a bitcoin event in a cafe

“Hey, I know what this is!”: Cultural Affinities and Early-Stage Appropriation of the Emerging Bitcoin Technology

I am pleased to announce that my paper with Xianghua Ding has been accepted by GROUP’16!

In this paper, we investigated the cultural affinities as sociocultural factors that bring early-stage technology appropriators closer to the sites of the innovation, and mediate their journey of negotiating meanings with the innovation.

The sociocultural influences of technological trajectories is under-explored in HCI, despite it having relevance with many mainstream research areas, chiefly technology appropriation, adoption studies, and online communities. We chose technology appropriation as our main theoretical frame, due to appropriation exhibiting a greater emphasis on user participation and creativity (thanks for the many constructive criticisms by diverse reviewers on early versions of this paper); but we tried our best to engage the other frames as well without overcomplicating the theoretical arguments.

I hope the paper helps shed lights on relations between user cultural-histories and technological innovations.

Posted in Blockchain.