Abstract
In order to explain how ignorance is diffused in online communities, which are sophisticated cognitive niches, in this chapter I aim at discussing their cognitive and epistemic features and at presenting them as virtual cognitive niches. Specifically, I will describe virtual cognitive niches as digitally-encoded collaborative distributions of diverse types of information into an environment, performed by human agents, to aid thinking and reasoning about two target domains, both in the real-world and in the virtual reality. Moreover, I will argue that they enable the users of online communities to build “imagined communities” (Anderson 1987) and to distribute particular sets of affordances—specifically what Nagy and Neff (2015) call “imagined affordances”, which are the combination of users’ perceptions, attitudes and expectations over the functionality of a particular technology.
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Notes
- 1.
Along this chapter, my use of the word virtual, for instance in “virtual reality” or “virtual cognitive niche” includes, but is not limited to, those understandings stressing the 3D, highly graphical and immersive understanding of the word. Rather, it can be understood as a more effective synonym of the prefix cyber.
- 2.
A brief terminological clarification should be introduced at this time. I will use the term “online communities” in order to employ a general definition that embraces different types of Internet-based frameworks, as social networking websites, newsgroups, forums, blogs, and miniblogs. I use this term to define a target broad enough to support different references as social media, digital frameworks, and social networks, without being general enough to hold the equivalence with traditional media, as newspapers and television programs.
- 3.
In this context I do not use “information” as an antagonist term for “misinformation”, but I employ it as a general word that refer to data exchanged by users in order to communicate something, true or false, vague or precise, meaningful or meaningless, to someone.
- 4.
- 5.
Rizza et al. (2014) provide a thorough analysis of the phenomenon.
- 6.
For instance, if the user has been honest in declaring her birthdate, she will be prone to think that also other users have been honest with the same respect (Acquisti and Gross 2006).
- 7.
This shift of behavior in the virtual domain is also confirmed by the already mentioned example of ad-hoc online communities, as websites of support of mental health patients, where the sites become “identity laboratory” where marginalized people can find different meanings for their diagnosed condition (Giles and Newbold 2011; Wallace 1999) and even causing forms of “cyberchondria” (White and Horvitz 2008).
- 8.
Bertolotti (2011) and Bertolotti and Magnani (2013) argued that a characteristic trait of social networking websites is the co-opting of evolved heuristics underdetermining social cognition. For instance, these websites may delude the user into believing that one’s reputation can be deterministically affected by one’s virtual appearance through what she posts online. Infamous cyberbullying accidents make clear how such a belief can stumble upon major shortcomings and self-defeating behaviors.
- 9.
That is one of the most important assets describing cognitive economy, that is, the need to reach a sort of trade-off between the accuracy of a decision and the limited time one is bounded to Gigerenzer et al. (1999).
- 10.
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Arfini, S. (2019). The Toleration of Ignorance in Online-Communities. In: Ignorant Cognition. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 46. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14362-6_10
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