The Blockchain and Its Possible Utility for Social Science Investigation
I’m just starting this off right now as a mental bookmark, and the germ of the idea was the idea of tracking Korean style (as in not just sartorial but also in terms of an aesthetic and general mode) across not just platforms with easy metrics, but across different mediums and genres to see where ideas and influence cross-pollinate and intersect (say as with K-POP videos that display specific fashion trends that one can track but it’s hard to say what led to what and isolate lines of influence, as in the brief example I’ll offer here:
And that’s just one example. How does one track the influence of an aesthetic? If the blockchain can act as the blue/imaging dye that goes into one part of a system, and there’s a section of a system where a lot of the dye shows up, to the point it’s as dark blue/concentrated as where it was initially placed into the system at the beginning, that will be indicative of something significant. If say, an Ethereum-based “influence currency” such as the Basic Attention Token (BAT) became widely used in social media, as much as tracking attention for passing around fiscal currency as reward for content production/consumption, that same currency (BAT) would be useful as a marker of social and even aesthetic influence as it indicated social and aesthetic lines of forcein the same way iron fillings do around magnets.
WHAT IS THE BLOCKCHAIN?
Blockchain is a digital platform that stores and verifies the entire history of transactions between users across the network. From a technical standpoint, Blockchain is “a database that consists of chronologically arranged bundles of transactions known as blocks,” against which any proposed transaction can be checked with confidence in the integrity of any particular block.4 Once entered, the information can never be altered or erased5. It has been described as both a network and a database, equipped with built-in security and internal integrity6. From a theoretical perspective, Blockchain technology has the potential to replace transactions rooted in trust with those based on rules that are defined mathematically and enforced mechanically7. It is important to note that “Blockchain” does not have one single universally agreed-upon definition as it has a number of dimensions, including technological, operational, legal and regulatory. (Kakavand, et al)
Put simply…
OTHER (SOCIAL) USES OF THE BLOCKCHAIN
From health care (Krawiec, et al) to music sharing (O’Dair, et al) and it’s importance even as a “global resource (Tapscott, et al)
This is much more than the financial services industry. Innovators are programming this new digital ledger to record anything of value to humankind — birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, rights to intellectual property, educational degrees, financial accounts, medical history, insurance claims, citizenship and voting privileges, location of portable assets, provenance of food and diamonds, job recommendations and performance ratings, charitable donations tied to specific outcomes, employment contracts, managerial decision rights and anything else that we can express in code.
ORIGINS OF BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY IN ACADEMIA
xxxxx (Narayanan, et al)
USING THE BLOCKCHAIN TO TRACK THE CHAIN OF SOCIAL INFLUENCE
This is where waiting for a standard vs. starting a coin of one’s own is the stumbling block. It’s not realistic for a scholar to successfully start and promote a coin. And hopefully BAT or something like it will succeed soon as a platform that will allow the application of digital ledgers (distributed ledger technology or DLA) to socially networked networks of influence as they are drawn out and described by BAT tokens in a new content production/consumption economy that sees mediated social interaction around content as labor worthy of compensation. The blockchain, as a system of marking relationships and interactions in constantly updated, networked trail of transactions with the ledgers themselves, stored at specific nodes along the chain, could be an obviously useful means of tracking and social interactions in a network and be the ultimate “killer app” that can make the tried-and-true methodology of social network analysis (SNA) the most powerful it has ever been, especially as the social sciences have to account so much for electronically mediated social interactions and relationships.
WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY
Krawiec, R., Barr, D., Killmeyer, J., Filipova, M., Quarre, F., Nesbitt, A., … Israel, A. (2016). Blockchain : Opportunities for Health Care. NIST Workshop on Blockchain & Healthcare, (August), 1–12. Retrieved from https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/public-sector/us-blockchain-opportunities-for-health-care.pdf
Narayanan, A., & Clark, J. (2017). Bitcoin’s academic pedigree. Communications of the ACM, 60(12), 36–45. http://doi.org/10.1145/3132259
O’Dair, M., Neilson, D., & Pacifico, P. (2016). Music On The Blockchain, (July), 1–29. Retrieved from https://www.mdx.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0026/230696/Music-On-The-Blockchain.pdf
Reijers, W., & Coeckelbergh, M. (2018). The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies. Philosophy and Technology, 31(1), 103–130. http://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0239-x
Sharples, M., & Domingue, J. (2016). The Blockchain and Kudos: A Distributed System for Educational Record, Reputation and Reward. Adaptive and Adaptable Learning, 9891, 490–496. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45153-4
Tapscott, D., & Tapscott, A. (2017). Realizing the Potential of Blockchain A Multistakeholder Approach to the Stewardship of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies. Whitepaper. Retrieved from www.weforum.org
