Semantic capital

its nature, value, and curation

Luciano Floridi

pp. 481-497

in: Marcello D'agostino, Massimo Durante (eds), The governance of algorithms, Philosophy & Technology 31 (4), 2018.

Abstract

Allow me to be trivial and vague to begin with. There is a wealth of resources—including ideas, insights, discoveries, inventions, traditions, cultures, languages, arts, religions, sciences, narratives, stories, poems, customs and norms, music and songs, games and personal experiences, and advertisements—that we produce, curate, consume, transmit, and inherit as humans. We use this wealth—which I shall define more precisely as semantic capital in the next section—in order to give meaning to, and make sense of, our own existence and the world surrounding us, to define who we are, and to develop an individual and social life. Given its crucial importance, one would expect the concept of semantic capital and its related phenomena to be well-known and extensively theorised. Much to my surprise, this is not the case. In this section, I shall offer an explanation of why there is such a gap. I will return to the definition of what semantic capital is in the next.