People within the cryptocurrency world come together on imageboards and forums to tell stories about the highly volatile and uncertain world they inhabit. Although they engage with a highly technical digital money form, the stories they share online could be more productively analysed as digital folklore. Through ethnography primarily conducted via 4chan and Reddit, I highlight three types of stories, loosely grouped together within the categories of ‘despair’, ‘comedy’ and ‘courage’. Drawing parallels to folk and fairy tales, I explore how ‘netizens’ use these stories to engage with the uncertainty that characterizes cryptocurrencies. Consequently, I highlight how stories come to make the online cryptocurrency world more inhabitable, as well as allowing people to subvert and resist ‘economic reason’. By foregrounding storytelling, I highlight the fluid, intersubjective and collective actions that help to sustain a volatile and uncertain market that is favourable for those who take to online message boards.
Staples of early United States Internet meme culture were sold via digital auctions for cryptocurrency (except one, which was sold for cash) throughout 2021. Through these transactions, Internet memes, or “the linguistic, image, audio, and video texts created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants across vast networks and collectives” (Milner 1), were “minted” as non-fungible tokens—a marker within cryptocurrency economy that denotes the level of originality or irreplaceability of an (often digital) artifact (Wired). Early 2021 saw Internet memes (memes, hereafter) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs, hereafter) articulated to one another when a series of trades ignited a “buying frenzy”. In February 2021, the original animation file of the Nyan Cat meme (a rendering of a flying cat with a Pop-Tart body) was sold for 300 Ethereum, or US$600,000 (Griffith; Kay); in April 2021, the original photo file of the Disaster Girl meme (an image of a smiling child in front of a burning home) sold for 180 ETH, or nearly US$500,000 (BBC News); in May 2021, the original video file of the viral YouTube video “Charlie Bit My Finger” (wherein an infant bites the finger of their older sibling with glee) was sold for US$760,999, but no cryptocurrency was exchanged for this auction (Evans); in June 2021, the original image of the Shiba Inu who became Doge (image of a dog looking contemplative, often with text around the dog’s face) was sold for a record-breaking (for memes) 1,696.9 ETH, or US$4 million (Rosenblatt). Other notable memes were sold around this time, such as Bad Luck Brian (an unflattering school picture of a teenager who became synonymous with embarrassing social situations), Overly Attached Girlfriend (wide-eyed teenager who was portrayed as obsessive over their significant other), and Success Kid (an infant clenching their fist with a sense of achievement), but for lower prices (Wired; Dash; Gallagher). All the memes sold during this frenzy feature either animals or white individuals, and none of the creators or subjects of the original files are Black. That said, mainstream Internet culture, specifically within the United States, is predicated upon the Othering and exploitation of Black cultural production (Brock 97, 124; Benjamin). The fungible constitution of US Black culture is replete within digital cultures, from contemporary discussions of digital blackface in white use of memes featuring Black folks to express emotion (J.L. Green; Jackson, “Digital Blackface”, White Negroes) and/or using imagery featuring Black folks without permission (J.L. Green; Nakamura; Matamoros-Fernández). The advent of meme-based NFTs, however, offers new areas of inquiry into the triangulation of race, fungibility, and US digital cultures. I approach this cultural phenomenon with two general queries: What cultural and racial legacies of non/fungibility are present in the dynamics of memes becoming NFTs? What are the implications in digital media and US culture? Fungibility and Black Cultural Production As this issue explores, fungibility is a quality of interchangeable, performing persons or objects, but a turn to US Afro-pessimism illustrates how fungibility is a central quality to racialisation. (Continental African scholars coined Afro-pessimism, and its original formulation was markedly different from the US counterpart, which emerged with little to no engagement with the existing African canon. Afropessimism 1.0, as Greg Thomas names it, focusses on the postcolonial economic conditions across the continent. Importantly, there is an undergirding optimism, “the urge to positive social change”, to the inquiries into the poverty, colonial extractivism, and more; Amrah qtd. in Thomas 283; Rieff; de B’béri and Louw.) Fungibility, in US-borne Afro-pessimist literature, is used to describe (1) a major tenet of slavery wherein Black bodies are treated as interchangeable objects rather than human actors, and (2) how the afterlife of slavery continues to structure everyday experiences for Black folks (Bilge; Hartman; Wilderson, III et al.). US Afro-pessimism argues that slavery instantiated an ontological structure that articulates humanity as irreconcilable with Blackness and further articulates whiteness as for what (or whom) the Black body performs and labours (Bilge; Douglass et al.; Wilderson, III and Soong). Within the US, the fungibility of the Black body means it is always already vulnerable to and violable by “the whims of the [non-Black] world” (Wilderson, III 56; see also: Hartman; Lindsey). Indeed, Wilderson, building off Hartman, asserts, “the violence-induced fungibility of Blackness allows for its appropriation by White psyches as ‘property of enjoyment’” (89). The fungibility of Blackness aides in white “transpos[ition of Black] cultural gestures, the stuff of symbolic intervention onto another worldly good, a commodity of style” (Wilderson, III 56). This expropriation of Black digital “imaginative labour” by US white mainstream culture is part and parcel to Internet practices (Iloh; Lockett; Jackson). bell hooks argues white US mainstream culture treats Black cultural production as the “spice, [the] seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (21). By the same token, US white mainstream culture “desire[s] … sustained ‘labor’ … of a dark Other” that seeks to contiunously exploit fungible Black production (31). The constitutive fungibility of Blackness enriches, even if just affectively, the non-fungibility of whiteness; this parasitic relationship has extended to digital culture, with white actors extracting Black meme culture. Internet memes, until the advent of NFTs, did not necessarily provide monetary gain for the creators or original owners. For example, the creator of the iconic phrase “on fleek”, Kayla Newman (aka Peaches Monroee) is regularly discussed when considering the exploitation of Black digital culture (Parham; Maguire; Hazlehurst). The term came from a Vine of Newman hyping herself up in the front-facing camera of her smartphone—“We in this bitch! Finna get crunk. Eyebrows on fleek. Da fuq”—and quickly went viral. Maguire’s insightful analysis of Newman’s viral fame underscores the exploitation and appropriation of Black girl cultural production within the US. Maguire turns toward the legal intricacies of copyright and property as Newman sought ownership of her iconic phrase; however, Vats’s