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Browsing Administration by Author "Belk, Russell W."
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Item Open Access Creation and Resilience of Decentralized Brands - Bitcoin & the Blockchain(2020-08-11) Humayun, Syeda Mariam; Belk, Russell W.This dissertation is based on a longitudinal ethnographic and netnographic study of the Bitcoin and broader Blockchain community. The data is drawn from 38 in-depth interviews and 200+ informal interviews, plus archival news media sources, netnography, and participant observation conducted in multiple cities: Toronto, Amsterdam, Berlin, Miami, New York, Prague, San Francisco, Cancun, Boston/Cambridge, and Tokyo. Participation at Bitcoin/Blockchain conferences included: Consensus Conference New York, North American Bitcoin Conference, Satoshi Roundtable Cancun, MIT Business of Blockchain, and Scaling Bitcoin Tokyo. The research fieldwork was conducted between 2014-2018. The dissertation is structured as three papers: - Satoshi is Dead. Long Live Satoshi. The Curious Case of Bitcoin: This paper focuses on the myth of anonymity and how by remaining anonymous, Satoshi Nakamoto, was able to leave his creation open to widespread adoption. - Tracing the United Nodes of Bitcoin: This paper examines the intersection of religiosity, technology, and money in the Bitcoin community. - Our Brand Is Crisis: Creation and Resilience of Decentralized Brands Bitcoin & the Blockchain: Drawing on ecological resilience framework as a conceptual metaphor this paper maps how various stabilizing and destabilizing forces in the Bitcoin ecosystem helped in the evolution of a decentralized brand and promulgated more mainstreaming of the Bitcoin brand.Item Open Access From Occupy Wall Street to Occupying the Academy: Three Interventions from One Demonstration(2015-01-26) Earley, Amanda Jenny Layne; Belk, Russell W.This primary purpose of this project was to further understand and theorize the meaning of Occupy Wall Street. Beyond that, the goal was to advance extant theorizations of the nature of economic justice movements more broadly. In order to achieve these goals, the theoretical lens of political philosophy is adopted. The dissertation starts with a brief introduction, which explains the rationale behind this choice, and begins the work of contextualizing the movement. The next chapter is a conceptual piece, which explains the utility of political philosophy in greater depth. Here, the discussion is framed in terms of the consumer culture theory literature, but the framework offered has relevance far beyond this discipline. Here, Badiou’s work on the event and subjectivity are employed, and it is argued that this provides an excellent theorization of how consumer culture operates—as well as resistance to consumer culture. The third chapter starts with a review of past discussions of consumer activism, and explains how the current framework can productively advance knowledge in the field. A Badiouian critical discourse analysis provides a great deal of insight into how individuals become committed to activist movements; how it changes their ethics; how it influences their choice of strategies; and how activism could lead to sustained social change. The final chapter critically interrogates the idea that marketing tactics should be used by social movements. Occupy Wall Street provides an ideal context for testing the limits of this argument, as it is simultaneously anti-marketing, as well as a movement where some protestors adhere to this idea that movements should be marketed. This chapter raises serious questions about the applicability of marketing techniques not only in this context, but also in many non-profit, social, governmental, and even for-profit contexts. In the end, it is my hope that this project provides a better understanding of politics and social movements not only for academics, but also for activists. The study presents important findings about the nature of consumer culture, and consequently the nature of strategies that are necessary for those who contest it.Item Open Access Technology Metaphors at the Base of the Pyramid(2016-09-20) Bhattacharyya, Arundhati; Belk, Russell W.Much of the technology consumption literature is predominantly situated in the context of the relatively free individual. It also assumes that the adopted technology is owned, or easily accessible by the consumer. This dissertation foregrounds the overlooked invisible world of technologies (Edgerton 2007. p xi), heeding the call to shift attention from the the spectacular to the mundane, the masculine to the feminine, the rich to the poor" (ibid. p. xiv). It highlights technology consumption under the unfreedom of resource constraints and that of entanglements created by desire. The dissertation uses a metaphorical approach in examining technology experiences among the poor in India. Metaphors are known to shape perceptions and understandings of consumption objects. They also inform and guide consumption. Specifically, technology metaphors have implications for how human beings (e.g., technology service providers or power brokers of other sorts) are perceived, and thereby, what expectations (realistic or unrealistic) we might have of these human beings. A year-long phenomenological investigation of the technology metaphors explicitly or implicitly held by the under-represented poor, surfaced commonly overlooked non-dominant metaphors The study reveals that among the involuntarily poor, technology is perceived according to the varying inflections of its effects through the forbiddances set by those controlling allocative resources that affect poor consumers access to or consumption of technology. Contrastingly, technology perceptions among those who are voluntarily poor, mostly stem from how strongly the tug of desire is perceived to exist in the particular consumption object versus in the need for self-realization. These findings augment and challenge existing theories of technology perceptions by widening the scope of the theorizing lens that has so far focussed on the affluent First World consumer and product attributes microcosm. This broadened view introduces the overlooked role of class-based societal domination in considering involuntarily poor consumers technology perceptions (and thereby their adoption and consumption decisions). In contrast to the involuntarily poor, where objects and dominant others have primary agency over the self, the findings among the voluntarily poor extend our understandings of human entanglement with objects by revealing methods of humans gaining primary agency over objects.