Trolling democracy: anonymity doesn’t cause conflicts, bad site design does

‘Don’t feed the trolls’, people on social media are told. By forcing people to use their real names online, the managers of online forums hope to shame trolls into silence. But, Jennifer Forestal argues, this fails to tackle the root of the problem: a lack of the ‘close and direct intercourse and attachment’ which John Dewey believed was vital to democratic deliberation. We need to design online spaces where this can happen, rather than indiscriminately multiplying our connections and relying on top-down moderation. Some disruption is necessary when we talk about politics

Beyond Gatekeeping: Propaganda, Democracy, and the Organization of Digital Publics

While there is disagreement as to the severity of the digital disinformation problem, scholars and practitioners have largely coalesced around the idea that a new system of safeguards is needed to prevent its spread. By minimizing the role of citizens in managing their own communities, however, I argue that these gatekeeping approaches are undemocratic. To develop a more democratic alternative, I draw from the work of Harold D. Lasswell and John Dewey to argue that we should study the organization of digital publics. For citizens to engage in democratic inquiry, publics must be organized so that they can (1) easily identify their common interests and (2) regularly encounter variety. I then analyze Facebook, showing how the News Feed and Facebook Groups together create a platform on which propagandists can effectively target and manipulate specific publics. I conclude by turning to Reddit to suggest alternative forms of organizing digital publics more democratically

Constructing Digital Democracies: Facebook, Arendt, and the Politics of Design

Deliberative democracy requires both equality and difference, with structures that organize a cohesive public while still accommodating the unique perspectives of each participant. While institutions like laws and norms can help to provide this balance, the built environment also plays a role supporting democratic politics—both on- and off-line. In this article, I use the work of Hannah Arendt to articulate two characteristics the built environment needs to support democratic politics: it must (1) serves as a common world, drawing users together and emphasizing their common interests and must also (2) preserve spaces of appearance, accommodating diverse perspectives and inviting disagreement. I, then, turn to the example of Facebook to show how these characteristics can be used as criteria for evaluating how well a particular digital platform supports democratic politics and providing alternative mechanisms these sites might use to fulfill their role as a public realm

Of Humans, Machines, and Extremism: The Role of Platforms in Facilitating Undemocratic Cognition

The events surrounding the 2020 U.S. election and the January 6 insurrection have challenged scholarly understanding of concepts like collective action, radicalization, and mobilization. In this article, we argue that online far-right radicalization is better understood as a form of distributed cognition, in which the groups’ online environment incentivizes certain patterns of behavior over others. Namely, these platforms organize their users in ways that facilitate a nefarious form of collective intelligence, which is amplified and strengthened by systems of algorithmic curation. In short, these platforms reflect and facilitate undemocratic cognition, fueled by affective networks, contributing to events like the January 6 insurrection and far-right extremism more broadly. To demonstrate, we apply this framing to a case study (the “Stop the Steal” movement) to illustrate how this framework can make sense of radicalization and mobilization influenced by undemocratic cognition

Gerontechnology acceptance of smart homes: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Advances in preventive medicine and technology have beneficially affected longevity in the past decades. Unfortunately, longer life expectancy and declining fertility are likely to trigger an increasingly aging population, posing new challenges for social systems. Since aging populations affect the healthcare industry, providing convenient solutions and user-friendly elderly healthcare services is necessary to curb the growing demand by older adults. Several studies have proposed intelligent homes as potential solutions to support old age. However, such solutions raise the question of whether or not elderly persons intend to use smart homes and benefit from them. This paper examines the gerontechnology acceptance of intelligent homes by systematically reviewing previous studies on older people\u27s intention to use innovative home technology. The review was conducted from the Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Scopus, retrieving a thousand articles. Out of these, 40 are selected for the meta-analysis and systematic review. The integrative results showed an increasing intention of older adults to use smart home technology as they believe those innovative ways may improve independent living. However, attributes and drivers like privacy and perceived security show increasing heterogeneity and should draw more attention to prospective researchers

Prediction Markets: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Prediction markets (PM) have drawn considerable attention in recent years as a tool for forecasting events. Studies surveying and examining relevant the trends of PM using traditional approaches have been reported in the literature. However, research using meta-analysis to review Prediction markets systems is very limited in Management Information System (MIS). This paper aimed to fill this gap by using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method to study Prediction markets trends over the past decades. Our results are as follows. First, we find that shows that more than 64% of academic studies on Prediction markets are published in top journals such as Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Journal of Consumer Research and Information Systems Research. Second, we showed that Prediction markets applications can be can be divided into two groups: internal use PMS and general public usage. Finally, our significant meta-analysis result show that on average prediction markets is 79% more accurate than alternative forecast methods based

Identity, distinction, and action: Re-evaluating the self in the work of Taylor, Foucault, and Arendt

In all its conceptions, identity is the connection between the self and the world, it shapes how one enters that world and determines the manner in which one addresses and is addressed by a given community. Given this importance of identity to making sense of worldly experiences, it seems that the framework and the vocabulary used to discuss identity are, too, very important. Yet the modern age, with its Romantically-inspired idealization of the individual has embodied this thirst for recognition in a self-project, as suggested by Charles Taylor, whereby one must recover her own authentic identity or risk missing out on a uniquely fulfilling life. While this identity quest has come under criticism, notably by Michel Foucault, as being a manifestation of the normalizing social power of a given community, I argue that both Taylor and Foucault, while seemingly at great odds, are instead trapped within the same de-politicized framework of self-obsession that necessarily precludes them from any significant success. Using the conceptions of action and identity from the work of Hannah Arendt, it becomes clear that identity can only ever truly make sense as it is revealed through action, in the name of self-forgetting, within the public-political realm, thereby exposing the modern fixation on one’s own identity as a damaging misconception.No embarg

Text Mining-Based Patent Analysis of Blockchain Technology Applications

This study focuses on the emergence of blockchain-related technologies regarding patenting activity. Blockchain technology has gained the attention of the general public. It has intensified in recent years, making it a fascinating subject of study for a patent analysis to scrutinize the evolution of this technology. However, research using the patent landscape to study the evolution of blockchain technologies is scarce. This article follows a unique methodology and comprehensive search strategy based on patent mapping and text mining to identify and categorize Blockchain patent documents extracted from the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the World Intellectual Property Organization databases. This methodology and dataset can be used for patent landscaping exercises or bibliometric analysis