Digital protest: how hashtags and emoji direct attention in the 2020 Black Lives Matters movement on Twitter
Mark Alfano
Protests and counter-protests have always sought to draw and direct attention with confronting slogans and images. In recent years, as protests and counter-protests have partially migrated to the digital space (as described at length in Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter & Tear Gas), such slogans and images have also gone online. Two main ways in which these slogans and images appear is through the use of hashtags and emoji. Especially recently, when unicode introduced skin-tones for many popular emoji, such glyphs have been used in protest movements. In this paper, we show that the hashtags and emoji embedded in tweets associated with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and the right-wing backlash to those protests, employed a range of easily-interpretable hashtags and emoji. Furthermore, using the Yo! and Lo! framework developed by Kukla & Lance, we argue that the use of these symbols is best understood not through their semantics but through their pragmatics, especially the ways in which they are designed to capture and direct the attention of their audience.
Extended Mind-Wandering
Regina Fabry (Ruhr University Bochum) & Jelle Bruineberg (Macquarie University)
Smartphone use plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Philosophical research that has used first-wave or second-wave theories of extended cognition in order to understand our engagement with digital technologies has focused on the contribution of these technologies to the completion of specific cognitive tasks (e.g., remembering, reasoning, problem-solving, navigation). However, in a considerable number of cases, smartphone use is either task-unrelated or task-free. In psychological research, these cases have been captured by notions such as absent-minded smartphone use (Marty-Dugas et al., 2018) or smartphone-related inattentiveness (Liebherr et al., 2020). Given the ubiquity of these cases, we develop a conceptual framework that can accommodate the functional, phenomenological, and epistemological characteristics of task-unrelated or task-free smartphone use. To this end, we will integrate research on second-wave extended cognition with mind-wandering research and introduce the concept of ‘extended mind-wandering’. Elaborating the family resemblances approach to mind-wandering (Seli et al., 2018), we will argue that task-unrelated or task-free smartphone use shares many characteristics with mind-wandering. We will suggest that an empirically informed conceptual analysis of cases of extended mind-wandering can enrich current work on digitally extended cognition by specifying the influence of the attention economy on our cognitive dynamics.
Attention and distraction: two sides of one (very valuable) coin
Miriam Rasch
Tech companies capture our attention by offering distraction. We feel distracted by notifications, messages, and breaking news that demand our immediate attention. The endless scroll that fixes our gaze for hours takes away what feels like an important sense of self-control.
Fixating eyeballs and thumbs on the screen is how money is being made – attention means data and data means the opportunity to sell profiles to the highest bidder. To this end, our attention is being automated. Technological channeling of attention ideally runs as smoothly as possible, frictionless, leaving no room for escape.
How to counter these automations? Seeing how our attention is captured via distraction, making the two entangled up to the point of being interchangeable, we should not only reclaim attention, but also our distraction.
Literature (Guus Kuijer, Virginia Woolf) offers beautiful examples of what distraction can potentially be – a mode of thinking and creating, even an expression of autonomy. Can ‘de-automated’ distraction – which reaches inward, is non-linear, intuitive – propose a model for reclaiming our attention within the attention economy?
Virtual worlds as homes?
Alex Gillett
Many people intuitively talk about virtual worlds as places we inhabit. This is important because a number of theorists have argued that the modern virtual worlds which we inhabit are detrimental to human flourishing in a variety of ways (e.g. Carr, 2016; Williams, 2018; Zuboff, 2019). In this paper I have two aims: firstly, to examine whether talk of virtual worlds as places or homes is simply metaphorical and whether it makes sense. And secondly, to demonstrate that certain worries and lines of arguments raised about virtual worlds as having negative impacts on the human psyche are based on underlying assumptions of Traditional Evolutionary Psychology and Internalism. In contrast, I shall put forward an account of feeling at home as a form of affective niche construction. This reformulation of the problem enables a clearer account of what virtual worlds are insofar that one can feel at home in them; and provides a basis for a more nuanced normative project about whether or not they facilitate human flourishing.
Extended mind and artifactual autobiographical memory
Richard Heersmink
As the extended mind debate came to maturation, it has conceptualized how cognitive artifacts extend various memory capacities, including working memory, prospective memory, spatial memory, and semantic memory. Surprisingly, the relation between autobiographical memory and artifacts has not received much attention in the extended mind literature. In this paper, I first distinguish between “cognitive artifacts” used for practical cognitive tasks and “evocative objects” used for remembering our personal past. I then go on to describe a number of ways in which evocative objects and our autobiographical memory are integrated into new systemic wholes, allowing us to remember our personal past in a more reliable and detailed manner. After discussing some empirical work on evocative objects and digital lifelogging technology, I elaborate on the dimension of autobiographical dependency, which is the degree to which we depend on an object to be able to remember a personal experience. When this dependency is strong, we integrate information in the embodied brain and in an object to reconstruct an autobiographical memory. In such cases, the information we use to remember our personal past is distributed across embodied agents and evocative objects.
4E and the dogma of harmony
Jesper Aagaard
The purpose of this talk is to raise a concern about 4E cognition. The concern is not about whetherthe mind is in fact extended, but about how this condition is currently portrayed in the 4E literature. It is argued that 4E cognition tends to paint an overly idealized picture of human-technology relations in which all entities are presumed to cooperate and collaborate. According to this view, technologies simply ‘aid’ and ‘enhance’ human cognitive processes. While positive examples may initially have paved the way for a broader acceptance of 4E tenets, this analytical one-sidedness may now constrain 4E research. In this talk, I therefore sketch out the so-called dogma of harmony in the 4E literature and argue for the importance of making analytical room for contradiction and conflict. As an illustration, I provide an empirical example of conflictual human-technology relations from my own research on digital distraction: Bad tech habits.