In a recent paper I printed with my colleagues Lavinia Marin (TU Delft) and Constantin Vica (College of Bucharest), titled “Digital Slot Machines: Social Media Platforms as Attentional Scaffolds” we take a step again from AI and return to an older downside in digital ethics, that regardless of its urgency, is commonly neglected: the affect of social media platforms on consideration, each on the particular person and collective ranges.
On this paper, we introduce the idea of attentional scaffolds and present the resemblance between social media platforms and slot machines, each functioning as hostile attentional scaffolds. We analyze how these platforms strategically harness customers’ feelings to seize and retain their consideration, benefiting the platforms on the expense of customers’ pursuits. Very similar to the mechanics employed in slot machines, social media platforms are designed to captivate customers’ consideration by using a system of intermittent rewards, all with the purpose of maximizing engagement. We additionally deal with the interaction of feelings and a spotlight, and their affect on epistemic states, to point out in additional element how social media platforms work as digital slot machines. We argue that regardless of being designed round particular person customers, digital platforms wield mixture results on the collective degree. By exploring phenomena equivalent to emotional contagion and the emergence of group feelings, we illustrate the transition from particular person experiences to collective outcomes. Using on-line ethical outrage as a case examine, we illustrate how unfavourable feelings function scaffolds for people’ consideration, propagate inside social teams, and provides rise to collective attitudes.
The paper was printed in Topoi and could be freely accessed by way of the next hyperlink: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-024-10031-0