work on the legal rhetorics of intellectual property note its racial exclusivity in the US. (Moreton-Robinson traces similar white supremacist ownership within Australian contexts.) Meaning, only white actors benefit from such legal rhetorics. These forbearances point to the larger cultural legacies of fungibility that alienate Black bodies from their cultural production. US Black digital culture is alienated from the individuals who perform the imaginative labour that benefits and enriches whiteness (Wilderson, III; hooks). The legacies of mass enslavement fundamentally structured the capital and libidinal economies of US culture (Wilderson, III et al.; Spillers; Brock), therefore it stands to reason, like other forms of hegemonic ideologies, that such structuring logics of anti-Blackness are foundational to digital US culture (Benjamin; Brock; Towns; Matamoros-Fernández). Iloh, Williams, and Michele Jackson separately argue that the foundation of mainstream US Internet culture is indebted to the labour of Black users. However, as Brock argues, US Internet culture is a medium by which whiteness marks itself as the default even though Black labour, individuals, and culture are regularly exploited to perpetuate white engagement. Jackson specifically notes that the white performance of US Black culture “financially, artistically, socially, and intellectually” rewards white and other non-Black actors for demonstrating their understanding of Black cultural productions (Jackson, White Negroes 5; see also: hooks; Nakamura). Black individuals are not (fairly) compensated for this labour, even as white individuals gain clout. Newman’s term “on fleek” became a staple of US Vine and broader Internet culture, spawning a hashtag (#EyebrowsOnFleek) and being featured in multiple brand commercials (Maguire). Newman notes that she did not consider trademarking the term because she did not realise how quickly it would spread, allowing corporations and other actors to capitalise on her term free of charge (Hazlehurst; Maguire). Usage of the term became a signpost of the in-crowd within US millennial popular culture (Maguire). However, when Newman later launched a hair extensions company utilising her phrase (On Fleek Hair Extensions), she was resoundingly criticised. During a GoFundMe campaign to jumpstart the business, white digital actors accused Newman of milking her fame (Parham; Hazlehurst; Maguire). Mainstream digital actors forbade Newman’s ownership of her own labour after exploiting her creation throughout its popularity, marking her imaginative labour as fungible. These cultural dynamics exemplify of how anti-Blackness proliferates US digital culture, marking Black cultural labour as fungible and as the (shared) property of white actors. Whiteness regularly dichotomises itself against Blackness, needing the denigration and de-humanisation of Blackness to constitute whiteness’s perceived racial superiority (Wilderson, III et al.; Hartman; Thomas). Since Blackness has been constituted as fungible, alienating the labouring bodies from their production, whiteness (implicitly) constitutes itself as non-fungible. Thus, under this paradigm, white actors, their bodies, and their (property’s) cultural production are constituted as non-fungible, as the foil to fungible Blackness. Of course, anti-Blackness uses fungibility as a means of enriching whiteness, first evidenced by the logics of the Atlantic Slave Trade and extending throughout contemporary US culture. Newman’s ico
Başta sinemacılar, yazarlar, reklamcılar, halkla ilişkiler uzmanları, oyun tasarlayanlar, dijital eser üretenler olmak üzere bütün hikâye anlatıcıları, hedef kitlelerine ulaşmak için transmedya anlatı öğelerini günümüzde artarak daha fazla kullanmaktadırlar. Bu çalışmada sanattan eğitime, yazın dünyasından pazarlamaya pek çok alanda kendine yer bulan transmedya hikâyeciliği anlatı türünün blok zinciri teknolojisine bağlanan sanat eserlerini ifade eden dijital varlıklar olan NFT’lere ne gibi katkılar sağlayacağı irdelenmiştir. Çalışmadaki temel amaç; NFT dünyasını transmedya hikâye anlatıcılığı çerçevesinde tartışmaktır. Literatür taramasına dayalı olarak yapılan bu çalışmada NFT’yi transmedya hikâye anlatıcılığı ile ele alarak, güncel NFT örnekleri üzerinden tartışmak hedeflenmiştir. Son birkaç yılda adından söz ettiren; literatürde hakkında henüz çok az sayıda çalışmanın olduğu NFT (Non-Fungible Token) dünyası yapısal özellikleri gereği transmedya hikâye anlatıcılığına uzak olmayan bir dünyadır. Sanatın üretiminden sanatla buluşan tüketici deneyimine kadar kalıcı değişimlere yol açan dijitalleşme; sonunda NFT ile -dijital para olarak tanımlanabilecek coin ve token’ların bir alt versiyonu olarak- hayatımıza girmiştir. Dijital pasaport olarak tanımlanabilecek olan NFT’ler tıpkı transmedya hikâye anlatıcılığında olduğu gibi farklı platformları harmanlayarak kullanıcıya dijital dünyaya seyahat etme imkânı sunmaktadır. Transmedya hikâyecilik anlatısının NFT dünyasına katkı sağlayabileceği gibi NFT’lerin de bir hikâye anlatım aracı olarak transmedya hikâye anlatımında kullanılan bir araç olabileceği görülmüştür. Her ikisi de çoklu medya kullanımı, hikâyeleştirme, oyunlaştırma stratejileri ve topluluklar tarafından beslenen kavramlardır. Bu noktada ortak paydada buluştuklarında dönüştürecekleri ve katkı sağlayacakları pek çok alan olduğu tespit edilmiştir. Yapılan literatür taramasında NFT ekosisteminin gelişmesi için NFT’lerin hikâye evrenine sahip olmasının öneminin vurgulandığı tespit edilmiştir. Bu bağlamda tıpkı transmedya hikâyecilikte olduğu gibi dijital oyunlar, uygulamalar, hayran kültürü, web siteleri gibi farklı araçlarla NFT’lerin hikâyelerini yaymak ve satın alan kişiyi de evrenin parçası yapmak önem taşımaktadır. NFT’lerin çoğalması ve üretiminin benimsenmesi ile birlikte alanda önemli bir piyasa oluşacağından gelecek yıllarda bu konuda daha fazla araştırma yapılacağı öngörülmektedir. Transmedya hikâyeciliği kapsamında konunun ele alınmasına literatürde hemen hemen hiç rastlanmadığından çalışmanın bu yönüyle öncü çalışmalardan biri olacağı düşünülmektedir. Bu çalışmada sanattan eğitime, yazın dünyasından pazarlamaya pek çok alanda kendine yer bulan transmedya hikâyecilik anlatı türünün blok zinciri teknolojisine bağlanan sanat eserlerini ifade eden dijital varlıklar olan NFT’lere ne gibi katkılar sağlayacağı irdelenmiştir. Çalışmadaki temel amaç; NFT’lerin transmedya hikâye anlatıcılığı çerçevesinde ele alınıp alınamayacağını tartışmaktır. Literatür taramasına dayalı olarak yapılan bu çalışmada NFT’yi transmedya hikâye anlatıcılığı ile ele alarak, güncel örnekler üzerinden tartışmak hedeflenmiştir. Transmedya hikâyecilik anlatısının NFT dünyasına katkı sağlayabileceği gibi NFT’lerin de bir hikâye anlatım aracı olarak transmedya hikâye anlatımında kullanılan bir araç olabileceği görülmüştür. Her ikisi de çoklu medya kullanımı, hikâyeleştirme, oyunlaştırma stratejileri ve topluluklar tarafından beslenen kavramlardır. Bu noktada ortak paydada buluştuklarında dönüştürecekleri ve katkı sağlayacakları pek çok alan olduğu tespit edilmiştir. NFT’lerin çoğalması ve üretiminin benimsenmesi ile birlikte alanda önemli bir piyasa oluşacağından gelecek yıllarda bu konuda daha fazla araştırma yapılacağı öngörülmektedir. Transmedya hikâyecilik kapsamında konunun ele alınmasına literatürde hemen hemen hiç rastlanmadığından çalışmanın bu yönüyle öncü çalışmalardan biri olacağı düşünülmektedir.
