Digital Clusters: How the Net is Marking Us

Come la rete ci "bolla"

Abstract

The work moves from the analysis of data from digital illiteracies as well as cognitive biases, deepening the specific criticalities of the phenomenon of the conversational decay, made pervasive by the diffusion of social networks - touching the topics of false news, fanaticism and online hate speech. In this context, even due to the algorithms’ filtering action, the user, being protagonist of the network and its contents, risks to be confined in large online structures, closed in echo chambers and finding only converging and polarized ideas. Deepening the theme of personal and collective narration, and how this is augmented and expanded in social media, the work explores a new digital aggregation object, called “Digital cluster”. These aggregations overcome and widen the phenomenon of “digital bubbles” described by Eli Pariser in 2011, and outline a digital context in which different subjects select contents to reinforce the choices and the common narratives. In these aggregations, there are also other elements, from the topology of the network to the presence of other distortions, which bring the phenomenon towards a wider scale magnitude, which is examined in rate and implications.