People obtain knowledge from different sources, depending on the issues that they wish to analyze or resolve. In this paper, the authors examine the sources of knowledge on cryptocurrencies that can be useful for young people. The authors used a survey questionnaire to collect empirical data. The sample consisted of students from Polish universities representing the population that is particularly interested in new technologies and solutions emerging on the market, as exemplified by cryptocurrencies. The purpose of this paper is to find an answer to the main research question: What sources of knowledge about cryptocurrencies have students used? Two criteria were taken into account, namely the respondents’ gender and the location of the universities where they studied. The general results showed that students choose modern, preferably well-known sources of knowledge about cryptocurrencies such as popular information websites and social media as well as information provided by their family and friends. The gender analysis showed that the main differences concern the sources of knowledge on cryptocurrencies: popular information websites were chosen more often by men, whereas television and radio were used more frequently by females. Regarding the location of the university, our findings showed that the approach of students to sources of knowledge tends to be similar, regardless of whether they study in Warsaw or Katowice. A difference was found for only one variable, i.e., family and friends. Thus, family and friends were a source of knowledge that students from Warsaw used more frequently than those from Katowice. It may indicate that metropolitan students are more sociable or family-minded.
This article explores the potentials of blockchain technology to alleviate and/or intensify some of the problems of the information and communication sector. Divided into four sections, the article first explores the democratic deficit within the context of an informed citizenry. This section includes a study of the current public sphere, post-truth politics and populism. Secondly, the article addresses the current information and communication system by investigating today’s social media and an ever-changing digital news media landscape. Thirdly, it explores four prevalent approaches toward reforming the information and communication system: fact-checking and debunking, media literacy, regulation and policy reform, and self-regulation. And fourthly, it addresses the central question of the study, which concerns blockchain technology. This disruptive database technology has potential to offer solutions to regaining trust in the information ecosystem, yet like other approaches, when placed within existing socio-economic structures, it falls short in reversing the democratic deficit.
Gartner's Technology Hype Cycle has Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) at the peak of the hype cycle in 2021 while not even having appeared on the hype cycle in 2020. This exploratory study looks at the spread of the hype from a social media context by examining all tweets related to #NFT. We find evidence that the communities are highly dynamic in nature which is indicative of a decentralized social movement with no strong leaders. Sentiment regarding NFTs was strongly positive across all communities with no indication of any growing negative sentiment. The community expanded at exponential rates throughout the period of study with the communities becoming more interlinked and sharing more content over time. This analysis provides a foundation on which future NFT studies, or alternative emergent technology studies could build upon.
Simone Casale-Brunet, Mirko Zichichi, Lee Hutchinson, Marco Mattavelli · 5 authors
This paper presents an analysis of the role of social media, specifically Twitter, in the context of non-fungible tokens, better known as NFTs. Such emerging technology framing the creation and exchange of digital object, started years ago with early projects such as "CryptoPunks" and since early 2021, has received an increasing interest by a community of people creating, buying, selling NFT's and by the media reporting to the general public. In this work it is shown how the landscape of one class of projects, specifically those used as social media profile pictures, has become mainstream with leading projects such as "Bored Ape Yacht Club", "Cool Cats" and "Doodles". This work illustrates how heterogeneous data was collected from the Ethereum blockchain and Twitter and then analysed using algorithms and state-of-art metrics related to graphs. The initial results show that from a social network perspective, the collections of most popular NFTs can be considered as a single community around NFTs. Thus, while each project has its own value and volume of exchange, on a social level all of them are primarily influenced by the evolution of values and trades of "Bored Ape Yacht Club" collection.
Open access
3 source records
Digital Marketing and Social Media
Social Media and Politics
Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing Technologies
Web3 and DeFi are widely advocated as innovations for greater financial inclusion and democratization. We assemble the most comprehensive dataset to date on the largest Web3 ecosystem and use large-scale computing to investigate the claim. We discuss Ethereum's network structure, time trends, and distributions of transactions, mining, and ownership. Mining income and Ether ownership are concentrated in a few nodes, even after excluding exchange and mining pool wallets, with inequalities more exacerbated than observed in the real economy. Network activities are dominated by large transactions, shifting from peer-to-peer to user-DApps/DeFi interactions, and from Ether-based to ERC-20-token-based. High percentage transaction fees, congestion-induced gas-price fluctuation, suboptimal reserve setting, and large return volatility of tokens disproportionally harm small, unsophisticated, and new nodes, with high failure rates hurting all users. Finally, we present causal evidence that base-fee burning mechanisms (e.g., EIP-1559) and airdrop programs (e.g., OmiseGo Airdrop) promote inclusion and equality through monetary redistribution.
