Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms populism Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship sexuality Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

Epistemic flooding

This is a useful notion from Glenn Anderau I’m saving here in order to come back to. I’ve been prone to talk about the epistemological chaos of platform capitalism of which I think flooding is one major mechanism:

Epistemic Flooding: Epistemic flooding occurs when epistemic agents find themselves in epistemic environments in which they are routinely confronted with more information and evidence than they can diligently process.

Several further clarifications are important to add here: It is only correct to speak of epistemic flooding if being exposed to a deluge of information we are unable to adequately process is a recurring problem we face over a longer period of time in the epistemic environment we inhabit. Single instances of ‘flooding’ pertaining to singular, self-contained situations and inquiries are not enough to qualify as epistemic flooding in this sense.Footnote5 So an isolated situation in which we are flooded with more information than we can diligently process for a limited amount of time does not qualify as ‘epistemic flooding’ in this sense. We could still call such situations instances of epistemic flooding in theory, but I am only interested in scenarios in which we inhabit an epistemic environment which is habitually flooded over a longer period of time in this paper.

Another is that I speak of epistemic flooding in the context of the epistemic environment we inhabit. It is epistemic environments which are flooded which then impacts the agents inhabiting them. This is important because it means the information we are flooded with impacts our epistemic surroundings in general and affects our everyday epistemic practices. It also means that the effects of epistemic flooding do not solely pertain to individuals but epistemic communities as a whole.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04336-7
, , , ,
, , , , , ,