University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO), Sierre, Switzerland.
Haute École Pédagogique Vaud (HEP-Vaud), Lausanne, Switzerland.
PLoS One. 2023 Jul 25;18(7):e0289025. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289025. eCollection 2023.
Since its first appearance as the infrastructure supporting Bitcoin, blockchain has received different waves of attention from practitioners and academics. Besides the degree of interest, the attention to blockchain has often focused not merely on its own potential and characteristics but on its applications field. However, looking at its application and deployment in domains other than cryptocurrency or the nascent non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain technology does not seem to be widely adopted or is still in its early stages. Given this, we are interested in how managers and the general public are informed about new technology other than through academic papers or the specialized press. In this paper, we analyze how blockchain has been presented by speakers invited to give TED and TEDx Talks to identify the most common terms used to present blockchain in these talks using a multi-methods approach (qualitative analysis and big data analysis) and see if the discourse surrounding blockchain has shifted over time. The results of this study show how the different perspectives brought by broadcasters like TED often overshadow a technological innovation like the blockchain in its evolution and application by the fact that the focus is instead shifted to products and services built on it. Also, this study shows how different degrees of attention and expertise are associated with each fashion wave of new or emergent technology innovations.
自其首次作为比特币基础设施出现以来，区块链已受到从业者和学术界的不同关注。除了关注程度外，人们对区块链的关注往往不仅集中在其自身的潜力和特点上，还集中在其应用领域上。然而，在除加密货币或新兴非同质化代币（NFT）以外的领域中，区块链技术的应用和部署似乎并未得到广泛采用，或者仍处于早期阶段。有鉴于此，我们感兴趣的是，除了学术论文或专业媒体之外，管理人员和公众如何通过其他方式了解新技术。在本文中，我们分析了被邀请在 TED 和 TEDx Talks 上发表演讲的演讲者如何介绍区块链，以确定在这些演讲中使用最常见的术语来介绍区块链，并使用多种方法（定性分析和大数据分析）来观察围绕区块链的话语是否随着时间的推移而发生了变化。这项研究的结果表明，像 TED 这样的广播公司带来的不同视角如何经常掩盖区块链等技术创新在其发展和应用过程中的作用，而是将重点转移到基于区块链构建的产品和服务上。此外，这项研究还表明，不同程度的关注和专业知识与新兴技术创新的每一次时尚浪潮都密切相关。
