Now showing 1 - 10 of 40
  • Publication
    Narrating the Stories of Leaked Data: The Changing Role of Journalists after WikiLeaks and Snowden
    Traditionally, investigative journalists had a gatekeeping role between their confidential sources of information and the public sphere. Over the last two decades and with the arrival of new media, this role has been undergoing changes. Recent cases of whistleblowing, such as WikiLeaks and Snowden, illustrate how contemporary media allow individuals to release data directly to the global audience. This raises the question of how recent leaks affect how journalists operate. In this study we compare how The Guardian covered two cases of whistleblowing which are commonly referred to as WikiLeaks and Snowden. We analyse how access to leaked data is provided or facilitated on The Guardian website, how readers are invited to interact with these data and how journalists present their own activities. A qualitative analysis of the leading articles further shows how the stories are framed and how much prominence is given to the data and the various actors.The results show how the roles of journalists shift from gatekeeping to data management, interpretation, contextualisation and narration. Journalists may no longer be needed to publish leaked data but they are still needed to tell the stories of leaked data.
      781Scopus© Citations 8
  • Publication
    Decision Problems in Blockchain Systems: old wine in new bottles of walking in someone else shoes?
    Blockchain technology comes with the promise of being a disruptive technology with the potential for novel ways of interaction in a wide range of applications. Following broader application, scholarly interest in the technology is growing, though an extensive analysis of blockchain applications from a governance perspective is lacking to date. This research pays special attention to the governance of blockchain systems and illustrates decision problems in 14 blockchain systems from four application domains. Based on academic literature, semi-structured interviews with representatives from those organizations, and content analysis of grey literature, common problems in blockchain governance have been singled out and contextualized. Studying their enactment revealed their relevance to major organizational theories in what we labelled “Patrolling the borders”, “External Legitimation”, “Reduction of Discretionality”, and “Temporal Management”. The identification of these problems enriches the scarce body of knowledge on the governance of blockchain systems, resulting in a better understanding of how blockchain governance links to existing concepts and how it is enacted in practice.
    Scopus© Citations 75  922
  • Publication
    Geospatial analysis of HIV-Related social stigma: A study of tested females across mandals of Andhra Pradesh in India
    Background: In Geographical Information Systems issues of scale are of an increasing interest in storing health data and using these in policy support. National and international policies on treating HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) positive women in India are based on case counts at Voluntary Counseling and Testing Centers (VCTCs). In this study, carried out in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, these centers are located in subdistricts called mandals, serving for both registration and health facility policies. This study hypothesizes that people may move to a mandal different than their place of residence for being tested for reasons of stigma. Counts of a single mandal therefore may include cases from inside and outside a mandal. HIV counts were analyzed on the presence of outside cases and the most likely explanations for movement. Counts of women being tested on a practitioners' referral (REFs) and those directly walking-in at testing centers (DWs) were compared and with counts of pregnant women. Results: At the mandal level incidence among REFs is on the average higher than among DWs. For both groups incidence is higher in the South-Eastern coastal zones, being an area with a dense highway network and active port business. A pattern on the incidence maps was statistically confirmed by a cluster analysis. A spatial regression analysis to explain the differences in incidence among pregnant women and REFs shows a negative relation with the number of facilities and a positive relation with the number of roads in a mandal. Differences in incidence among pregnant women and DWs are explained by the same variables, and by a negative relation with the number of neighboring mandals. Based on the assumption that pregnant women are tested in their home mandal, this provides a clear indication that women move for testing as well as clues for explanations why. Conclusions: The spatial analysis shows that women in India move towards a different mandal for getting tested on HIV. Given the scale of study and different types of movements involved, it is difficult to say where they move to and what the precise effect is on HIV registration. Better recording the addresses of tested women may help to relate HIV incidence to population present within a mandal. This in turn may lead to a better incidence count and therefore add to more reliable policy making, e.g. for locating or expanding health facilities.
      283Scopus© Citations 10
  • Publication
    Infrastructures and their invisible carnivalesque
    (European Group for Organization Studies, 2017-07-08) ;
    In this paper, we argue that Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies more generally, is an important and distinctive information infrastructure that warrants substantive study by organizational scholars. The Bitcoin system is briefly described and the particular methodological challenges involved in studying the phenomenon are also discussed. We assert that neither of the two broad conceptualisations of information infrastructures found in the literature -- topdown and bottom-up -- help us in understanding Bitcoin. Instead, Bitcoin is better understood as a form of game and we draw on the ludology literature and the case material to identify its game dimensions. Bitcoin is a particular type of game, and we introduce the term Klein Bottle Game to describe this type of game. A Klein bottle a one-sided, non-orientable surface that has no boundary. We then describe the main features of Klein bottle games. First, they are different from most games in that the boundaries between the game and non-game worlds are not decipherable. Second, we use the term Klein Portal to describe the particular set of practices that link the Klein Bottle Game that is Bitcoin to other infrastructures. Third, we argue that Bitcoin exhibits many of the features of the carnivalesque -- hence we speak of the crypto-carnivalesque -- in that it is a site where norms and structures are temporarily suspended, conventional authority is contested, and autonomy if favoured over heteronomy. Fourth, Bitcoin is a site of ironic inversion, in that the ideology that drove Bitcoin's initial development shows signs of now being inverted. We conclude by noting the distinctive nature of Bitcoin and caution against extending our analysis to other instances of information infrastructures.
