Spectacle of Online Life

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc eBooks · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

<JATS1:p>The Spectacle of Online Lifeoffers a groundbreaking exploration of the digital age's most pressing paradoxes: connection and isolation, democratization and control, authenticity and performance.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Edited by Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo, Christopher T. Conner, and Matthew N. Hannah, this volume assembles a diverse array of scholars to critically examine how online technologies shape, reflect, and amplify the complexities of modern society.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Chapters in the text draw on insights from the Frankfurt School, Situationist International, and contemporary media studies. This collection delves into topics as varied as promotional livestreaming, climate change conspiracy theories, beauty influencer culture, and the role of artificial intelligence in content moderation. As the authors show, digital platforms are a double-edged sword both empowering grassroots movements and reinforcing systemic inequalities.</JATS1:p>

Responsibility for Resistance to Epistemic Injustice

transcript Verlag eBooks · 2025-02-18

Screens and Spectacles

2025-01-01

Responsibility for Resistance to Epistemic Injustice

transcript Verlag eBooks · 2025-02-26

Pill epistemology

Journal of Information Technology & Politics · 2025-01-31 · 3 citations

Expressions of Belief in the QAnon Conspiracy Movement

Deviant Behavior · 2025-09-08

Information studies: Library development of an undergraduate curriculum for the information age

The Journal of Academic Librarianship · 2025-03-19

Virginia Woolf’s Common Readers in Paris

Modernism/Modernity Print Plus · 2024-05-28 · 1 citations

On July 27, 1927, Vita Sackville-West wrote to Virginia Woolf, describing an unexpected encounter: "Today as I was driving down Oxford Street I saw a woman on a refuge, carrying [To the] Lighthouse. She was an unknown woman – up from the country, I should think, and just been to Mudie’s or the Times, – and as the policeman held me up with his white glove I saw your name

Editorial: Paranoid publics: conspiracy theories and the public sphere

Frontiers in Communication · 2024-09-05

"Chatter amongst those in control has begun. They know we know which means the public will know." -Q Conspiracy theories have become a seemingly unavoidable aspect of both online and offline life in the 21 st century. Although most individuals now have vast resources for information access and retrieval, we are still susceptible to explain historical events through paranoid delusions about secret plotters controlling our lives. National tragedies, unexplained phenomena, and major historical events create sparks a flurry of online conspiracy theorists "simply asking questions." Conspiracy narratives bleed from the dark corners of the internet and into the mainstream via social-media platforms, family gatherings, and other interpersonal relations. Openly embracing these ideas used to be a closely guarded secret, for fear of public censure. Today these ideas are now broadcast on nightly television newscasts. Tucker Carlson, before he was terminated from Fox News, for example, routinely championed the white-supremacist "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory, which posits that elites are deliberately replacing whites with migrants. 1 Former American president Donald Trump appeared at a CNN town hall for his 2024 re-election campaign and repeated his now-familiar mantra about the 2020 elections being stolen despite promises to stop spreading such lies publicly. 2 Online and offline communities bleed into one another, and ideas espoused on social media become offline ideologies, which affect personal relationships and public discourse: we are facing a public crisis caused by bad information.Although conspiracy theories have been a prominent aspect of American public and political life since the nation's founding 3 , they have become more visible and easily transmissible through social-media platforms. 4 If the internet represents the contemporary public square, a space in which public discourse happens, the rise and spread of paranoid and delusional conspiracy theories through a fully networked society represents a challenge to the notion of a fundamentally reasonable public sphere. 5 In the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, the online public sphere underwent a fundamental transformation in which the trolling jouissance of the chans 6 -imageboards in which anonymous individuals post about any number of topics from anime to porn to conspiracy theories-gave rise to QAnon, a repackaged antisemitic conspiracy theory for the internet age.While the conspiracy theory itself is nothing new, as a social phenomenon the speed of its spread, additional layers of complexity added to it, and the power it holds over others is nothing short of fascinating-especially because of Q's eschatological predictions consistently failing to materialize.Instead, the particularities of the QAnon mythos have produced a widespread conspiracism extending far beyond the actual QAnon community into the broader public consciousness. 7 Conspiracy theories have now become a mainstream form of public discourse, such that even ostensibly non-politicized topics such as vaccine usage during a global pandemic are debatable by common citizens doing their own "research." 8 In such a flooded information zone as the internet, citizen investigations can aspire to the same authority as any other official information source.The contemporary public sphere is thus both fragmented and, at the same time, aggregate; moreover, the various shards have become equally viable as competing public spaces due to the ubiquity and scope of platforms, which have become de facto public spheres in the information society. 9 The complexity of such a networked public sphere has only increased since 2016 and produced a "multiverse" of public spheres, which exist simultaneously within various internet echo chambers and enclaves but which interface with one another through ideological and political eruptions. Furthermore, these various public spheres vie for legitimacy and authority even when they are paranoid, delusional, and conspiratorial, and there seems to be no official mechanism to expel them from public consideration as legitimate alternatives. The question thus remains whether a normative public sphere against which competing modes of publicness can be measured is even possible today.

A mindfulness-based information literacy framework for the current information environment

Journal of Information Literacy · 2024-11-29

This paper proposes a new information literacy (IL) framework, based around mindfulness, that is suited for the contemporary informational environment. This framework results from a weeklong interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars, theorising and incorporating mindfulness as a significant aspect of healthy information seeking and interpretation. Our framework builds on existing IL frameworks but encourages information consumers to recognise their emotional responses and political biases while providing reminders that information always contains political components. By doing so, this framework updates existing IL guidelines to better reflect the current era of rising polarisation and affective media consumption. We present a mindfulness framework for IL that combines mindfulness practices with critical thinking in addressing the emotional impact of mis/disinformation and conspiracy theories on the current information society.