Tommaso Bertolotti’s research while affiliated with University of Southern California and other places

... 14 The Incongruity Theory of humor suggests that humor is triggered by the perception of ignorance, perceived as an incongruity. If we understand humor as a social modality of signaling an instance of ignorance which urges its resolution (in this case ignorance elicits amusement), the cognitive process can be seen as a way of enhancing the quality of the related cognitive niche by keeping the ignorant in line without excluding the others from participating to common niche-construction activities (Bertolotti, 2020). 12 Dotson (2014) further analyzes "epistemic oppression" as a persistent epistemic exclusion (more or less intentionally driven) that hinders one's contribution to knowledge production: it can result from inefficient shared epistemic resources, like organizational schemata or instituted social imaginaries, which generate epistemic exclusions, from scarce or inadequate epistemic resources. ...

Reference:

Discoverability: The Urgent Need of an Ecology of Human Creativity

... As Bertolotti et al. (2018) point out, Internet users themselves (and, from an individual user's view, other people online) are configured as bundles of information. Building up on Waite and Bourke (2015), they argue that the association of users of digital platforms with the platform-especially in the case of SNSs-constitutes a case of "cyborgification": the human user and the used piece of technology are coupled in such a way that the artifact co-constitutes the way the user cognizes and experiences the world (Clark, 2003;Verbeek, 2008Verbeek, , 2011. ...

Reference:

Through the Newsfeed Glass: Rethinking Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers

... Some work in the direction of a theory of scientific discovery has been done recently (see for instance, the contributions by Bud (2007), Schindler (2015), Copeland (2018Copeland ( , 2019, Ippoliti (2020), Arfini et al. (2020), Clark and Khosrowi (2022), Michel (2022), but as I will try to explain in the following, four rather common prejudices, expressing a stereotype of discovery, formed during our common experiene of everyday discoveries, have proven to be rather persistent obstacles to a more comprehensive understanding of the subject in line with scientific practice. What I intend to do in this paper, is to show, by means of a prominent case study, that these prejudices are unjustified, and how to replace them by some more adequate understanding of scientific discovery. ...

Reference:

Four prejudices about scientific discovery and how to resolve them – with Alzheimer´s disease as a case study

... This dependence of content-based affordances to social ones comes from the goals and aims of social media users: If social connection and entertainment is the goal of online activities, then finding information is just their by-product. So, O'Riordan et al. (2012)'s study favors the view already offered by my colleagues and me Arfini & Bertolotti, 2018) as well as other authors (Croce & Piazza, forthcoming), which describe the information encountering on social media as strictly dependent on social aims, rules, and structures. Thus, it is important to see the social framework that shapes how agents encounter online content to further discuss which actions that content affords them. ...

Reference:

Ignorance and (Im)Possibility

... For example, the spread of mis-and disinformation has been tied to the emotionally charged language in which misinformation is packed (Bakir & McStay, 2018) and to the tendency of personalisation algorithms to make more visible the content written with emotional language (Steinert, 2021); this was then shown to be a problem of designing emotional affordances on social media (Steinert & Dennis, 2022). Other examples of successful conceptual work that clarifies how design choices backfire into harmful epistemic effects are the analyses of the formation of epistemic bubbles on Twitter (Nguyen, 2020) or of ignorance niches online (Arfini et al., 2018), or the problem of networked virtues on social media (Alfano, 2021), etc. These philosophical approaches, while substantiated with empirical data and offering successful explanations, are limited in dealing with epistemic harms, as the analysis tackles one particular problem at a time happening on one platform. ...

Reference:

How to Do Things with Information Online. A Conceptual Framework for Evaluating Social Networking Platforms as Epistemic Environments

... Specifically, some works on this population segment focus only on particular aspects of Millennials' lifetime, such as media use (Botterill et al. 2015), use of technology at work (Kim 2018), impact of new technology (Vilhelmson et al. 2018). In Italy as well, recent studies on Generation Y pay attention only to specific themes, such as, among others, connection between social networking and social inclusion (Introini and Pasqualini 2019), preferences for wine consumption and purchasing behaviours (Gallenti et al. 2019;Iazzi et al. 2020;Nassivera et al. 2020), preferences about means of transport (Nosi et al. 2017;Magnani et al. 2018), competencies needed for a leadership (D'Amato and Macchi 2019). Other studies concentrate on Millennials as a whole-i.e., to the aim of comparing time use styles of both Millennials versus non Millennials (Freeman 2019) and younger versus older Millennials (Garikapati et al. 2016)-and thus provide a general portrait. ...

Reference:

Spare time use: profiles of Italian Millennials (beyond the media hype)

... One source of inspiration is biology, a domain replete with conceptualisations of the surroundings of organisms and how they may affect and be affected by the development, evolution, and interactions of individuals and groups, as exemplified by the ideas of climate, Umwelt, habitat, environment, ecotype, and niche (Baedke & Buklijas, 2023;Benson, 2020). There is a long history of these concepts being applied in a variety of ways within philosophy, of which we here consider only recent decades. 1 For example, epistemologists have drawn on concepts of environment, niche, and landscape to capture phenomena such as learning, fake news and social media, as well as for formal epistemology (Alexander et al., 2015;Arfini et al., 2019;Blake-Turner, 2020;Goldberg, 2020;Levy, 2018;Marin, 2022;Ryan, 2018;Weisberg & Muldoon, 2009). In addition, philosophers of mind have cast 4E approaches to cognition (including knowing) as consisting in the interaction of an agent with relevant elements of its environment (Clark, 2006;Shapiro & Spaulding, 2021). ...

Reference:

Conceptualising research environments using biological niche concepts

... While it has been explored above how social identity can form in cyberspaces, social relations and 'friendships' in cyberspaces also hold different meanings (Bertolotti, 2015); owing to these differences in social relations online, moralities also look different (most of the research on gossip and bullying are ethics and morality driven; the present paper wishes more to focus on the evolutionary epistemic angles). This difference is owing to the ability to alienate one's identity and from the people one is interacting with online. ...

Reference:

Explicating Evolutionary Epistemological Concerns on Gossip and Cyberbullying

... Complex sociocognitive scaffolds, such as financial markets, are probably one of these contexts and this is why they are attracting a lot of attention (Todd & Gigerenzer, 2012). In this area, more research on the interplay of cognition and social processes of communication and market behavior is needed to understand the specific distributed nature of the aggregate intelligence of markets in complex environments (Bertolotti & Magnani, 2017). ...

Reference:

Adaptive Heuristics That (Could) Fit: Information Search and Communication Patterns in an Online Forum of Investors Under Market Uncertainty

... It is easy to think about social networking websites and on-line communities focusing only on their role as social aggregators. Originally, as commented in ( Bertolotti et al., 2017), social media were indeed designed as personal spaces to gossip and share personal information, but now the amount of news, scientific data and political statements that are distributed on their platforms should force even the most skeptic person to consider them common venues for sharing -and consuming and commenting -external content with one's (actual and virtually extended) network. Indeed, on-line communities could be powerful instruments for education, but the current distribution of fake or, at best, "oversimplified" scientific reports, political facts, and news in on-line platforms are the main reasons to consider social networks actual ignorance spreaders. ...

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Chapter 4. The expert you are (not): Ethics and Interdisciplinarity