“You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape”
by Phillips and Milner
Synopsis by publisher-
Our media environment is in crisis. Polarization is rampant. Polluted information floods social media. Even our best efforts to help clean up can backfire, sending toxins roaring across the landscape. In You Are Here, Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner offer strategies for navigating increasingly treacherous information flows. Using ecological metaphors, they emphasize how our individual me is entwined within a much larger we, and how everyone fits within an ever-shifting network map.
From the SageJournal book review…
“Herein, Phillips and Milner utilize the metaphor of ecology to explore how polluted information is produced and spread throughout the media landscape and to promote a new form of media literacy, ecology literacy, as a frame through which their readers can be conscious of how to begin reducing the pollution around them.
Framing mis-and disinformation as pollution is successful on numerous fronts. First it successfully depicts the way that harmful information seeps through the media landscape, builds up, and creates larger issues. In particular, Chapter 2 describes the spread of white supremacist ideology by comparing Internet culture to the interconnected root system of the Redwood forest. Since these roots are mutually intertwined, any pollution which affects one tree will inevitably spread. Along a similar vein, Chapter 4 goes on to explain how once pollution has permeated the landscape, it can lead to the formation of storms, which devastate the surrounding area, spreading pollution even further. The comparison of conspiracy theories to hurricanes not only underlines their devastating impact, but allows Phillips and Milner to outline how these conspiracies interact with one another as coexisting conspiracies, which may merge together or affect each other’s trajectories, increasing their destructive power, as exemplified by the multi-layered QAnon conspiracy…”