This paper presents a social-media data analysis tool to support investors making their decision on play-to-earn projects. The tool was developed in a web application by featuring (1) the common data about the game project and (2) its trend on Twitter by using NLP AI to analyze the tweets and visualize the results in graph presentation. The use scenarios are also presented by how to find answers by using the proposed analysis tool.
Ryan Francisco, Nelson Rodelas, John Edison Ubaldo
Purpose – This study aims to shed light on the rise of play-to-earn games in the Philippines alongside cryptocurrency. The lack of research and public understanding of its benefits and drawbacks prompted the researchers to investigate its market. As such, the study tried to look into the risks and benefits of crypto gaming if it would be regulated by the government, and how market volatility influences the churn rate of crypto games. Method – The research used a descriptive study to determine the perception of people who are engaged in playing “Axie Infinity”. The research also used non-probability sampling using the snowball method. The only tool used to collect data was Google Forms. Furthermore, the study used Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) to analyze the descriptive data. Result – The results showed that most players spend their time playing Axie Infinity for about 1 to 4 hours a day. Predominantly, the return of investments for playing the game will take about 1 to 3 months. It also showed that these players agreed that there is a possible financial instability in a volatile market. With this, they have a high trust issue in terms of price manipulation, privacy and security, and its design and usability. Conclusion – Understanding the cryptocurrency market requires comprehending the perspective of the people who are engaged in a play-to-earn game, and their concerns are critical for any government actions aimed at regulating self-employed income earners playing (Non-fungible Tokens) NFT games in the Philippines. Recommendations – It is suggested that further research must be conducted to understand how self-employed Filipino income earners comprehend NFT gaming and cryptocurrency, impacting their level of interest and participation. Research Implications – Taxing NFT games without sound regulatory frameworks may result in the disarray of this alternative income source. Therefore, the government must tread carefully to avoid a market collapse or other unfavorable outcomes.
Poe came of age in what Frank Luther Mott described as a “Golden Age of Periodicals” in A History of American Magazines ([New York: D. Appleton, 1930], 337). Although “essentially a magazinist” (PL 476), Poe managed to become a major American author by working in the fruitful midground between books and newspapers. “The whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward,” he wrote in 1846. “We now demand the light artillery of the intellect: we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand,” he warned, “the lightness of the artillery must not degenerate into the pop-gunnery . . . of the newspaper press” (Graham’s, December 1846, eapoe.org).What Poe called “pop-gunnery” in newspapers, anticipating the stream of social network items on the Internet today, had their place for him when he needed their special ambiance. Significantly, he announced his return to New York in 1844 by publishing his famous “Balloon-Hoax” as an extra of a penny paper, The Sun. It was issued on a single sheet surrounded by a mixture of announcements, events, and fiction reprints. Poe saw that the effects of the penny papers on “the whole newspaper business of the country . . . are probably beyond all calculation” (Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson [New York: Library of America, 1984], 1214; hereafter ER). The impact of The Sun was memorable: “Its success firmly established ‘the penny system’ throughout the country” . . . [becoming] one of the most important steps ever yet taken in the pathway of human progress” (ER 1221). On the other hand, the penny press also contributed “an increasingly spicy diet of horror, gore, and perversity” (David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 171), suggesting at times a content approaching that of Poe’s most extreme tales.When “The Balloon-Hoax” was published, Richard Adams Locke edited The Sun, where his quite famous “Moon Hoax” had appeared eleven years before. Reviewing Locke afterward, Poe listed the main ingredients of a good hoax: “the novelty of the idea,” its “reason-repressing character,” the tact of the deception, and the “exquisite vraisemblance of the narration” (Godey’s, October 1846, eapoe.org). Suggesting a possible similarity between the hoax and the detective tale, Poe reminded us that the former challenged the reader with constant intellectual “correctness, and the consequent difficulty of detecting a flaw” (“Doings of Gotham,” 4, eapoe.org).Readers of a detective tale might enjoy the possibility, however difficult, of solving the crime, but readers of a hoax had to deal with the utter impossibility of the situation. In total, Poe wrote six hoaxes, each exhibiting a different kind of wit than that found in his detective tales. They further burnished his image as a very clever writer in what was, lest we forget, the age of P. T. Barnum. To a degree his hoaxes were the humorous literary equivalent of diddling, sharing its qualities of “minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin” (M 3:869–70; repr. Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and Sketches, ed. Mabbott [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000], 2: 869–70; hereafter M [2000] 2).Poe’s first hoax, “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall” (Southern Literary Messenger, June 1835), as he later admitted, failed to achieve a consistency of approach, because he “fell back upon a style half plausible, half bantering” (Godey’s, October 1846, eapoe.org). The banter included the use of the date April 1, the description of the balloon as “entirely made of dirty newspapers,” and his use of Dutch-Irvingesque ambiance. In this and subsequent hoaxes, Poe always built on something that readers already knew. Recent press reports of balloon flights provided the starting point for “Hans Pfaall.” Early exploration attempts in the Antarctic provided information on which to base The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837). The famous Lewis and Clark expedition paved the way for its imaginary predecessor, “The Journal of Julius Rodman” (1840). Poe used the apparently inexhaustible subject of aerial travel again in “The Balloon-Hoax” (1844), where he incorporated as many supporting factual details as possible. The contemporary interest in hypnotism and mesmerism—forerunners of the modern concept of the unconscious—providedgrounds for his next hoax, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845). Finally, the contemporary gold craze and the myth of the transmutation of lead provided contexts for his last hoax, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (1849).Poe claimed that the public widely believed his hoaxes. One reader, the historian Robert Greenhow, went so far as to mention “Julius Rodman” in his Memoir, Historical and Political, on the Northwest Coast of North America, and the Adjacent Territories (PL 289). Poe insisted that most readers believed his “Balloon-Hoax”: “Not one person in ten discredited it . . . chiefly the ignorant, because the thing was so novel, so entirely ‘out of the usual way’” (PL 161). For “Van Kempelen,” Poe made the similar claim that “nine persons out of ten (even among the best informed) will believe the quiz,” adding that as a “check to the gold fever, it will create a stir to some purpose” (PL 796). In private, however, Poe told a different story, responding to a query from Arch Ramsay, a Scottish druggist: “Hoax is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar’s case. . . . Some few persons believe it—but I do not—and don’t you” (PL 677).The press generally greeted Poe’s hoaxes with skepticism. However, reviewers at first were charmed by the novelty of “Hans Pfaall”: the Baltimore Republican saw it as “a capital burlesque upon balloonings” (PL 160), and the Charleston Messenger appreciated it as “one of the most exquisite specimens of blended humor and science” (PL 160–61). But reviewers who recalled that Arthur Gordon Pym had been party serialized “under the garb of fiction” could not accept it as a work of fact supposedly created by an actual Pym, then conveniently deceased. Although the New-Yorker praised Pym as a work of “extraordinary, freezing