Technosocial disruption, enactivism, & social media: On the overlooked risks of teenage cancel culture

Abstract

In a world undergoing rapid, large-scale technological change, the phenomenon of technosocial disruption is receiving increasing scholarly and societal attention. While the phenomenon is most actively delineated in philosophy of technology, it is also receiving growing attention within a different area of philosophy, namely the so-called “4E Cognition” approach to philosophy of mind. Despite this shared interest in technosocial disruption, there is relatively little exchange between the theorizing going on in these two different areas of philosophy. One of our paper's two main aims is programmatic: to motivate the fruitfulness of such an exchange. We do this by turning to a specific case of technosocial disruption, namely Teenage Cancel Culture [TCC]. TCC cannot be disentangled from the introduction of social media platforms [SMPs] into modern day social life. Hence, we will speak of SMP-Afforded TCC. SPM-afforded TCC is a phenomenon fretted over by societal actors but strikingly ignored in academic research. In our effort to narrow this knowledge gap, we analyze SMP-afforded TCC from a perspective of technosocial disruption enriched by insights from 4E-Cognition. This brings out a specific worry about the role of SMPs in the social lives of teenagers. We argue that SMP-afforded TCC disrupts the social relational domains within which teenagers develop, maintain, and express their precarious social identities, by creating social affordances that are hostile to healthy risky interpersonal identity-exploration. As such, SMP-afforded TCC not only cancels particular individuals for particular acts; it may also pre-emptively cancel a certain way of being a social self, namely a healthy social risk-taker. We conclude the paper by proposing several potential routes for mitigating the perniciously disruptive effects of SMP-afforded TCC and identifying future areas for research.