Over the past 2 decades, Digital Platforms (DPs), including Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple, have risen from insignificant start- ups to a dominating set of firms with a combined 4 trillion dollar market capitalisation1. These now ubiquitous DPs have revolutionised many aspects of everyday life, from working and studying to communicating and dating. In recognition of this unprecedented rise of commercial power, legal and academic scholarship has begun to revisit the concepts of monopolistic market behaviours and the subsequent potential for both economic and political influence.
Metadata and Non-Fungible Token Architecture
Cryptocurrency and Blockchain technologies are fast becoming areas of public interest across a breadth of diverse domains, with novel applications ranging from financial services to state politics. In particular, promising future use cases of these decentralised technologies aim to re-define the concept of value, and potentially enable a new wave of accessible investment opportunities for the general public. One such example of this is through Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), which act as digital certificates of ownership for a given piece of digital content. These stamps are stored as tokens on a public Blockchain (such as Ethereum), which uses complex hashing algorithms to ensure that each token is unique, tamper-proof and publicly-visible. This adds value to a range of digital content & artworks through enabling a single source of truth relating to its ownership and historic activity.
The Perception of Threat in Female-Targeted Online Abuse
As a component of the INFO-272 Research course at the School of Information, I lead an independent qualitative research study in order to explore the perception of threat in a range of online abuse situations through the contexts, themes and experience of five self-identifying women. Online abuse is becoming an increasingly prevalent issue in modern day society, with 41% of Americans having experienced online harassment in some capacity in 2021. People who identify as women, in particular, can be subjected to a wide range of abusive behaviour online, with gender-specific experiences cited broadly in recent literature across fields such as blogging, politics and journalism.