interest” (PL 250), the New York Mirror called Poe a “liar of the first magnitude” (PL 252) and Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine declared it to be “a mass of ignorance and effrontery” (PL 254). The Naval and Military Gazette remarked that Poe’s Pym contained “not only the improbable but the impossible” (PL 257). Disdaining “The Balloon-Hoax” as “ridiculous,” James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald used the occasion to refer to the current Sun publisher, Moses Y. Beach, as “that manufacturer of hoaxes of all kinds” (PL 460).Taking advantage of the loose editorial standards of the day, Poe sometimes pursued the opportunity to exaggerate the extent of his accomplishments and even to fabricate details in his biography. For example, he reported that as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger he had increased the number of subscribers eightfold, from 700 to 5,500, in only fifteen months (Poe to Anthon, October 1844, eapoe.org), and later had boosted circulation at Graham’s tenfold (from 5,000 to 52,000) in only two years (ER 742). Poe’s estimates were repeated in some form in biographies and general reference works until Terrence Whalen, examining the surviving circulation records of the Southern Literary Messenger, found that subscriptions increased only modestly during Poe’s editorship, undermining his claims: “The oft-repeated Messenger story must therefore be seen as a deliberate act of deception” (Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999], 75).Perhaps in imitation of Byron, Poe added some details to his biography that made him seem more adventurous and more brilliant, and he also shaved two years off his official age. Poe gathered these claims for a biographical sketch intended for the Philadelphia Saturday Museum in 1843, hoping they would serve to promote his proposed magazine, The Stylus. The claims consisted entirely of “myths concerning the elopement of Poe’s parents, their death ‘on a visit to Richmond,’ Poe’s journey to Greece and St. Peterburg, [and] his return from Europe on the night after Mrs. Allan’s burial” (A. H. Quinn Edgar Allan Poe [1941; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998], 373). Although Poe expected his friend Frederick William Thomas to complete the article, Thomas, insisting he “knew more of his history,” demurred, and the sketch was completed by Henry W. Hirst, who claimed he had been helped by Thomas, which Poe dismissed as “a slight extension of the truth for which I pray you to forgive him” (Quinn 371). Thus, when Thomas confronted Poe regarding the inaccuracies and fictions in the sketch, he took the matter very lightly: “He was amused, and laughed the matter off by confessing that the story was intended to help the magazine project” (qtd. in Whalen 64).On another occasion, Poe insisted that the use of exaggeration was an essential element in the composition of “Berenice.” He famously enumerated the sources of the tale’s effectiveness: “In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical” (PL 150). Poe continued by applying the process to editing: “The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature—to Berenice.”Today, many species of exaggeration flourish in Silicon Valley, where careers are believed to thrive by following the maxim: “Fake it till you make it.” A recent severe example of the maxim was Elizabeth Holmes’s unicorn, her highly promising automated blood testing company Theranos. With her charming presence and appealing backstory, Holmes presented herself as a youthful, female version of the brilliantly successful Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. At its height Theranos raised an estimated $1 billion in investments, enjoyed a marketing agreement with Walgreen’s, and had an estimated stock value reaching as high as $10 billion. But Theranos proved to be something other than a legitimate invention seeking to turn a profit. On October 15, 2015, the Wall Street Journal began running a series of exposés revealing that the company’s signature device was a sham that had never worked; in order to perpetuate the lie, its supporting tests had been staged. In 2018 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Holmes with a “years-long fraud” of deceiving both investors and patients. In January 2022 a jury found her guilty of four counts of fraud. Although Facebook has literally billions of users, very few of them stop to think about how the service works. Indeed, even outside Facebook very few understand its inner operations. There was great interest therefore when Frances Haugen, a former data engineer at Facebook, turned whistleblower in September 2021, sharing with the Securities Exchange Commission, the Wall Street Journal, the British Parliament, EU authorities, and even 60 Minutes thousands of internal company documents. Her evidence suggested that Facebook prioritized its profits over the public interest in its handling of a long list of sensitive subjects, including “political misinformation, hate speech, teenage mental health, human trafficking, the promotion of ethnic violence, preferential treatment for certain users, and its communications with investors” (Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2021). Although Facebook employees spent 3.2 million hours tackling global issues of misinformation in 2020, Haugen’s documents disclosed that a disappointingly low 13 percent worked on content from outside the United States.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg replied to Haugen, “Many of the claims don’t make any sense. I think most of us just don’t recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted” (Facebook, October 6, 2021). Facebook spokesperson Mitch Henderson said it had spent $13 billion and hired forty thousand people to work on safety-related issues, further claiming its artificial intelligence software was catching 90 percent of hate speech. In rebuttal, Haugen said the figure was less than 5 percent (New York Times, October 25, 2021).After the Haugen papers appeared, Facebook changed its identity, preferring to be known as Meta. Zuckerberg expressed the hope on October 26, 2021, that over the coming five years people would move from seeing Facebook as “a social media company to being a metaverse company.” Since “metaverse” had become a widely adopted buzzword with a variety of meanings and associations, for many observers this immediately clarified little. But Facebook did have a concrete plan to invest at least $10 billion in its VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and AI (artificial intelligence) activities. Zuckerman remarked, “I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet” (Facebook, October 28, 2021). Nevertheless, whether known as Facebook or Meta, the stock of the company collapsed, falling from its high in September 2011 by 45 percent in February 2022 (Bloomberg, February 18, 2022).After the era of Web1, the text-based early web, and Web2, the era of the interactive commercial web, Web3 promised to bring AR, VR, and AI into the home. However, some observers remain skeptical about the promises of machine or artificial intelligence: “For instance, many companies who claim to have developed algorithms that can recognize complicated images or derive meaning from text with machine learning don’t always mention that humans are often doing much of that work behind the scenes” (Washington Post, January 4, 2022; hereafter WP).Outside Silicon Valley in the United States today, in an era of ultra-partisan politics, unbridled exaggeration in the form of misinformation, disinformation, fake news, doctored media, conspiracy theories, and outright lies has become dangerously prevalent. Recently the word “hoax” is more likely to be applied to discussions of partisan politics than to literary antics in magazines and newspapers. In the United States nearly everyone seems to believe in some national political hoax. To Trump supporters, the hoax is the theft of the 2020 election by Biden and his supporters. To Trump critics, the hoax is Trump’s claim that the election had been stolen, despite the denials of Trump’s vice president and attorney general. In addition, there are also a parallel pair of irreconcilable views of what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. While president, Trump was ceaselessly active on the social networks, especially Twitter. According to critical statistics gathered by the Washington Post Fact Checker newsletter, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first three years as president, with the number increasing each year: “Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third