The Media Life of Cryptocurrencies: From Libertarian Dreams to Institutional Control

This project’s central research question is: ‘What are the key cryptocurrency discourses that exist in the crypto space, and by whom are they created?’. This thesis focuses on the historical trajectory of the media life of cryptocurrency. Specifically, it identifies cryptocurrency discourses in international news media and explores how they are socially constructed from a Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) perspective. Utilising computational topic modelling, a text analysis of cryptocurrency articles (N=4200) published from 60 countries in international news media, identified key topics associated with cryptocurrency from 2018 to 2020. The thesis presents a theoretical STS deconstruction of how cryptocurrency has been conceptually understood by media actors, accompanied by empirical evidence of the key finding that there are two major discourses which characterise news media communication about cryptocurrency: the ‘Crypto-Crime’ discourse and the ‘Financial Governance’ discourse. The main argument held in this thesis is that these two macro discourses are appropriated by international media but often emanate and are echoed from institutional positions. Vitally, this study is the first to demonstrate both theoretically and empirically, how news media in different countries ascribe diverging meaning to cryptocurrency technology, offering audiences varied images of what cryptocurrency is through discourse appropriation. Results showed that the co-constitution of discourse was strong across the UK and US whose news media appropriated the crypto-crime and crypto- governance discourses to different degrees. The thesis reveals how institutional positions are channelled through skewed news media narratives, from corporate economic and governmental control rationales. This control is demonstrated as being enacted through the state regulation of cryptocurrency, or complete bans, as in the case of China. Sometimes control is exerted through the innovation of state Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), as in many countries including the US, UK, Venezuela some EU countries. This is important because a new monetary form of digital currency can transform state macro-economic and micro-economic structures, affecting the social, economic, and political lives of global citizens.