      546
  • Publication
    Telemedicine in the upper Amazon: Interplay with local health care practices
    (Management Information Systems Research Center, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota, 2007-06)
    This article is based on the introduction of a telemedicine system in the jungles of northeastern Peru. The system was designed by a European consortium led by a Spanish polytechnic in cooperation with two universities in Lima and the Peruvian Ministry of Health. The purpose of the system was to improve health conditions by extending science-based medicine into a region with well-established traditional healing practices. The central analytical focus of this article is on the interplay between the public health care system, which used the telemedicine system, and local health care practices. The manner in which scientific medicine was delivered through information technology and public health care services is analyzed in terms of the health personnel's activity, the local population 's conceptions of health, and the trajectories followed by patients seeking recovery. The author participated in the design of the second evaluation of the telemedicine system and acted as a participant observer in the regional hospital and peripheral clinics. In addition to interviewing health care staff from the study area, the author also met with traditional healers, and patients in the districts whether or not they were involved in the telemedicine project. New institutional theory provided the analytical framework for the interpretation of the observed behavior of the public health care staff, traditional healers, and potential patients. Empirically, this study describes the informal aspects of the functioning of the telemedicine system, and its partial mismatch with the definitions of health and illness employed by local communities and healers. An argument is made that people's construction of their health, which is embedded in their normal patterns of action, should be identified, and then considered in the design, implementation, and evaluation of future telemedicine projects. This article problematizes an approach to telemedicine-based health development that is weakly accountable to local social contexts and their diversity.
      378
  • Publication
    A claim upon what? Cryptocurrencies as 'scene'
    (2019-07-06)
    The internet architecture, usage, and culture have always been defined by openness. Since its inception in the late decades of the Cold War, internet designers made any node of this digital network equal and capable of bridging new nodes without the need of anyone else’s approval. This way, the formation of single points of failure is avoided because nodes can always be added, and communications can always be rerouted through alternative nodes. This principle of resilience – which assumes that centers are easy targets, thus weak links, rather than strongholds – was intended to prevent the emergence of hierarchies among nodes and priorities among messages. So, Soviet attacks could hit any node but never paralyze the entirety of this network of military communication. The persistent defense of network openness – still visible in the ongoing debate on ‘net neutrality’ – is well expressed by the motto "we reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code", coined by David Clark, a chief internet architect. The same openness proved future-proof through the decades to come.
      228
  • Publication
    Myth, management of the unknown
    (UCD Business School, University College Dublin, 2014-06)
    Since centuries, myth, progress and technology are interwoven in ways that explain the past and anticipate the future. The relevance of myths is not in being true or false, but in contributing in orienting social praxes, thus in acting as a regulator of human behaviour in front of unknown consequences of today's decisions and actions. This is particularly evident beyond Western settings, where the thirst for progress is imported with technologies.
      624
  • Publication
    HAcK3rZ and Information Warfare
    (Rosenberg and Sellier, 2000)
    This piece of work attempts to suggest an outlook on hacking-related phenomena which are usually enquired acc ording to many different disciplinary perspectives, and it especially focuses on their social aspects. Hackers are here considered as system-intruders, an activity which doesn't imply computer systems only as the boundaries of hacking are overlapping those of the cultural and aesthetic fields. As a consequence of this, social institutions we believe in could loose their legitimacy when their errors are shown. The deeper the error is rooted into the mechanism, the more it spreads mistrust. What is socially relevant is the use we make of networks and the confidence we accord to them. «Hacking is an attitude» constitutes a way to approach information and communication technology (ICT) in accordance to the «hands on» and «information wants to be free» mottos which contrast any confidence in economically or politically managed development. Anyone who respects the hacker ethics is bound to explore the «natural rule» of an electronically simulated place. The «daydream nation», the «matrix» evoked by W. Gibson proves to be an environment where not only signs but also acts are meaningful. The democratization of technology is defining new economical and military settings, new forms of sociality and knowledge, but it enables anomy either.
      250
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