claims a day in his January hoaxes have been to contemporary fake news, even they never to political G. “Fake Poe’s and the that in their of penny press as The Sun readers to their 2020, At the the penny press to some extent the of a that has been as the of and (qtd. in people a among media for that their the be among in Poe A in point is Poe’s story of the outside the Sun for the his of the balloon in the has because his to believe this great Poe had described a of for a so that the the Sun was literally for most of the The and Thomas a different starting from his that Poe’s after a or two of him “not but Poe his to a newspaper for he the but by a of on the the and told the that the extra was a hoax, as he for he had it The the and the . . . saw his author what he to be the of American repr., New York: a and who had Poe times in In “The Poe described her as “a a a a and a of of more I not to (ER one of her to Poe he had ever praised a in for Poe replied that to an act would be an he that he had so when to a way of “not his to In Poe he was guilty of a the of (qtd. in Quinn with Poe that he and even with of Edgar Allan Poe repr., New York: hereafter However, in a subsequent he to the that he all “I on would to the very the I would have in from and from and on this are and in “The of apparently for Poe, the of newspapers, us in in it is the of to create a make a to further the of (qtd. in this how to create a among readers by content with the of some “The mass of the people as only him who of the general (M in a of far beyond the of success in the maxim “Fake it till you make it.” For Poe, was never a of a successful but a to a variety of and pursued this by two which have been described as and in an Poe never in partisan fake people his of exaggeration and him to his work to literary as he in his that a (ER For Poe, even after or public much he continued his for and in “I . . . from a mental and of in are at
The West Point classmate who appreciated Poe as a “fellow of talent” assumed that he would be “too mad a poet to like Mathematics” (PL 114). Mad or not, Poe began his lifelong interest in mathematics by standing a respectable seventeenth in his math class of eighty-seven cadets. Throughout his career he maintained a continual thread of logical and mathematical awareness in his detective tales, science fiction, Eureka, and criticism, in counterpoint to their Gothic elements. To follow up on the unprecedented success of “The Raven,” Poe surprised his readers with the mathematical claim in “The Philosophy of Composition” that he had written “The Raven” by following a few logical precepts: “No one point in its composition is referrable either to accident or intuition—that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (L2 61–62).Poe experienced in antebellum American literary culture an unprecedented combination of historical factors: geographic expansion on a continental scale, major moral reform, and sweeping technological innovations. These complexities give his career special relevance for us today as we face the dangerous mix of political uncertainties, COVID, Ukraine, and the dual economic worries of inflation and depression. Our response today is to turn toward the digital or virtual equivalents of in-person work and socialization. Thus traditional culture is being replaced to some extent by mechanized procedures and oceans of data. The new mathematical entities have been enlivened to some extent by assuming two-letter abbreviations: AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning), and VR (virtual reality). Facebook, once a familiar and stable cultural standard, is now refashioning itself as Meta, transforming ordinary reality into AR (augmented reality).These fundamental transitions deeply affect the Internet, as might well be imagined. When websites first appeared in the 1990s, they were composed chiefly of static pages of information. In response to the innovations of interactive social networks, blogs, wikis, and shared media, Tim O’Reilly in 2004 introduced the term “Web 2.0.” In the early web, which became known retrospectively as Web 1.0, a typical attraction was the Encyclopedia Britannica Online, its static pages written by experts. In Web 2.0 the comparable page was Wikipedia, an ongoing compendium produced by multiple anonymous contributors. After smartphones encouraged the broad expansion of the Internet, Web 2.0, being largely unregulated, contained material that had legal protection, but which unprotected printed outlets could not risk publishing. One serious charge was that Web 2.0 had spread conspiracy theories, hate, and racist sentiments, and even lies and disinformation. At the same time, the Internet was accused of ignoring privacy, being flagrantly partisan in political elections, and offering unstable advice on the COVID pandemic. In addition, many web pages practiced what Shoshana Zuboff studied in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) as the relentless collection and sale of demographic data, location information, and personal habits online. The final effect is that the Internet, once trustworthy, is no longer so.In the worst case, a would-be shooter could take advantage of the low level of supervision in order to obtain on the Internet uncensured instructions on how to make bombs and ghost guns. Some shooters realized that their attacks could be live streamed, thereby encouraging other shooters. Thus in 2019 the New Zealand shooter who killed fifty-one Muslims in Christchurch live streamed the event, providing an example for the Buffalo shooter who used the Internet in multiple ways in his racist attack on a Tops supermarket in spring 2022. He drew information from BitChute, a video sharing site, Reddit, 4chan chat rooms, racist articles on HuffPost and Medium, and practical videos on YouTube. During his fatal shootings, he streamed video live on Twitch, afterward writing a diary, producing a 180-page manifesto, and posting details on Discord. The common thread in these mass shootings is the belief in replacement theory, the notion that Blacks, immigrants, and others were eliminating the dominant white culture in order to replace it with a radical alternative culture. The nonprofit site Media Matters for America reportedly found fifty ads on Facebook promoting replacement theory, some from candidates for political office, in addition to restored posts previously removed from mainstream platforms such as Twitter and Reddit (New York Times, June 1, 2022).Today, as the Internet turns from Web 2.0 to what is called Web3, many observers hope that its new technologies will provide protection that the legal system has failed to offer thus far. Thus Web3 holds up some hope, although most users may still not know what it is. The term could not be explained by 70 percent of the readers of the Harvard Business Review in a survey conducted online on LinkedIn in March 2022. The promise of Web3, to use its own terminology, would be to store data on the blockchain of individual users and rely on its own cryptocurrency to replace transactions of untrustworthy governments and large organizations. The general promise of blockchain is that it would take power now concentrated in the hands of Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook), and Microsoft and redistribute it across the Internet to empower ordinary users.Many claims are now being made for this new technology. Web3 is decentralized because ownership is distributed among its builders and users. Web3 is permissionless because everyone has equal access. Web3 uses native payments of cryptocurrency instead of banks and payment processors. Web3 is trustless: it operates using incentives and economic mechanisms. Two more features: Web3 uses DeFi, decentralized finance, and DAO, decentralized autonomous organizations.Supporters argue that Web3 will provide increased data security, scalability, and privacy for users, combating the influence of large technology companies. However, critics are concerned that a decentralized web with low regulation can disseminate harmful content and end up concentrating new wealth in a small group of early investors, turning crypto into a Ponzi scheme.Thomas Stackpole’s balanced response in response to the question “What Is Web3?” appeared in the Harvard Business Review of May 10, 2022. Much interest in Web3 stems from envy or FOMO (fear of missing out) because some early investors had reported making a fortune by investing in crypto. Memorably, famous media stars, not just techno-libertarians and bank haters, were appearing as advocates on TV and in commercials. What started as a curiosity and speculative