Taking responsibility for our words on social media

Cardiff philosopher explores question of our times in prestigious fellowship

Professor Alessandra Tanesini is to take up the 2023-24 Mind Association Major Research Fellowship.

In her year as a fellow, the philosopher will focus on a major new work, sharing her project findings at the UK’s largest philosophy conference.

She will concentrate her research on how we can collectively take responsibility for our words on social media, culminating in publication of a new monograph, provisionally entitled Commitments Online: Taking Responsibility for One’s Words on Social Media.

This latest project builds on Tanesini’s previous work on social media, speech acts, and emotions (2022), polarization and public debates (2021 -2021), silence as a speech act (2018) and silencing and assertion (2019).

She explains:

“The research intends to offer diagnoses for some of the well-documented ills of online communications focusing on the obstacles to “epistemically sober” conversations, based on text-based Social Networking Sites (SNSs) such as Mastodon, Twitter, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Facebook.

“It will consider how vast networks of users engenders a cacophony of communications where all participants are vying for attention, where communication at scale is effortless and where accountability is harder. The intention is to consider the implications for detecting dishonesty, heightened risks of misunderstanding and potential loss of conversational common ground.”

Mind fellows share their research in a lecture at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association as part of the fellowship.