This book is a journey through coexisting, emerging or speculated about, types of digital value transfer infrastructures. Using digital value transfer infrastructures as a central case study, this thesis is concerned with unpacking the negotiation processes that shape the governance, design and political purposes of digital infrastructures that are closely linked to the public interest and state sovereignty. In particular, the papers that are assembled in this manuscript identify and inspect three main socio-technical developments occurring in the domain of value transfer technologies: a) the privatization and platformization of digital payment infrastructures; b) the spread of blockchain-based digital value transfer infrastructures; c) the construction of digital value transfer infrastructures as public utilities, from the part of public institutions or organizations. Concerned with the relationship between law, discourse and technological development, the thesis explores four transversal issues that strike differences and peculiarities of these three scenarios: i) privacy; ii) the synergy and mutual influence of legal change and technological development in the construction of digital infrastructures; iii) the role of socio-technical imaginaries in policy-making concerned with digital infrastructures; iv) the geography and scale of digital infrastructures. The analyses lead to the argument that, in the co-development of legal systems and digital infrastructures that are core to public life, conflicts are productive. Negotiations, ruptures and exceptions are constitutive of the unending process of mutual reinforcement, and mutual containment, in which a plurality of agencies – expressed through legal institutions, symbolic systems, as well as information and media structures – are entangled.
In the following paper I investigate the use of Facebook and the purpose of its use by first year students, in the Department of Media, Communication and Information at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, with a limited enrolment of 960 students (2011-2012). Differences in whether or not students use self-created Facebook-groups will be measured against the differences in utilization of various activities on Facebook. According to a previous study, these activities are categorized by the motives for using Facebook; 1) for information sharing, 2) for educational purposes, 3) for social purposes and 4) for leisure. Furthermore, this study is part of a broader (PhD) research where I investigate the influence of media literacy and its possible effect on students’ success. The aspects of media literacy I focus on are better known as information problem solving skills (IPS-skills). These IPS-skills are also measured against the different activities conducted on Facebook. All variables are measured using digital surveys and analysed with the help of statistical tests. This will ultimately provide a valuable insight into how and if there is a relation between the differences of the students’ use of Facebook and their IPS-skills.
The presentation of management information on screens and paper is aimed at the initiation of control actions in order to bring about predefinied goals. The terms and concepts used in this control information can be interptreted in different ways. It is of vital importance that adequate definitions for these terms and concepts are provided, because of the area of tension betrween those that control and those being controlled. The creation of a common conceptual framework and the maintenance of concepts and definitions can be supported by the construction of an organization-specific lexicon and the use of modern IT tools.
