Blockchain is one of the most widely debated technologies in recent years. Pundits and scholars have described it as a disruptive technology that will impact many sectors of society. Skeptics argue blockchain’s popularity is fuelled by the media’s obsession for the ‘next big thing’ rather than the intrinsic potential of the technology. In this paper, we follow a social constructivist approach with the aim of explaining how different discourses are creating new meanings about this technology. As Communication scholars, we focus on the role media play in framing debates about blockchain. Our analysis relies on a human coding of the most popular news about blockchain circulating on Twitter from October 2014 to July 2018. The findings show the general attitude about blockchain is predominantly positive. The discourses developing around crypto technologies are complex and multifaceted and indicate a general transition in the rhetorical definition of blockchain.

Our dear colleague, Pietro Sammarco, will defend his MA Thesis on Wednesday, December 16, 2015 at Harbour Centre, Room 1500 (1:00 am - 12:00 pm). Here is the abstract of his thesis “Waste Media Pedagogy”:

Blockchain has become a hot topic in technology, finance, regulation, and the wider society in recent years. Along the way, various users and interests have shaped the technology materially and discursively. This paper investigates the debate taking place on Twitter surrounding blockchain technology to understand the nature and development of its online public discourses. We collected and analyzed a Twitter dataset containing a total of 267,512 tweets that reference blockchain by 105,734 unique users. We conducted a mixed method research study involving qualitative and quantitative approaches. The results indicate that the majority of the retweeted posts are educational and promotional in nature, while the lowest numbers of frames are critical or skeptical of the new technology. The most active users seem to be largely involved in promoting the technology including some that are human created bots. The paper employs the theory of Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) that emphasizes the way our actions and discourses shape technology. We argue that a number of active Twitter users, for a variety of motives including financial ones, are shaping the discourse about blockchain by mostly framing it as a positive development in the global market, allegedly creating a revolution in the financial sector. More importantly, the social construction of technology on Twitter does not seem to be exclusively organic, for it includes bots and online spammers who mostly tweet promotional blockchain hashtags.

Our dear colleague, Felix Lo, will defend his MA Thesis on Friday, April 1, 2016 at Harbour Centre, Room 1315 (12:00 pm - 2:00 pm). Here is the abstract of his thesis “The Dialectic of Open Technology”.

Our dear colleague, Geoffrey Glass, will defend his PHD dissertation on Wednesday, November 18th, 2015 at Harbour Centre, Room 1520 (10:00 am- 1:00 pm). Here is the abstract of his dissertation “Comment Space”.