niche became big business.Crypto is supported by blockchain, which is a “distributed ledger” whose database is backed by a network of independent computers. The idea of the “digital deed” is to support the ownership records of unique digital objects, which are called nonfungible tokens or NFTs. In 2022, their market was said to be worth $41 billion, a value that seemed to appear out of nowhere. Needless to say, blockchain faces major technical, environmental, ethical, and regulatory hurdles as well as the hazards of intentional abuse. Nevertheless, some experiments in Web3 are now underway in the communities of the NBA, Nike, Adidas, Under Armour, and Time magazine. However, the assets of Web3 are highly concentrated: “The top 0.01% of bitcoin holders own 27% of the supply” (bitcoinist.com).To some critics, Web3 seems to be largely speculation in cryptocurrencies, a mirroring of the shadow banking practices that resulted in the 2008 financial crisis. At one time the value of crypto is said to have risen as high as $3 trillion, but in the summer of 2022 it reportedly fell to $1 trillion (decrypt.co). The skeptic Jim Chanos, an American investment manager, called crypto a “predatory junkyard”; columnist Paul Krugman labeled crypto a “postmodern pyramid scheme” (New York Times, July 12, 2022). In China and eight other countries, cryptocurrencies have already been banned, and its treatment under European regulations remains unclear. Despite catastrophic losses, the enthusiasm of some advocates of crypto remains undampened (New York Times, August 2, 2022).Many of the hopes and fears concerning Web3 depend on its use of big data and mathematical procedures, which add convenience but also weaken human control. The huge swings of opinion on the subject may reflect the public’s low level of mathematical literacy. In Poe’s case, some contemporaries were distressed by what they saw as his excessively mathematical side. Charles Frederick Briggs, founder of the Broadway Journal, who hired Poe as an editor, complained about Poe to James Russell Lowell on June 27,1845: “I think a machine, something like Babbage’s[,] might be constructed to write poetry and criticisms like his” (www.eapoe.org). Poe had been early aware of Babbage’s computer, mentioning it in “Maelzel’s Chess-Player” (Southern Literary Messenger, April 1836) and again in “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade” (Godey’s Lady’s Book, February 1845), which Briggs excerpted in the Broadway Journal on January 25, 1845 (PL 497), just a few days before the publication of “The Raven.”In the poem Poe used the raven, a highly intelligent animal with deep associations in myth, prophecy, and tradition, for its special voice reputedly resembling that of human speech. Poe’s tale of a bereaved lover is cast as a ballad in which he asks a series of questions to which the raven speaks the refrain “Nevermore” in reply. The lover’s midnight reading is interrupted by an outbreak of involuntary memory (to use Proust’s term) of his sorrowful thoughts of the loss of his “sainted Lenore,” now in heaven, hoping for a joyous future reunion with her in the afterlife. However, the raven’s refrain “Nevermore” startles him, denying this meeting will ever take place, then resisting the lover’s attempt to dismiss him. In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe quotes the final text that presents the image of the shadow of the raven on the floor, and the startling disclosure that the shadow now contains the young man’s soul:Then, perhaps for the benefit of genteel readers of Graham’s, where the essay appeared, Poe describes the final effect of the poem as “Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance” (L2 70), a deep sentiment that Kenneth Silverman uses as the subtitle of his biography of Poe. However, some readers have had a different understanding, seeing allegorical significance in the young man’s soul leaving his body and becoming entrapped in the raven’s shadow on the floor, never to leave. Here “Nevermore” is not the raven’s refrain but the young man’s own description, concluding the ballad with the allegorical suggestion that the young man’s trapped soul signified his realization of his imminent fate of madness, death, and damnation. In this reading, the closing text of the poem does not support Poe’s account of the young man’s final sentimental and melancholy separation from Lenore; instead, the ballad concludes abruptly with the shock, amplified by its severe understatement, of the young man’s first realization of the full extent of his final moral state and its associated terror and horror.Although Poe may not have been, as his West Point classmate claimed, “too mad a poet to like Mathematics,” he evidently realized at some point that a reputation for mathematical proficiency would do wonders for his reputation. Thus he also adds a second mathematical claim in “The Philosophy of Composition,” namely that “the extent of a poem” exists in a “mathematical relation to its merit . . . [adding that] the brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect” (L2 62). Indeed, a short poem such as a sonnet may be more intense than a long epic, but Poe’s claim of a precise “direct ratio” in the number of lines overstates the case. Nevertheless, Poe understood that exaggeration in matters of appearance could make an impression more memorable. In private, Poe admitted that what he called his tales of ratiocination could owe more to their novelty than to their logical discipline. “These tales of ratiocination,” Poe wrote to Phillip P. Cooke, “owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious—but people think them more ingenious than they are—on account of their method and air of method” (PL 661).“Poe in Cyberspace” columns are available online at eapoe.info.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have gained considerable media attention and sparked growing public interest. NFTs are unique units of data recorded on a permanent ledger or blockchain. NFTs are used to record ownership of both physical and digital goods. Prominent sport organizations have embraced NFTs for innovative growth opportunities such as generating revenue via novel digital products (e.g., digital collectibles). For example, the National Basketball Association (NBA) launched NBA Top Shot, an online marketplace to buy and sell digital sports highlights. Sport organizations are exploring future innovation opportunities where there is a need to reliably track and verify authenticity or ownership of digital or digitizable assets. This includes existing sport products (e.g., tickets) and novel fan engagement initiatives. To benefit from NFTs, sport managers need to reconceptualize how sport is marketed and managed in a digital domain. The purpose of this research primer is to acquaint readers with key concepts related to NFTs. Specifically, we provide an overview of NFTs, offer a review of the brief history of NFTs, conceptualize NFTs via parallels with collectibles, and address the speculative nature of the NFT market. We conclude by outlining innovative growth opportunities of NFTs for sport managers and future research directions for sport management scholars.
Open access
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Digital Games and Media
Sports Analytics and Performance
Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
Web3’s current applications mostly revolve around financial systems; yield farming, lending and borrowing, token swaps, bridges, and many more. Applications with social features in mind have started to take light, as well as more incentives for creators to join Web3. This paper aims to explain an idea involving listen-to-earn mechanics, the concept that users could be compensated for their time listening to music. I explain how artists could benefit significantly from this mechanic if implemented correctly. I also analyze how a platform like this can change the music industry and bring more mainstream attention to Web3, thus increasing users. I detail some paths to success and sustainability for a project such as this, as well as some potential issues I see. Benefits and incentives for artists and content creators using Web3’s technologies, such as DAOs and NFTs, are also explained in this paper. I explain the potential implications that Web3 could bring to the music industry and how artists and content creators can have better, more engaging communities while also being paid much more than they were using Web2’s platforms. These findings alleviate the misconceptions that Web3’s technologies will hurt content creators and show a path towards sustainability in the music industry.