During each election cycle, the city of Seattle distributes four $25 vouchers to every registered voter, which may be donated to and redeemed by campaigns for city office. Through a difference-in-differences research design, we study the causal effect of Seattle's program on various outcomes in city council elections in the first two cycles after implementation, with comparison cities drawn from large cities in Washington and California. We find a 53% increase in total contributions and a 350% increase in number of unique donors; these effects are largely explained by large increases in small donations, defined as contributions less than $200. We find statistically insignificant evidence of decreases in private donations, although our point estimates suggest moderate-to-substantial crowd-out ratios. We further estimate a highly significant 86% increase in number of candidates coupled with substantial decreases in incumbent electoral success. These results provide some of the first causal evidence of the effect of decentralized public campaign finance schemes, while speaking to the impacts of campaign regulation more generally on donation activity, candidate entry, and incumbency advantage.
This research sets out to analyze the message promoted by start-up enterprises that apply blockchain technologies for the purpose of e-voting [blockchain-powered e-voting (BPE)], and their perceived effects of this technological solution on democratic outcomes. Employing Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA), I examined the written output of seven BPE start-ups (Agora, DemocracyEarth, Follow My Vote, Polys, Voatz, Votem, and VoteWatcher), as displayed in their websites. The close attention of CDA to power relations brought out relevant topics of discussion for analysis. Notably, these included: voting as an expression of democracy; technological determinism; individual versus communitarian understandings of democracy; the prominence of neoliberalism and the economic sphere; and technological literacy. Findings from the literature suggest that the assumptions of BPE start-ups about a blockchain-powered democracy diverge from widely accepted understandings of democracy. BPE start-ups envision a democracy determined by positions and institutions of power, by the technologically able, and by economic interests. This research argues that this conception of democracy disempowers voters from any form of decision-making regarding how democracy is run beyond their expression in the form of a vote decided by these established powers. The widespread addresses to existing elites to enable BPE, as well as what is left unsaid about community, collective rights and the not so technologically literate population, imply that BPE developers display concern for one particular expression among the many diverse and heterogeneous understandings of democracy, while disregarding outstanding privacy, security and accountability concerns associated to implementations of the technology for BPE. This work is a contribution to much needed research on technology and democracy’s deepening intersections, at a time of rapid technological innovation and turbulent democratic scepticism.
Rickard Grassman, Vanessa Bracamonte, Matthew J. Davis, Maki Sato
In this paper, we explore how cryptocurrencies have been received in Sweden and Japan, and what specific attitudes and discourses may reveal about the ethical implications surrounding this new technology. By way of topic modelling prevalent discourses on social media among users of cryptocurrencies, and teasing out the more culturally situated significance in such interactions through discourse analysis, our aim is to unpack the way certain tropes and traces around the notion of autonomy may provide a fruitful lens through which we may discern how this technology has been received in each respective country. The ultimate aim of the paper is to shed light on the attitudes that inform the way this technology is perceived and the cultural and ideological nuances that this brings to the fore, as well as how this culturally nuanced view may help us better discern the potential advantages and ethical challenges associated with this new technology.
Amrita Dhillon, Grammateia Kotsialou, Peter McBurney, Luke Riley
This work discusses the potential of a blockchain based infrastructure for a decentralised online voting platform. When compared to paper based voting, online voting can vastly increase the speed that votes can be counted, expand the overall accessibility of the election system and decrease the cost of turnout. Yet despite these advantages, online voting for political office is subject to fraud at various levels due to its centralised nature. In this paper, we describe a general architecture of a centralised online voting system and detail which areas of such a system are vulnerable to electoral fraud. We then proceed to introduce the key ideas underlying blockchain technology as a decentralised mechanism that can address these problems. We discuss the advantages and weaknesses of the blockchain technology, the protocols the technology uses and what criteria a good blockchain protocol should satisfy (depending on the voting application). We argue that the decentralisation inherent in the blockchain technology could increase the public's trust in national elections, as well as eliminate voter impersonation and double voting. We conclude with a discussion regarding how economists and social scientists can collaborate with the blockchain community in a research agenda on the design of efficient blockchain protocols and new voting systems such as liquid democracy.
Within the social sciences, there is growing interest in the ways in which cryptocurrencies are shaping interactions. The major approaches have been economic, sociological, legal, and technological...
In the era of digital revolution many contemporary events that changed the world were shaped through the internet. Nowadays, the emergence of internet of things (IoT), combining physical objects with virtual networks is expected to have even more influence. This new 'decentralised' structure in the world raises questions such as power, governance and the notion of democracy online. The aim of this paper is to investigate these notions. We have taken the examples of Bitcoin and Wikipedia and examined their decision-making process. Our analysis has found some inconsistencies in their policies, that are in contradiction with democracy and consensus principles of governance. Starting from our findings, we present further improvements that can be used to achieve more democracy and equity in the digital context.
Digital ledger teknologi kan enkelt automatisera Sverige som en jurisdiktion, inklusive automatisering av beskattning, och möjliggöra digitala regeringsval, säkra digitala nationella IDn, och en Svensk e-krona. Exakt vad som behövs för en Svensk digital ledger är en konsensus algoritm som ordnar ledgern under Svenska folkets kontroll, proof-of-vote, digitala motsvarigheten av representativ demokrati. Under proof-of-vote röstar Svenska medborgare fram validatorer, som sen följer motsvarande protokoll som i Bitcoin och Ethereum, e.g., konkurrerar om auktoritet utifrån konsensus algoritmen, Nakamoto konsensus, i proof-of-vote med dom folk-röster dom fått, motsvarande stake i proof-of-stake.
