Different levels of cognition in Social Networks

Cognition, is the first level of cognition. In this level, individuals memorize, read, write and perceive new information. I think what we did in primary school is mostly on this level, we memorize, read and write what teachers taught. Metacognition, aka. “cognition about cognition” is the second level. It includes knowledge about when and how to use particular strategies for learning or for problem solving. In middle school, we have to learn many different courses and also take lots of exams. We have to think about how to study, what is the most efficient way to learn things and this is metacognition. Epistemic cognition is the highest level of cognition, in this level we do not only learn but also create. There are five key components of epistemic cognition: epistemic aims; structure of knowledge; certainty, sources and justification of knowledge; epistemic virtue and responsibility; reliably and processes. I think this level of cognition cannot be described as we learn, it’s actually research.

All of three levels of cognitions appear in today’s social networks although the features of the social networks may not be designed to facilitate cognitions. In fact, it is rather difficult to design  features to support the higher level of cognition. Let’s take Twitter or Weibo as an example, there are lots of information on the user’s timeline, different kinds of information shared by the people we follow, the contents can consist of text, links, pictures, audio and even video. Reading others statuses is just the first level of cognition. To help users organized the statuses, lots of different features are provided: we can use #tag in a tweet, we can @reply others, we can also search tweets and so on. These different features actually help us to get information more efficiently and this is the metacognition. However, the third level of cognition -- epistemic cognition has quite high requirements, I think today’s technology can just provide limited support for this. Let’s take Quora or its Chinese clone Zhihu 知乎 as an example. Quora is an online Q&A community, people ask and answers questions on it. Unlike other online services, Quora started with an invitation only membership policy. They limit the number of users and try to maintain high quality of both the questions and answers. Usually a question is answered by people who have related background and experience with the question, the best answer is voted by other users. The answers may be even edited multiple times according to others’ comments. I think this is kind of epistemic cognition. All the features: voting, commenting, etc provided by Quora facilitate the progress of epistemic cognition.

Although there are already lots of features to facilitate progress of cognition on the social networks. I think the effect it still quite limited because none these can happen automatically. All the features provided by a social network are just tools, they are useless if people do not use them. For example, the #tag feature of Weibo can better organize the users’ statuses, however if you never use #tags, then you cannot benefit from it. Quora encourages users to discuss with others and vote the best answer, but no epistemic cognition can happen if the users are not willing to share there options and vote. I think an ideal social network should have some features that can actively help people to do higher level cognition. It’s metacognition if a user try to find a way to group his/her friends so that he/she can get information from his/her friends much more efficiently. But it will be much better if the grouping is automatically done by the system according to the user behavior observed. I think this can be a challenging problem and requires lots of work on data mining and artificial intelligence.