Abstract

In order to explain how ignorance is diffused in online communities, which are sophisticated cognitive niches, in this chapter I aim at discussing their cognitive and epistemic features and at presenting them as virtual cognitive niches. Specifically, I will describe virtual cognitive niches as digitally-encoded collaborative distributions of diverse types of information into an environment, performed by human agents, to aid thinking and reasoning about two target domains, both in the real-world and in the virtual reality. Moreover, I will argue that they enable the users of online communities to build “imagined communities” (Anderson 1987) and to distribute particular sets of affordances—specifically what Nagy and Neff (2015) call “imagined affordances”, which are the combination of users’ perceptions, attitudes and expectations over the functionality of a particular technology.