Chance-Discovery and Chance-Curation in Online Communities
- Selene Arfini, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy
- Lorenzo Magnani, Department of Humanities, Philosophy Section and Computational Philosophy Lab, University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy
- Tommaso Bertolotti, University of Pavia, Pavia, PV, Italy
AbstractIn this paper, we consider chance-curation (the task of easing chance-discovery activities for agents) as far as it concerns information sharing in online communities, understood as Virtual Cognitive Niches. We claim that Virtual Cognitive Niches are digitally-encoded collaborative distributions of information and pieces of knowledge into the environment. The particularity of Virtual Cognitive Niches, as socially biased networks, is that they provide more ways for agents to interact than to control the quality of the information they share and receive. We contend that this social bias enables chance-curation strategies that agents cannot foster in real-life communities. In particular, the chance curation strategies that we discuss are: redirecting the attention of agents to the virtual domain, fostering an only-docility-based relation with truth, and increasing the social virtues of fallacies.