Hailey Caram

After watching the video, write a journal entry about how you think the media influences our understanding about cybersecurity. Has this understanding changed over time? What is different in the older pieces of media vs more current media? 

Movies and television have played a big part in influencing how we think about cybersecurity even if it isn’t always accurate. I certainly had an idea of what cybersecurity was before working in the field and have realized many of my assumptions were proven to be wrong. I am not the only one to believe this either, a study done by the University of Maryland found that most participants believed that the way hacking was portrayed in movies and tv shows was real (Fulton et al., n.d.). After working in the field, I see now that cybersecurity is not just a bunch of pop-up screens and typing frantically to hack somebody, but that it encapsulates much more and is not so dramatic. Media tends to over-dramatize what really goes on in spaces where people are trying to get into systems or prevent them from being hacked, it makes it seem like it was only something that only secretive government agencies or criminals dealt with.

Over time, I feel like the media has grown to depict more accurate representations of cybersecurity, however some of it is still a bit dramatic and unrealistic. Media has gotten better about showing that hacks can happen to anybody and that it is not windows flashing all over the screen. I think with the rapid advancements in technology though, that a lot of media likes to show futuristic, 3-D models that are supposed to act as an interface to hack a system, which is just not accurate. The media still has a long way to go in accurately portraying cybersecurity, but it has shifted the portrayal from a mysterious, intense idea of hacking to something that affects everybody on an everyday basis. 

References

Fulton, K. R., Gelles, R., McKay, A., Roberts, R., Abdi, Y., Mazurek, M. L., & University of Maryland. (n.d.). The effect of entertainment media on mental models of computer security. In USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2019. https://www.cs.umd.edu/~ricro/research/publications/soups19_mediasec.pdf