Engagement as a Value-Based Foundation for Transforming the Boundaries of Digital Communities

Abstract

The boundaries of digital communities are systematically permeable; however, the question of why this per-meability favors conflictual rather than neutral context crossings remains open. Studies on the value-laden na-ture of technical systems and the axiology of metrics demonstrate that artifacts embody values and that a met-ric can displace the very goal it was meant to measure – but these studies do not explore how this happens at the level of specific social structures. The article aims to fill this gap by examining engagement as an axiologi-cal foundation of digital space. Methodologically, the study is structured as a socio-philosophical reconstruction of the relationship between content selection criteria and forms of social connection. The article shows that en-gagement serves as the connecting link – a metric functioning within platform architectures as an operational substitute for “the good”. The structural instability of digital communities thus receives an axiological explana-tion: it stems from the implicit value embedded in the objective function of platform algorithms, rather than from the impersonal technical properties of the environment.