La pandemia ha definito diverse declinazioni della liveness nella dimensione digitale. Tra i settori più colpiti e che hanno dovuto reinventare linguaggi e forme comunicative, accanto al teatro quello della musica live (il tema disciplinare sul quale vogliamo riflettere). L’industria musicale, da sempre fortemente legata alla prossimità fisica, al necessario rapporto con la strada, inteso come luogo d’ispirazione e nutrimento (immaginiamo le subculture giovanili: dai teddy boys, ai mods, dal movimento hippie, al punk, dall’hip hop alla trap) si è tenacemente reinventata negli ultimi anni negli innovativi spazi digitali: dai social network ai concerti sui videogames (sperimentando un nuovo modo di comunicare e dando vita ad un rinnovato immaginario). Attraverso questo saggio si intende procedere verso una ricognizione e analisi delle pratiche della liveness multimediali, transmediali, intermediali nell’ambito musicale esaminando, in particolare, come gli NFT musicali (Non Fungible Tokens) si siano rivelati come una delle strade più promettenti per continuare a mantenere il legame emotivo, culturale ed identitario tra i performer e i fans. E gettando le basi per un’economia alternativa futura.
Purpose Based on the concepts confined in Ajzen's theory of planned behavior (TPB), this study investigates users' attitudes towards adoption of a blockchain-based framework in the esports industry that proposes a scheme of rewarding stakeholders for their invested attention along with blockchain technology's inherent protocols. Design/methodology/approach The present study uses RStudio (Version 1.3.1093) package RedditExtractoR for scraping and analysis of the discussion referring to the keyword “Verasity” on the Reddit website. The final corpus of 1,913 user comments was considered for the study. Sentiment analysis was initially conducted to explore the semantic orientation of the users concerning Verasity. This was followed by generalized equation modeling to analyze the impact of social media attributed to the users' commenting behavior. Findings The study found that Redditors, in general, have a positive attitude towards the adoption of a blockchain-based esports platform. This was validated through the empirical findings. The regression model states that there is a significant positive impact of the positivity in the comments over the Redditors' attitude and in their commenting behavior. Originality/value This study offers a new understanding of key contributing attributes of sentiment formation over social media concerning a blockchain-based esports framework. The study also establishes an empirical relationship between the social media attributes and the commenting behavior of Redditors. Finally, the current study offers valuable insights into social media engagements and the selection of highly influential Redditors for practicing marketing managers.
The remediation of analog trading card games into digital platforms troubles notions of ownership and highlights the flows of capital through the ecologies of TCGs that previously relied on material artifacts. $2 is a digital trading card game that utilizes Non-Fungible Tokens to address concerns over ownership. However, in the wake of the sale of a $69 Million dollar NFT at Christie's art auction, crypto-art has been embroiled in discourse with respect to artist exploitation, environmental, and other concerns endemic to blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies. This paper examines the implications of NFTs in digital card games via the material histories of trading card games and the way digital TCGs accelerate the extraction of capital from player communities by bypassing traditional secondary markets. $2 proposes to solve these issues of ownership and assure players their cards will retain their value. However, the game relies on the continued existence of the publisher's platform, blockchain infrastructure, and player interest. The game also ignores how cards become valuable. Despite mimicking the artificial scarcity associated with TCGs, it does not take into account the impact metagame trends have on the value of cards. By looking at NFT implementations in games such as $2 we can identify several issues with the technology that might otherwise be overlooked in favor of more common critiques. This also highlights several implications remediation and adaptation herald for digital versions of analog games.
Atte Oksanen, Eerik Mantere, Ilkka Vuorinen, Iina Savolainen
OBJECTIVES: Online platforms enable real-time trading activities that are similar to those of gambling. This study aimed to investigate the associations of traditional investing, real-time stock trading, and cryptocurrency trading with excessive behavior and mental health problems. STUDY DESIGN: This was a cross-sectional population-based survey. METHODS: The participants were Finnish people aged 18-75 years (N = 1530, 50.33% male). Survey asked about monthly regular investing, real-time stock-trading platform use, and cryptocurrency trading. The study had measures for excessive behavior: gambling (Problem Gambling Severity Index), gaming (Internet Gaming Disorder Test), internet use (Compulsive Internet Use Scale), and alcohol use (Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test). Psychological distress (Mental Health Inventory), perceived stress (Perceived Stress Scale), COVID-19 anxiety, and perceived loneliness were also measured. Background factors included sociodemographic variables, instant loan taking, and involvement in social media identity bubbles (Identity Bubble Reinforcement Scale). Multivariate analyses were conducted with regression analysis. RESULTS: Within the sample, 22.29% were categorized into monthly regular investors only, 3.01% were investors using real-time stock-trading platforms, and 3.59% were cryptomarket traders. Real-time stock-trading platform use and cryptocurrency trading were associated with younger age and male gender. Cryptomarket traders were more likely to have an immigrant background and have taken instant loans. Both real-time stock-trading platform use and cryptomarket trading were associated with higher excessive behavior. Cryptomarket traders especially reported higher excessive gambling, gaming, and internet use than others. Cryptomarket traders reported also higher psychological distress, perceived stress, and loneliness. CONCLUSIONS: Regular investing is not a risk factor for excessive behavior. However, rapid online trading platforms and applications were significantly more commonly used by participants reporting excessive behavior and mental health problems. The strong association between cryptomarket trading and excessive behavior in particular underlines the need to acknowledge the potential risks related to real-time trading platforms.
Alesha Serada, Tanja Sihvonen, J. Tuomas Harviainen
This article analyzes specific characteristics of value created through digital scarcity and blockchain-proven ownership in cryptogames. Our object of study is CryptoKitties, the first instance of a blockchain-based game that has garnered media recognition and financial interest. The objective of this article is to demonstrate the limits of scarcity in value construction for owners of CryptoKitties tokens, manifested as breedable virtual cats. Our work extends the trends set out by earlier cryptocurrency studies from the perspective of cultural studies. For the purpose of this article, we rely on open blockchain analytics such as DappRadar and Etherscan, as well as player-created analytics, backed by a one-year-long participant observation period in the said game for research material. Combining theoretical cryptocurrency and Bitcoin studies, open data analysis, and virtual ethnography enables a grounded discussion on blockchain-based game design and play.
