Interpersonal recognition and the dynamics of opinion formation: Analysis of the impacts of ICT on personal identity from the second person perspective

Abstract

The main objective of this project is to analyze possible ethical implications of information and communication technologies (ICT) and Big Data analytics in second-person interactions, focusing on the identity role of interactions involving the dynamics of opinion formation. More specifically, this is a study, from a second-person perspective, of the influence of these technologies on the dynamics of constitution / updating and abandonment of opinions, which maintain interdependent relationships among themselves and play a significant role in the formation / updating of the personal identity. The second-person thesis deals with how people recognize each other on a daily basis as people by countless expressive aspects that are immediately significant, especially emotional (Gomila, 2001; Liñán & Pérez-Jiménez, 2017). According to Gomila (2008) and Gomila & Pérez (2018), second person processes would be at the base of cognitive and moral life, since they would be ontogenetically primitive and the condition of possibility for the acquisition, in the case of human beings, of a natural language. Thus, modifying such processes, for example, changing the means by which we interact, could imply a structural reconfiguration of how people are treated in an intuitive / spontaneous way. Thus, we will seek to investigate the possible impact on the personal identity of processes of adherence to opinions in second-person interactions mediated by ICT, to the extent that such interactions also involve basic emotional aspects. In particular, we will investigate whether the second-person perspective can help to understand new ethical implications of these technologies in the dynamics of the formation and abandonment of opinions, since this perspective considers immediately significant expressive aspects of interpersonal relationships to which other perspectives have not attributed relevance. In short, we aim to investigate (1) the contributions from the second-person perspective to understand ethical implications of social interactions mediated by ICT and (2) the dynamics of second-person interactions involving processes of opinion formation in users of virtual networks, given its possible impact on personal identity.