E-democracy as the frame of networked public discourse : information, consensus and complexity

The quest for democracy and the political reflection about its future are to be understood nowadays in the horizon of the networked information revolution. Hence, it seems difficult to speak of democracy without speaking of e-democracy, the key issue of which is the re-configuration of models of information production and concentration of attention, which are to be investigated both from a political and an epistemological standpoint. In this perspective, our paper aims at analyzing the multi-agent dimension of networked public discourse, by envisaging two competing models of structuring this discourse (those of dialogue and of claim) and by suggesting to endorse the epistemic idea of complementarity as a guidance principle for elaborating a form of partnership between traditional and electronic media

The Online Construction of Personal Identity through Trust and Privacy

Constructing a personal identity is an activity much more complex than elaborating a series of online profiles, which are only digital hints of the Self. The construction of our personal identity is a context-mediated activity. Our hypothesis is that young people are enabled, as digital natives and social network users, to co-construct the “context of communication” in which their narrative identities will be interpreted and understood. In particular, the aim of this paper is to show that such “context of communication”, which can be seen as the hermeneutical counterpart of the “networked publics” elaborated by Danah Boyd, emerges out of the tension between trust and privacy. In other terms, it is, on the one hand, the outcome of a web of trustful relations and, on the other, the framework in which the informational norms regulating teens’ expectations of privacy protection are set and evaluated. However, these expectations can be frustrated, since the information produced in such contexts can be disembedded and re-contextualized across time. The general and widespread use of information technology is, in fact, challenging our traditional way of thinking about the world and our identities in terms of stable and durable structures; they are reconstituted, instead, into novel forms

The Good, the Bad, and the Invisible with Its Opportunity Costs: Introduction to the ‘J’ Special Issue on “the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Law”

Scholars and institutions have been increasingly debating the moral and legal challenges of AI, together with the models of governance that should strike the balance between the opportunities and threats brought forth by AI, its ‘good’ and ‘bad’ facets. There are more than a hundred declarations on the ethics of AI and recent proposals for AI regulation, such as the European Commission’s AI Act, have further multiplied the debate. Still, a normative challenge of AI is mostly overlooked, and regards the underuse, rather than the misuse or overuse, of AI from a legal viewpoint. From health care to environmental protection, from agriculture to transportation, there are many instances of how the whole set of benefits and promises of AI can be missed or exploited far below its full potential, and for the wrong reasons: business disincentives and greed among data keepers, bureaucracy and professional reluctance, or public distrust in the era of no-vax conspiracies theories. The opportunity costs that follow this technological underuse is almost terra incognita due to the ‘invisibility’ of the phenomenon, which includes the ‘shadow prices’ of economy. This introduction provides metrics for such assessment and relates this work to the development of new standards for the field. We must quantify how much it costs not to use AI systems for the wrong reasons