This thesis examines methods which could be used for developing MMORPG games so that there is no single entity that could arbitrarily control game mechanics, virtual assets or other game aspects. The theoretical part systematically analyzes the usual aspects of MMORPG games, then the principles of decentralized cryptocurrencies are presented, and one of them, Ethereum, is analyzed in more detail. Based on this theoretical knowledge, methods are proposed on how to use Ethereum to implement the identified aspects of MMORPG games, and the restrictions which must be imposed on these aspects are recognized. The practical part then introduces a specific implementation of MMORPG game on Ethereum, which demonstrates the above methods. In conclusion, the chosen approach is compared to the games with a common client-server architecture, especially in terms of complexity and gaming costs. 1
With the support of the blockchain systems, the cryptocurrency has changed the world of virtual assets. Digital games, especially those with massive multi-player scenarios, will be significantly impacted by this novel technology. However, there are insufficient academic studies on this topic. In this work, we filled the blank by surveying the state-of-the-art blockchain games. We discuss the blockchain integration for games and then categorize existing blockchain games from the aspects of their genres and technical platforms. Moreover, by analyzing the industrial trend with a statistical approach, we envision the future of blockchain games from technological and commercial perspectives.
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.
Games have their own economic models. Today, players can not only collect digital currencies, but they can also use real currencies to buy virtual goods. Business models in games such as freemium and in-app purchases, for example, sustain this structure. Within this context, there is also the expansion of models outside the game realm like eSports, which happens in the form of tournaments. With this, there is constant exchange of value that emerges from games, which could also include the use of cryptocurrencies. In this chapter, we give an overview of the current state of the art of economic models within games and eSports. The current chapter aims to situate and analyse the application of these business models derived from games, e-sport and the future of ludic economies.
Blockchain is a new trend rising fast from the community and the enterprise world. As an infrastructural technology it is finding its way into a growing number of domains like finance, medical, digital marketplace, pharmaceutical and government agencies. While blockchain technology is primarily thought as the foundation of Bitcoin, it has grown far beyond underpinning the virtual currency. It promises building better trust, transparency, and integrity without a third-party and the risk of censorship. These remarkable advantages do however come at a price. The blockchain ecosystem is riddled with human-centric and economical issues for its participants, leading to unintended consequences in decentralized networks. Gamified software engineering is a growing field that in particular taps into gamification technology, the application of game mechanics in non-game contexts, to address human-related concerns. There are currently no studies around blockchain that have been identified to have a clear view of existing research and solutions for utilizing the gamification in the emerging blockchain systems. As a first step towards filling this gap, this paper discusses and identifies two major human-based problems in the blockchain decentralized applications and development. For those problems, it proposes a preliminary gamified model to provide a basis for expanding future research and applications in this joint domain.
Kriptovalute su digitalni novac utemeljen na kriptografiji i decentraliziranom sustavu. Postoje samo u elektroničkom obliku kao jedinstveni digitalni novčići ("tokeni"). Iza njih ne stoji autoritet države niti ih je moguće svojevoljno proizvesti. Rad se fokusira na značajkama, postavkama, razvoju i svim međuodnosima važnih ekonomskih faktora koji utječu na kriptovalute. U prvom poglavlju navedena su obilježja kriptovaluta. Drugo poglavlje daje primjere i govori o primjeni kriptovaluta u svakodnevnom životu. U trećem poglavlju je raspravljano o trenutnim i budućim regulacijama najmoćnijih zemalja svijeta (G20) , kao i njihovoj zajedničkoj suradnji u želji za jedinstvenim i standardiziranim pravilima, a sve u svrhu što kvalitetnijeg nadzora nad kriptovalutama kako bi se spriječile malverzacije i zaštitili potrošači. Četvrto poglavlje govori o inicijalnoj ponudi kovanica, a peto poglavlje je namijenjeno sigurnosti kriptovaluta. Cilj istraživanja je utvrditi koliko je studentska populacija upoznata i usmjerena prema novim oblicima digitalnog novca, koje značajke kriptovaluta smatraju pozitivnima, a koje negativnima i u kojoj su mjeri investirali ili su spremni investirati dio svojih ulaganja u kriptovalute i sl. Metode istraživanja korištene u radu su kompilacija na temelju proučavanja postojeće literature o temi rada, prikupljanje i analiza podataka vezanih uz kriptovalute, ponajprije podataka vezanih uz cijene i tržišnu kapitalizaciju, anketiranje studenata Ekonomskog fakulteta u Rijeci i metoda dedukcije putem koje su pokazane sve važne karakteristike i obilježja kriptovaluta. Na temelju provedene ankete u kojoj je sudjelovalo 90 studenata Ekonomskog fakulteta u Rijeci zaključak toga dijela istraživanja je da je mlada populacija dobro upoznata s kriptovalutama i njenim glavnim značajkama, ali i određenim nedostatkom informiranosti o tehnologiji (trećina studenata nije čula za pojam "blockchain") i nedovoljnoj odlučnosti oko investiranja i trgovanja u kriptovalute. Povrh toga, dokazan je i negativan utjecaj hakerskih napada i određenih kriminalnih radnji, kao i nestabilnost tržišne cijene na povjerenje studenata, ali i ukupne populacije vezane uz globalni financijski sustav u kriptovalute. Ishod istraživanja omogućio je da zaključimo kako su kriptovalute trenutno u ranoj fazi razvoja i nisu se dovoljno implementirale za široku primjenu u trgovini roba i usluga ili općenito kao sredstvo razmjene. Faktor koji je uključen u istraživanje kako bi opisao veličinu, odnosno obujam neke kriptovalute je tržišna kapitalizacija u dolarima. Temeljna ideja ovog rada je informirati čitatelja o pozitivnim i negativnim značajkama koje se se vežu uz kriptovalute. Na taj način čitatelji će biti bolje informirani i educirani o potencijalnom riziku ulaganja u kriptovalute, kao i većoj razini zaštite prilikom posjedovanja neke digitalne valute.
Traditional sports ticket sales have followed a basic model of tickets in exchange for cash or credit. In an evolving and competitive market, sports marketing professionals must adapt and consider alternate forms of ticket sales. This case study follows Julie Lin, the director of ticket sales for a fictional National Hockey League expansion team, the Seattle Salmon. In an effort to align with the strategic vision of being considered a highly innovative sports franchise, Lin is considering accepting Bitcoin, a virtual currency, as a form of payment. Considered a “cryptocurrency,” Bitcoin is awarded through the solving of complex computer riddles, is devoid of a physical form, has no government or regulatory body backing it, and has value based largely on speculation. Bitcoin has found popularity and legitimacy among technology companies and companies considered to be innovative. At the present time, three professional sports accept Bitcoin for the purchase of tickets. This case will follow Lin and her exploration of Bitcoin within her franchise. Readers will consider positive and negative aspects of Bitcoin in a sports ticketing environment, and ultimately present an educated and data-driven recommendation regarding the details of this case.