The Epistemic Consequences of the Internet: The Case of a Diabetes Online Community

Dr Roberta Bernardi

Before the advent of social media and other Web 2.0 technologies, formal knowledge production was in the hands of few expert organizations and individuals. Nowadays, internet users co-produce knowledge tailored to their own needs and preferences. An example is Online Health Communities (OHC), in which people living with a chronic condition are enabled to make informed health decisions by constructing “patient knowledge” based on latest medical research findings and shared experience (Foster 2016; Brady et al. 2016). Yet, user-generated content (UGC) also presents “epistemic dangers” (Choo 2016a) because it can challenge the authority of experts based on unsubstantiated knowledge claims (Doty 2015). This is evidenced by the spread of misinformation online by anti-vax movements (Doty 2015) and climate change denialists (Vähämaa 2013). The spread of fake news and its effect on the democratic vote of a country (Torres et al. 2018) is another example of the dangers of misinformation online about issues that affect our civic society and humanity. These examples show the importance of  investigating the epistemic consequences of social media and the internet (Miller and Record 2013). My recent British Academy research project on the epistemic practices of a diabetes online community moves towards this direction and brings to light key theoretical and empirical challenges for social scientists in the study of the epistemic consequences of internet technologies. In turn, this could inform the development of frameworks for the design of internet technologies that are epistemically responsible. Here I provide an analysis of these challenges with a brief overview of my research project findings and contribution as well as limitations in meeting these challenges followed by recommendations for future research.

A key challenge to the investigation of the epistemic consequences of UGC websites and the internet is the ontological inseparability between human and material agencies. For example, reputation scores are both material and an expression of various beliefs. We do not know what these beliefs are because they are just translated into a simple “like”, and yet, they entice us to believe that such simplified digital representations are a testimony of truth, thus limiting our capacity to take responsible actions in forming a justified true belief (Choo 2016b). Rating systems can also create groupthink by polarizing people’s judgment around a dominant view. Minority views are sidelined creating epistemic injustice (Matthews and Stephens 2010).

Findings from interviews with members of the diabetes online community I studied sheds some light on the epistemic consequences of OHC. This research draws on virtue epistemology (Baehr 2011; Zagzebski 1996) to understand to what extent OHC can act as epistemically virtuous agents, that is, agents who are motivated and have the ability to achieve justified true beliefs (Kornblith 1983). Findings showed that individual participants and the community as a collective were motivated to and capable of enacting virtuous epistemic practices. These practices allowed individuals to distinguish the value and appropriateness of knowledge in the OHC to achieve their health self-management goals and were crucial for maintaining quality and consistency of knowledge production within the community. Participants were open to other people’s experiences (open-mindedness); had confidence in testing alternative diets not recommended by conventional clinical advice (intellectual courage); had the intellectual humility to recognize the limitations of their own knowledge. The epistemic agency of the community was also crucial in encouraging epistemically virtuous behaviours. It fostered the intellectual autonomy of its members by encouraging them to form independent epistemic judgments about information shared on the forum. It maintained intellectual integrity in making sure that knowledge contribution was not harmful or misleading. It showed intellectual courage in disciplining the epistemic intemperance of members that made inappropriate and epistemically dangerous claims.

Looking more closely into the epistemic consequences of the material features of the OHC site, this research demonstrates the epistemic ambivalence of peer-agreement mechanisms (e.g. “likes”). On the one hand, “likes” to posts in response to a query empowered posters by giving them confidence about their knowledge about diabetes. On the other hand, peer-agreement mechanisms allowed community members to reach consensus about conflicting opinions. Yet, this also gave participants the wrong impression that their knowledge claims were correct even though this was not entirely true. This finding problematizes the material agency of online community and social network sites in influencing our capacity to act as responsible epistemic agents in forming justified true beliefs.

While this research provides some answers, it also raises questions about the epistemic effect of peer-agreement mechanisms. For example, some participants assumed that posters who held an opinion that was not supported by the majority of members, and who did not reply back, simply came to the realisation that they were wrong. The reality is that we don’t know. Some of them might still hold to their beliefs but might feel intimidated to justify them, others might simply have lost interest in the discussion. Why is this important? Other findings from this research show that a healthy debate about contrasting views about treatment augments the variety of knowledge that visitors to the community can benefit from for their care. It also instils humility into community participants, who come to the realisation that there are other ways in which people manage their diabetes.

To summarize, owing to the ontological inseparability between material and human agency that characterizes Internet technology, it is hard to understand how the sociomateriality of UGC sites display epistemic agency in influencing how we evaluate the veracity of online content. From a social science perspective, these investigative challenges are theoretical as well as methodological. Big data research and virtual ethnography taken alone, for example, provide only a partial representation of content producers/consumers’ intentions and views concerning what they read and what they post. Advanced quantitative and computational research methods in the social sciences can help in addressing some of these challenges, in combination with advanced qualitative research methodologies such as virtual ethnography (Hine 2000) and narrative network (Pentland and Feldman 2007) methodologies.

References

Baehr, J. 2011. The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bernardi, R. 2019. “Online Health Communities as Social Spaces for Experimentation”. OKLC Conference, Brighton.

Brady, E., Segar, J., and Sanders, C. 2016. "“You get to know the people and whether they’re talking sense or not”: Negotiating trust on health related forums," Social Science & Medicine (162), pp. 151-157.

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Choo, C. W. 2016b. “Internet Epistemology”, Chun Wei Choo (ed.), The Inquiring Organization: How Organizations Acquire Knowledge and Seek Information, Oxford Scholarship Online, University Press Scholarship Online.

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Torres et al. 2018. “Epistemology in the Era of Fake News: An Exploration of Information Verification Behaviors among Social Networking Site Users,” The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems, (49:3), pp. 78-97.

Vähämaa, M. 2013. "Groups as Epistemic Communities: Social Forces and Affect as Antecedents to Knowledge," Social Epistemology (27:1), pp. 3-20.

Zagzebski, L. 1996. Virtues of the Mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.