Papers presented by David Kirsch since 2019

2023 Detroit, MI, United States

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2023 Detroit, MI, United States

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2022 Mexico City

"The Pirates of the Caribbean: Mapping Responses to Institutional Voids by Satellite Entrepreneurs, 1974-1986"

Abstract:

Building on prior work (Prieto, 2019), we present an interdisciplinary conversation about how the initiation of U.S. satellite television led to an increase in entrepreneurial activity in the Caribbean area and the mechanisms through which these entrepreneurs were delegitimized over time. In 1974, the first commercial American broadcast satellite was launched into geosynchronous orbit above North America. Soon after the satellite was in orbit, amateur experiments with satellite television reception created an ecosystem within the United States. However, the spillover of the satellite signal outside the terrestrial boundaries of the United States created an institutional void into which entrepreneurs in the Caribbean basin entered, thereby creating an alternative (unexpected) ecosystem. This alternative ecosystem included homemade antennas, local distribution systems, and other networks of exchange. The increasing prevalence of these practices should have legitimized the satellite entrepreneurs. But instead, the prevalence and proliferation of these practices raised concerns, and eventually, these activities were made illegal. A decade later, in 1986, a new technological fix -- the scrambler -- was introduced that formalized the “pirate” status of the satellite entrepreneurs of the Caribbean. The institutional void had been filled. We will use multilingual topic modeling (a type of Natural Language Processing) to explore the mechanisms through which satellite entrepreneurs operating outside the U.S. were delegitimized. Our machine-learning data corpus will include documents from diverse data sources reflecting the perspectives, points of views and arguments from the multiple key stakeholders (including satellite entrepreneurs’ magazines, media content from U.S. and Latin American countries, and congressional hearings) to understand how each stakeholder’s perspectives evolved over time. This methodology, together with knowledge of the context, allows us to identify anomalies and generate a more granular and theoretically fruitful explanation of the mechanism through which satellite entrepreneurs were labeled as “pirates” and eventually delegitimized

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2020 Charlotte, North Carolina

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