The new media occupies a wide range of different areas of our daily lives, one of that is the question of national identity and culture. If we focus on the development of the new media and the Internet, we will find that there are many questions and concerns about the Kurdish identity and its culture have come into being, with this development, ringing like bells of dangers, want to alert the media, educational and cultural institutions to do more scientific efforts to study those fears.
Amrita Dhillon, Grammateia Kotsialou, Peter McBurney, Luke Riley
This work discusses the potential of a blockchain based infrastructure for a decentralised online voting platform. When compared to paper based voting, online voting can vastly increase the speed that votes can be counted, expand the overall accessibility of the election system and decrease the cost of turnout. Yet despite these advantages, online voting for political office is subject to fraud at various levels due to its centralised nature. In this paper, we describe a general architecture of a centralised online voting system and detail which areas of such a system are vulnerable to electoral fraud. We then proceed to introduce the key ideas underlying blockchain technology as a decentralised mechanism that can address these problems. We discuss the advantages and weaknesses of the blockchain technology, the protocols the technology uses and what criteria a good blockchain protocol should satisfy (depending on the voting application). We argue that the decentralisation inherent in the blockchain technology could increase the public’s trust in national elections, as well as eliminate voter impersonation and double voting. We conclude with a discussion regarding how economists and social scientists can collaborate with the blockchain community in a research agenda on the design of efficient blockchain protocols and new voting systems such as liquid democracy.
Social networks in the public sphere support the process of innovation that aims to make the action of the municipalities more efficient and participatory. Due to their characteristics, social media seem to be able to contribute significantly to the development of e-governance and e-democracy as tools based on dialogue and on the enhancement of the contribution of users-citizens or, more generally, of users-local stakeholders. Web 4.0 and social media are progressively taking on a role of primary importance in the contemporary socio-economic context, contributing to change not only the processes and methods of communication of individuals, citizens and businesses, but also the organization and business management itself. In the new dimension of the Web 4.0 the user's behavior is not predetermined, but the user can derive and autonomously build the services, as the web is decentralized and enriched by the experiences of the users who participate in the definition and improvement of content.
This article introduces the concept of ‘place-based civic tech’ — citizen engagement technology co- designed by local government, civil society and global volunteers. It investigates to what extent creating such a digital space for autonomous self-organization allows for the emergence of a parallel, self-determining and more place-based geography of politics and political action. It finds that combining online tools with offline collaborative practices presents a unique opportunity for decentralization of power and decision-making in a manner which both politically motivates civil society and begins to update the infrastructure of democracy. The discussion is supported by a combination of primary and secondary data, with research methods including ethnographic and participatory observation techniques. Research data is drawn from a range of empirical sources, including an in-depth case study of the radical municipalist movement in Spain. The article concludes that there is a clear and compelling narrative of cities taking power back, in the form of a plural and globally networked movement. As such, this study contributes to both the theory and practice of civic tech, collective impact, municipalism and place-based urban politics while emphasizing the need for further research on experiments and movements currently existing below the academic radar. <br/>
Open access
Innovative Approaches in Technology and Social Development
Blockchain technology has been claimed to have the potential to disrupt a large number of industries. Despite all the hype around it, blockchain remains at a nascent state. In the early stage of the development of an IT innovation, its success is to a degree contingent on building legitimacy around it. This seems to be particularly relevant in the context of blockchain due to the questionable reputation that its most famous application, the bitcoin, has gained over time. This paper explores the usage of social media by four key actors in the blockchain ecosystem –media, IT, financial services and consulting firms – over a calendar year and through the lens of ‘organizing visions’ to identify how these organizations are trying to legitimize blockchain. Our results show that these actors employ three primary legitimation micro-level strategies through two types of legitimation mechanisms – advertising affiliations with influential field level actors (pragmatic legitimacy), describing positive market responses to blockchain and emphasizing its ongoing development (cognitive legitimacy), and describing characteristics of blockchain that are in alignment with current technological best practices (cognitive legitimacy). This paper extends the current literature on IT innovation adoption and legitimation, and contributes to the nascent literature on blockchain.
Abstract In the last decades, modern democracies have been witnessing a low rate of political participation and civic engagement with existing governmental institutions. Civic participation is not dead, however, it is only shifting to a new space. In the shadow corners of the internet, people are looking at blockchain technology as a means to replace many of our traditional institutions. While most of the attention was put, initially, on Bitcoin disrupting banks and other financial operators, as people understood the full potential of blockchain technology they saw it a means to implement new governance structures that could potentially replace some of our existing systems of governance. At the extreme end of this spectrum are those who envision the creation of new blockchain-based virtual nations, with a view to ultimately replace the nation state, or at least experiment with new and allegedly apolitical governance systems, which nevertheless play a crucial political function.