SPEAKER: Shaila Miranda, M.D. Matthews Endowed Professor at the University of Arkansas Sam M. Walton College of Business
TITLE: The Botification of an Innovation Discourse Ecosystem: Discursive Practices in an Attention Ecology
VIRTUAL: TBA
ABSTRACT: With a focus largely on their role in political campaigns or as software-for-hire, social bots are pilloried and feared. News media denounce their role in distorting communication and propagating disinformation. Scholarly research has highlighted their role in polarizing and hijacking political discourses. Little is understood, however, of their role in innovation discourses. Further, a focus on bots’ dyadic or network interactions offers insights into the functioning of bots that are less useful in understanding their consequences in complex innovation discourses. Building on emerging perspectives of innovation discourses as ecosystems, in which the currency is attention, we ask a foundational question: how do bots shape attention in an innovation discourse ecosystem? We answer this question by examining seven years (2011-2017) of Australian blockchain discourse on Twitter using computationally intensive theory construction, with methods drawn from text and network analysis. We first observed relationships between bot participation and the diversity and volatility of innovation framing balanced each other such that when one was high, the other was low. We then looked for activities and their systematic consequences—indicative of a practice. We inductively surfaced four sets of discursive practices – innovation spotlighting, innovation focusing, innovation warranting, and innovation memorializing. We observed that bot accounts engaged in these practices more than did human accounts. Next, abductively iterating between these observations, disciplined thought trials, and a simulation we theorize how social bots contribute to the viability of innovation discourse ecosystems through these practices and to the stability of ecosystems by creating and (re)populating discursive niches.
BIO: Shaila M. Miranda is M.D. Matthews Endowed Professor and Chair of the Information Systems Department at the University of Arkansas Sam M. Walton College of Business. She has a doctorate in Information Systems (with a minor in Computer Science) from the University of Georgia and an M.A. in Sociology from Columbia University. Her research focuses on the constitutive nature of discourse and on emergent social structures in organizations, digital activism, and digital innovation communities. She employs a combination of qualitative and computational abductive techniques in her research. Shaila’s research has appeared in journals such as the MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, and Journal of Management Information Systems and she has published a book on Social Analytics. Her research has been funded by NCITE/the Department of Homeland Security. She has served as Senior Editor for MIS Quarterly and as Senior Editor for Information Systems Research. Shaila is a Fellow of the AIS.
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