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Social Media Platforms: Trading with Prediction Error Minimization for your Attention

16th October  at 11:30 AM - EDT

Culture exploits the acquisition of meaningful content by crafting regimes of shared attention, determining what is relevant, valuable, and salient. Culture changes the field of relevant social affordances worthy of being acted upon in a context-sensitive manner. When relevant affordances are highly weighted, their salience increases the probability of it being enacted, and as a consequence, their associated prediction error is minimized. This process is known as active inference. In the digital era, individuals need to infer the action-related attributes of digital cues, here characterized as digital affordances. The digital affordances of social media platforms are of particular interest here. By their own nature, these are salient because they are related to social interactions and relevant social cues. However, the problem around social network platforms is that they are not equivalent to situated social interactions because their structure is built, mediated, and defined by third-parties with diverse interests. The third-parties behind the social media platforms are using the same mechanism exploited by culture to manipulate the shared patterns of attention. Moreover, these social media platforms are deliberately designed to be hyper-stimulating, making them dangerously rewarding and increasingly addictive. As we will show, the outcome is a growing risk of our online social interactions disrupting our long-term adaptivity. This appropriation, for economic purposes, is an issue of greater importance, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic brought deep global changes pushing societies to an online digital way of life. In this paper, we examine digital instrumental actions as well as digital epistemic actions afforded by social media in light of the prediction error dynamics they might elicit to their users. This paper aims to analyze, under the active inference framework, how the field of relevant affordances is changing as a product of the use of social network platforms. Specifically, how social network platforms are changing the patterns of attention, affecting the way beliefs are updated, how social norms are learned, and how self-identity is built. Changes in the field of relevant affordances as a product of economic purposes may be putting at risk our context-sensitive grip on a rich, dynamic and varied field of relevant affordances.