“I invented Bitcoin”: Trivia as an Interactional Arena

• In Event: Research in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis: Interactions in Institutional Settings II

Abstract

"I Invented Bitcoin": Trivia as an Interactional Arena
Abstract
This paper presents the first systematic ethnomethodological and Conversation Analysis (CA) study of "Trivia" as a distinct interactional social practice—referred to throughout as [Trivia]—drawing on a corpus of TikTok street interview videos. While knowledge and its management have long been recognized as central organizers of interaction (Heritage, 2012), the mundane genre of trivia-based interaction has remained largely unexplored in the social sciences. Addressing this gap, the study investigates the structural and epistemic features that constitute [Trivia] as a recognizable social phenomenon. The paper achieves both context-specific and context-free analytic goals (Schegloff, 1987). The context-free analysis delineates the structural norms of [Trivia] across multiple data excerpts. Analysis reveals that [Trivia] is organized around a three-part Question-Answer-Feedback (Q-A-F) sequence embedded within an overall structural "listing,” in which a host poses successive questions to one or more contestants and evaluates their responses. A central finding concerns the epistemic norms governing this activity: questions must adhere to a "Goldilocks principle," calibrated to be neither too easy nor too difficult, and the host is normatively expected to possess K+ epistemic status—that is, to know the correct answers in order to provide accurate feedback. Correct answers should be met with positive assessments, sometimes accompanied by financial rewards, while incorrect answers warrant negative feedback. The context-specific analysis explains a puzzling utterance—"I invented Bitcoin"—produced at the close of a deteriorating trivia interaction. This declaration is interpreted as a reductio ad absurdum argument: by offering a patently false claim, the contestant demonstrates that the host's indiscriminate positive feedback violates the foundational norms of [Trivia]. The study thus illuminates how participants orient to and enforce interactional norms, and contributes to broader understandings of knowledge, epistemics, and social order in mediated everyday interaction.

Authors

• Gonen Dori Hacohen, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Liran Peretz, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• Joohee Kim, University of Massachusetts, Amherst