE | LAWSON S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Utah |
| ORCID | 0009-0001-0157-7755 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 44 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 9 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Cyber Pearl Harbor
During the two and a half decades leading up to the Russian cyber attacks on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, public policy discourse about cybersecurity typically framed cybersecurity using metaphors and analogies to war and tended to focus on catastrophic doom scenarios involving cyber attacks against critical infrastructure. In this discourse, the so-called “cyber Pearl Harbor” attack was always supposedly just around the corner. Since 201…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as “drones,” have gained media attention over the last several years with much of the focus centering on their military uses and their emerging role in newsgathering. News organizations, journalists, and private citizens have employed UAVs to capture and share breaking news, to provide glimpses of natural disasters that would otherwise be too hazardous for journalists to obtain, and to offer u…
The US military's social media civil war
This article uses the controversy within the United States (US) 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 US military imaginary. But the controversy over social media is one indicator that the dominant discourse of information-age conflict is neither stable nor total. The int…
Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement
Amid a dizzying array of social media, the ground of activism has fractured into decentered knots creating a cacophony of panmediated worlds. Our analysis of Occupy Wall Street (Ows) offers a preliminary charting of the fragmenting of the old media world into a proliferation of social media worlds. On old media, Ows was stillborn, first neglected, and then frivolously framed. On social media, Ows's emergence was vibrant, its manifestations much d…
Putting the “war” in cyberwar
Public policy discourse about cyber security in the United States is dominated by a metaphor of war and analogies to the Cold War. This essay critically evaluates the contradictory tendency within U.S. cyber war discourse to see cyber conflict as simultaneously revolutionary and unprecedented, but also amenable to the tenets of Cold War nuclear deterrence. This contradiction points to an ongoing crisis of effectively identifying and understanding…
Beyond Cyber-Doom
Cybersecurity proponents often rely on cyber-doom scenarios as a key tactic for calling attention to prospective cyberthreats. This article critically examines cyber-doom scenarios by placing them in a larger historical context, assessing how realistic they are, and drawing out the policy implications of relying on such tales. It draws from relevant research in the history of technology, military history, and disaster sociology to examine some of…
Surfing on the edge of chaos
This article argues that during the 1990s, military professionals and civilian defense experts in the US used concepts and metaphors from nonlinear science to translate tenets of 1980s battlefield strategy and tactics into theories of international politics and foreign policy that posited the necessity of speed and offense in the face of a supposedly more chaotic and dangerous post-Cold War world. Ultimately, the most militaristic of the lessons …
Articulation, antagonism, and intercalation in Western military imaginaries
This article provides a discursive grounding for understanding the construction of military imaginaries by adding the concepts of ‘antagonism’ and ‘intercalation’ to articulation theory. By examining the cases of industrial-mechanized warfare theory and network-centric warfare theory through the lens of this expanded articulation theory, it is argued that military imaginaries often serve to define and link conceptions of science, technology, soci…
Cold War military systems science and the emergence of a nonlinear view of war in the US military
This paper examines the role of Cold War military systems science in the emergence of a nonlinear view of war within the US military. It argues that US military ambivalence towards systems science and seeds of a nonlinear worldview within the systems sciences help to explain the enlistment of nonlinear sciences like chaos and complexity theories. The turn to nonlinear science represents not a radical break with, but rather the evolution of a worl…
Articulation, antagonism, and intercalation in Western military imaginaries
This article provides a discursive grounding for understanding the construction of military imaginaries by adding the concepts of ‘antagonism’ and ‘intercalation’ to articulation theory. By examining the cases of industrial-mechanized warfare theory and network-centric warfare theory through the lens of this expanded articulation theory, it is argued that military imaginaries often serve to define and link conceptions of science, technology, soci…
Beyond Cyber-Doom
Cybersecurity proponents often rely on cyber-doom scenarios as a key tactic for calling attention to prospective cyberthreats. This article critically examines cyber-doom scenarios by placing them in a larger historical context, assessing how realistic they are, and drawing out the policy implications of relying on such tales. It draws from relevant research in the history of technology, military history, and disaster sociology to examine some of…
The US military's social media civil war
