Some fear that personalised communication can lead to information cocoons or filter bubbles. For instance, a personalised news website could give more prominence to conservative or liberal media items, based on the (assumed) political interests of the user. As a result, users may encounter only...

Political micro-targeting (PMT) has become a popular topic both in academia and in the public discussions after the surprise results of the 2016 US presidential election, the UK vote on leaving the European Union, and a number of general elections in Europe in 2017. Yet, we still know little...

Trust can best be understood as a relational attribute between (1) a social actor and other actor(s) (interpersonal trust) and / or (2) actors and institutions (institutional or systemic trust) and (3) institutions and (trusting) actors (trust as shared expectations), where institutional...

The rapidly evolving blockchain technology space has put decentralisation back into the focus of the design of techno-social systems, and the role of decentralised technological infrastructures in achieving particular social, economic, or political goals. In this entry we address how blockchains...

Decentralisation as a concept is attracting a lot of interest, not least with the rise of decentralised and distributed techno-social systems like Bitcoin, and distributed ledgers more generally. In this paper, we first define decentralisation as it is implemented for technical architectures and...

The technological infrastructures enabling the collection, processing, and trading of data have fuelled a rapid innovation of data governance models. We differentiate between macro, meso, and micro level models, which correspond to major political blocks; societal-, industry-, or community level...

A complex system of rules and governance mechanisms control the lives of piratical P2P file-sharing darknets and ensure the survival and the quality of the shared P2P resource pool. In some communities these rules include the voluntary intellectual property (IP) protection as well. I show three...

2016 is the year when piracy finally became an unavoidable topic in the domain of scholarly communications. The public exposure of Sci-Hub, a copyright infringing site that provides free access to paywalled journal databases, electrified the decade old debates about the role of scholars,...

This paper introduces the new theoretical concept of technology mediated trust, or in short, mediated trust to capture and analyze the role of complex techno-social assemblages in trust production and distrust management. Societies are increasingly reliant on digital technologies to collect data;...

Decentralization is heralded as the most important technological design aspect of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). In this chapter we’ll analyze the concept of decentralization, with the goal to understand the social, legal, economic forces that produce more or less decentralized...