Bitcoin Blockchains on Twitter
Alexia Maddox
October 9, 2018
4:30–6pm

Cryptocurrencies represent emerging financial technologies engendered through overlapping community values of decentralised peer-to-peer exchange, encryption technologies and an overarching agenda towards the disruption of centralised banking within the fiat economy. This paper will trace the development and shifts in public discourse within social media surrounding cryptocurrencies. The last five years have seen cryptocurrencies move from technological emergence to a broadening range of applications and history potholed with disputes, divergence, hacks and scams within the community. The accompanying influence of speculation has shifted the focus from social adoption to value volatility and seen the incorporation of associated technologies within banking and other organisational processes. The emphasis within public discourse has also followed a shift from bitcoin to blockchain. The study is grounded through a Twitter analysis of cryptocurrency-related social media discourse within the Australian context. The social media analysis works with social media archives of the Australian Twittersphere captured between early 2012 to May 2017. Access to this curated archive is through TrISMA and the timeframe under analysis aligns with the most detailed available dataset. The analysis seeks to characterise the emergence of public dialogue surrounding cryptocurrency use and application over time, focusing on peak engagement events. The key concepts directing the focus and interpretation of the social media analysis include financial inclusion, socio-technical disruption and social change. The whimsical quest of the study is to learn where the digital frontier has shifted to within this community and point to possible future developments. From a community studies perspective the case study represents an initial foray into data analytics to explore whether it is possible to detect the shifting shape and form of digital community through its environmental imprint (Maddox 2016). This methodological aspect of the work speaks to an attempt to generate a data recognition practice that can be deployed to search for signatures of social disruption within digital trace data.

Milieux Institute EV 11.705
Concordia University
1515 St. Catherine St. W

Social Media and Promotional Culture
Jeremy Shtern
November 23, 2017
12:00p.m. (noon)

Questions about the democratic impact of social media political advertising have recently burst their way onto policy agendas and into public consciousness. But if politics can be manipulated by targeted social media content, what are the implications for our daily lives as consumers and citizens when brands and advertisers use the affordances of social media to influence our thinking and choices? Based on more than four years of research into social media advertising, Jeremy Shtern (Ryerson University) discusses the internet governance implications linked to the emergence of data-driven social media advertising. He makes the case for internet governance discussions to start paying more attention to the fact that advertising—historically a crucial policy agenda for governing electronic communication—is fundamentally shaping user experiences online and sponsoring the architecture of most public internet communication.

CJ 1.114
Loyola Campus
Concordia University
7141 Sherbrooke Street

Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present
Robyn Maynard
November 9, 2017
4:30p.m.

Laying bare the violent realities behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization, and punishment of Black life in Canada. Through an unapologetically intersectional, feminist, and abolitionist lens, this talk looks at how slavery’s legacy has been carried forward by the state, exposing the social and historical forces behind carding/street checks, the war on drugs, the school-to-prison pipeline, welfare “fraud” and child welfare enforcement, deportation, and the disproportionate incarceration of Black folks in Canada’s jails, prisons, and immigration detention centres.

Milieux Institute, EV 11.705
Concordia University
1515 St. Catherine St. W