This article uses the controversy within the United States (US) 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 US military imaginary. But the controversy over social media is one indicator that the dominant discourse of information-age conflict is neither stable nor total. The int…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as “drones,” have gained media attention over the last several years with much of the focus centering on their military uses and their emerging role in newsgathering. News organizations, journalists, and private citizens have employed UAVs to capture and share breaking news, to provide glimpses of natural disasters that would otherwise be too hazardous for journalists to obtain, and to offer u…
Surfing on the edge of chaos
This article argues that during the 1990s, military professionals and civilian defense experts in the US used concepts and metaphors from nonlinear science to translate tenets of 1980s battlefield strategy and tactics into theories of international politics and foreign policy that posited the necessity of speed and offense in the face of a supposedly more chaotic and dangerous post-Cold War world. Ultimately, the most militaristic of the lessons …
Cold War military systems science and the emergence of a nonlinear view of war in the US military
This paper examines the role of Cold War military systems science in the emergence of a nonlinear view of war within the US military. It argues that US military ambivalence towards systems science and seeds of a nonlinear worldview within the systems sciences help to explain the enlistment of nonlinear sciences like chaos and complexity theories. The turn to nonlinear science represents not a radical break with, but rather the evolution of a worl…
Surfing on the edge of chaos
This article argues that during the 1990s, military professionals and civilian defense experts in the US used concepts and metaphors from nonlinear science to translate tenets of 1980s battlefield strategy and tactics into theories of international politics and foreign policy that posited the necessity of speed and offense in the face of a supposedly more chaotic and dangerous post-Cold War world. Ultimately, the most militaristic of the lessons …
Articulation, antagonism, and intercalation in Western military imaginaries
This article provides a discursive grounding for understanding the construction of military imaginaries by adding the concepts of ‘antagonism’ and ‘intercalation’ to articulation theory. By examining the cases of industrial-mechanized warfare theory and network-centric warfare theory through the lens of this expanded articulation theory, it is argued that military imaginaries often serve to define and link conceptions of science, technology, soci…
Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement
Amid a dizzying array of social media, the ground of activism has fractured into decentered knots creating a cacophony of panmediated worlds. Our analysis of Occupy Wall Street (Ows) offers a preliminary charting of the fragmenting of the old media world into a proliferation of social media worlds. On old media, Ows was stillborn, first neglected, and then frivolously framed. On social media, Ows's emergence was vibrant, its manifestations much d…
Putting the “war” in cyberwar
Public policy discourse about cyber security in the United States is dominated by a metaphor of war and analogies to the Cold War. This essay critically evaluates the contradictory tendency within U.S. cyber war discourse to see cyber conflict as simultaneously revolutionary and unprecedented, but also amenable to the tenets of Cold War nuclear deterrence. This contradiction points to an ongoing crisis of effectively identifying and understanding…
Beyond Cyber-Doom
Cybersecurity proponents often rely on cyber-doom scenarios as a key tactic for calling attention to prospective cyberthreats. This article critically examines cyber-doom scenarios by placing them in a larger historical context, assessing how realistic they are, and drawing out the policy implications of relying on such tales. It draws from relevant research in the history of technology, military history, and disaster sociology to examine some of…
The US military's social media civil war
This article uses the controversy within the United States (US) 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 US military imaginary. But the controversy over social media is one indicator that the dominant discourse of information-age conflict is neither stable nor total. The int…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as “drones,” have gained media attention over the last several years with much of the focus centering on their military uses and their emerging role in newsgathering. News organizations, journalists, and private citizens have employed UAVs to capture and share breaking news, to provide glimpses of natural disasters that would otherwise be too hazardous for journalists to obtain, and to offer u…
Cyber Pearl Harbor
During the two and a half decades leading up to the Russian cyber attacks on the 2016 U.S. presidential election, public policy discourse about cybersecurity typically framed cybersecurity using metaphors and analogies to war and tended to focus on catastrophic doom scenarios involving cyber attacks against critical infrastructure. In this discourse, the so-called “cyber Pearl Harbor” attack was always supposedly just around the corner. Since 201…
Political science (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Computer security (4 works) · Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Political economy (4 works) · Politics (4 works)