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.
MULTIFILE
Today’s internet has become like Deleuze’s societies of control, media scholars argue. The network’s invisible infrastructure, with near global reach, has amplified hierarchies, and is owned, exploited and surveilled by internet, advertising, and data-analytics companies, and by state security institutions. With the digital data produced by the often banal and quotidian activities of millions of internet users – or dividuals – a monopoly of a handful of Tech Giants accumulate massive amounts of wealth, and influence. The world wide web, various media scholars contend, has degenerated to a serpent’s coil. This article argues that the rhizomatic Wood Wide Web provides a basis from which to rethink today’s debate on the present and future of the internet, and challenges a predominant understanding of the societies control. Beneath our feet and beyond our perception, a subterranean meshwork of trees, mushrooms and fungi forms an ecology of trans-species solidarity, singularities, and creative, collaborative interactivity that could carry us outside the entrapments of the supposed totality of the societies of control.What can the World Wide Web learn from the Wood Wide Web?
Abstract: Technological innovation in the healthcare sector is increasing, but integration of information technology (IT) in the care process is difficult. Healthcare workers are important agents in this IT integration. The purpose of this study is to explore factors that feed motivation to use IT. Self-determination theory (SDT) is applied to study how motivational factors impact effective IT use among frontline caregivers in residential care settings. As the team is very important to these caregivers, the team is our unit of analysis. In an embedded single case study design, interviews were conducted with all nine members of a team effectively using IT. All three basic psychological needs from SDT - autonomy, competence and relatedness - were found to have impact on effective IT use, though autonomy was primarily experienced at team level. Conversely, the effective use of an IT collaboration tool influences relatedness.
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A huge amount of data are being generated, collected, analysed and distributed in a fast pace in our daily life. This data growth requires efficient techniques for analysing and processing high volumes of data, for which preserving privacy effectively is a crucial challenge and even a key necessity, considering the recently coming into effect privacy laws (e.g., the EU General Data Protection Regulation-GDPR). Companies and organisations in their real-world applications need scalable and usable privacy preserving techniques to support them in protecting personal data. This research focuses on efficient and usable privacy preserving techniques in data processing. The research will be conducted in different directions: - Exploring state of the art techniques. - Designing and applying experiments on existing tool-sets. - Evaluating the results of the experiments based on the real-life case studies. - Improving the techniques and/or the tool to meet the requirements of the companies. The proposal will provide results for: - Education: like offering courses, lectures, students projects, solutions for privacy preservation challenges within the educational institutes. - Companies: like providing tool evaluation insights based on case studies and giving proposals for enhancing current challenges. - Research centre (i.e., Creating 010): like expanding its expertise on privacy protection technologies and publishing technical reports and papers. This research will be sustained by pursuing following up projects actively.
