Università Roma Tre

The network as a tool for knowledge creation: Data, control and freedom.
The course aims at analysing the most common devices for sharing information in order to focus on risks and opportunities.
The communication technologies revolution faces a big transformation: the original open spaces are about to be substituted by private walled gardens, in which the user is welcomed as well as restrained.

The data mining activity – well-knows as big data technology – extraction of valuable pieces of information among those directly or indirectly offered by the users, represents one of the central elements of the network organization both in economical and social terms. These strategies pose not only privacy problems (as it is easily shown) but also problems relative to the knowledge model that seems to impose on humanities as well as social sciences. Such a model can be adopted, by using an epistemological approach that could foresee as well as a monitor human habits and behaviours.

We speak about platform capitalism and algorithmic governamentality. They attribute to the algorithms not only the commercial choices but also the social and political decisions that are relevant for pacific, civic citizenship practices. The opacity of the algorithms risks to undermine the democratic possibilities even in western democracies.


The course is based on a critical approach on the relationships between freedom and control within the digital communication devices. It tackles the question from the point of view of the interaction between freedom opportunities and control mechanisms, which stands at the core of practices and techniques of digital apparatuses, with special regards to their social, political, epistemological dimensions.
This course can be considered inside the area of critical enquiry on the philosophy of technology.

Big data and algorithms create correlations, regurlar patterns and quantifications in order to propose interpretations of phenomena according to mathematical mechanisms of automation. however, it is an illusion to think that an automatic understanding of habits and events could be objective and neutral. Artificial Intelligence technologies wish to define what happened and to predict the future, but they are created by human beings and they keep all human characteristics.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence in both Automated decision Maching and generative artificial intelligence confront us with new challenges that society must face if it is to survive and continue to be recognizable.
This course aims to identify strategic issues in these areas and works in increasing information literacy and cultural critique tools to understant the intelligence model proposed by the field of Artificial Intelligence.
The course aims at offering the basic elements of information and media literacy in this area of research, in order to allow students to undertand what is at stake in the massive use of digital platforms and in their use for data interpretation within the area of artificial intelligence.

Numerico T. (2021) Big Data e algoritmi, Carocci, Roma.
Crawford K (2021) ATlas of AI. Power, Politics and the planetary cost of artificial intelligence, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.