Sven Walter’s research while affiliated with Osnabrück University and other places

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Publications (3)


Scaffolded Affective Harm: What Is It and (How) Can We Do Something About It?
  • Article
  • Full-text available

January 2025

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22 Reads

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Carmen Mossner

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Sven Walter

Situated affectivity investigates how natural, material, and social environmental structures, so-called ‘scaffolds,’ influence our affective life. Initially, the debate focused on user-resource-interactions, i.e., on cases where individuals (‘users’) actively structure the environment (‘resource’) in beneficial ways, setting up scaffolds that allow them to solve routine problems, modify their means of coping with challenges, or avail themselves of new affective competences. More recently, cases of mind invasion have captured philosophers’ attention where the ways others structure the environment affect, or invade, people’s minds, typically without their awareness and with harmful consequences. This paper contributes to recent discussions about the variety of phenomena that can count as ‘scaffolded affectivity’ in general and ‘scaffolded affective harm’ in particular. It also addresses the emerging question of how harmful affective scaffolds can come to have a grip on people’s minds, despite their detrimental consequences. We first disentangle some misconceptions and illustrate how diverse (harmful) affective scaffolds can be. In contrast to recent approaches that have characterized scaffolds in largely descriptive terms, we then identify factors that can help explain why a given scaffold is effective in modifying people’s minds. We also try to shed light on why some agents and some social structures are especially likely to experience or cause scaffolded affective harm, respectively, by arguing that user-resource-interactions and mind invasions are not independent, but intimately intertwined and mutually reinforcing, especially in the digital domain. We conclude with a speculative suggestion for further research.

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Shaping Social Media Minds: Scaffolding Empathy in Digitally Mediated Interactions?

March 2024

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177 Reads

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1 Citation

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Empathy is an integral aspect of human existence. Without at least a basic ability to access others’ affective life, social interactions would be well-nigh impossible. Yet, recent studies seem to show that the means we have acquired to access others’ emotional life no longer function well in what has become our everyday business – technologically mediated interactions in digital spaces. If this is correct, there are two important questions: (1) What makes empathy for frequent internet users so difficult? and (2) What can we do to alleviate the negative consequences? Correspondingly, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, we identify structural differences between offline and technologically mediated interactions that can explain why digital empathy is harder to achieve. Second, drawing on the literature on ‘situated affectivity,’ we consider the idea of modifying digital spaces in ways specifically designed to ‘scaffold’ empathy where our evolved mechanisms fail. Section 2 argues that empathy is requires interpreting the behavior of embodied subjects. Section 3 identifies three factors that are crucial for this interpretative endeavor: the empathizer’s affective repertoire, their perceptual input, and their background knowledge. Section 4 argues that technologically mediated interactions differ from face-to-face interactions with regard to these factors in ways which render our evolved empathy mechanisms less effective in the digital world. Section 5 introduces the idea that situational factors can serve as ‘empathic scaffolds,’ i.e., as ‘tools’ that can ‘shape’ people’s empathic reactions. Section 6 wraps up the main line of reasoning, responds to objections and invites further scholarship.


Citations (1)


... What, for instance, makes people vulnerable to scaffolded affective harm (e.g., Figà-Talamanca 2024)? How are 'affective injustices' (e.g., Krueger 2023) that deprive people of 'affective goods' (Gallegos 2021) and lead to 'affective wrongs' (Archer 2024) established and maintained, for instance in the context of online radicalization (e.g., Shafieioun and Haq 2023;Valentini 2022), colorist oppression (e.g., Bajwa et al. 2023), or digitally mediated social interactions (e.g., Mossner and Walter 2024)? And, importantly, how can such external appropriations of our minds be combated and their consequences mitigated (e.g., Pismenny et al. 2024)? ...

Reference:

Scaffolded Affective Harm: What Is It and (How) Can We Do Something About It?
Shaping Social Media Minds: Scaffolding Empathy in Digitally Mediated Interactions?

Topoi