Overview
We argue that centralized platforms are a main source of epistemic pollution online, and propose Open Source Attention—a socio-technical framework for freeing human attention from platform control through a decentralized ecosystem for creating, storing, and querying stigmergic markers: the digital traces of human attention. We frame social annotation as a collective sensemaking tool that can restore epistemic health to online environments.
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Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- The authors argue that centralized platforms are a main source of epistemic pollution and that healthier environments require redesigning how attention is collectively governed.
- They propose Open Source Attention, a framework for a decentralized ecosystem for creating, storing and querying stigmergic markers as digital traces of attention.
- OSA aims to 'free' stigmergic markers starting from basic hypertext primitives: likes, bi-directional links, span highlighting, tags/bookmarks, and textual annotation.
- The authors suggest existing personal knowledge management tools could be bootstrapped toward collective knowledge management via interoperable protocols and storage for stigmergic primitives.
Methods
- Stigmergic-cognition lens: sematectonic stigmergy vs stigmergic markers — Frames online sensemaking using the distinction between content-altering sematectonic stigmergy and signalling stigmergic markers such as likes, annotations and links.
- Three-element architecture for a maker-centered ecology — Specifies the proposed ecosystem as annotation tools, self-sovereign storage, and content discovery services, contrasted with a platform-centric loop (Fig. 1).
- Comparison with the Solid ecosystem and dokieli annotation client — Positions the proposal against Solid and dokieli as the closest existing decentralization efforts and notes their limitations.
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