Eric Meyer Presents Talk on the Blockchain Movement
By Maggie McDonald
On Friday, September 8th, Eric Meyer, Dean and professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin and graduate of the ILS program, joined the Department of Information and Library Science to deliver a talk on his current work with blockchain.
Meyer’s talk, titled Blockchain as a Computerization Movement and Blockchain Technologies as Socio-Technical Networks, was part of a series hosted by the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics.
Technologies are socially constructed as they are brought into widespread use. In his talk, Dr. Meyer considered blockchain and its underlying technologies as both a macro-level computerization movement and a micro-level socio-technical interaction network. He also discussed specific examples of his team’s creation of a blockchain-based medical identity tool, Medilinker, to consider broader issues of how digital technologies that replace non-digital equivalents evolve in use. Meyer made sure to stress that this was a work-in-progress talk, welcoming comment and critique from the audience.