2022/10/14 by Steffen Steinert, Lavinia Marin, Sabine Roeser · 39 citations
Arts and Humanities · Chemistry · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Argument (complex analysis) #Chemistry #Computer science #Critical thinking #Education and Critical Thinking Development #Epistemology #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Feeling #Focus (optics) #Misinformation and Its Impacts #Philosophy #Psychology #Social media #Social psychology #Sociology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/0020174x.2022.2126148
published in Inquiry 68(1), 114-141 (Taylor & Francis)
openalex publication_date 2022/10/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
It is often suggested that social media is a hostile environment for critical thinking and that a major source for epistemic problems concerning social media is that it facilitates emotions. We argue that emotions per se are not the source of the epistemic problems concerning social media. We propose that instead of focusing on emotions, we should focus on the affective scaffolding of social media. We will show that some affective scaffolds enable desirable epistemic practices, while others obstruct beneficial epistemic practices, or enable hostile epistemic practices. Particularly, we will show that emotions play a crucial role in the epistemic practice of critical thinking and that the affective scaffolding of social media can support, or hinder, online critical thinking. The upshot of our argument is that affective scaffoldings of social media can harness emotions to support beneficial epistemic practices, like online critical thinking.