You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape

Length: 280 pages
Edition: 1
Language: English
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 2021-03-02
ISBN-10: 0262539918
ISBN-13: 9780262539913
Sales Rank: #474865 (See Top 100 Books)

How to understand a media environment in crisis, and how to make things better by approaching information ecologically.

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.

Contents
Preface
Introduction: Mapping Network Pollution
Polluted Information and You
On Thinking Ecologically
The Cartography to Come
Standpoint, Audience, and an Invitation
1 The Devil’s in the Deep Frames
Deep Memetic Frames
Network Climate Change
The Rising Tide of Pollution
2 The Root of All Memes
Internet Culture, or How We Fed the Fetishistic Gnarl
The Unbearable Whiteness of Internet Culture
A Hazardous Everything
3 Tilling Bigoted Lands, Sowing Bigoted Seeds
The Truth about the Alt--Right, or Looking beyond the Usual Subjects
The News Filter
As the Dust Bowl Forms
Trolling’s Rotten Fruit
Embodying Fetishized Sight
4 The Gathering Storm
Conspiratorial Frames
You Can’t Spell Great Awakening without the Letter Q
Network Climate Change and Everything After
On Future Storm Chasing
5 Cultivating Ecological Literacy
Ecological Literacy
Informational Bootstraps
The Limits of Liberalistic Literacy
From Facts to Ecology
An Ethics of Reciprocity
6 Choose Your Own Ethics Adventure
One: Pull Out the Network Ecology Map
Two: Take What You Don’t Know as Seriously as What You Do
Three: Remember That Affordances Have Consequences
Four: Adjust Your Understanding of Harm
Five: Spread Information Strategically
Six: Know Thy Politically Situated Selves
You Are Here
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index