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Posts Tagged ‘QAnon’

No surprises

Posted in Blog stuff, Climate change, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 7, 2021 | Leave a Comment »

I am an academic who researches, writes, and teaches about the human relationship with the ecological environment within which we live and on which we depend. I recognize that that relationship is deeply troubled, and I want to be working on untroubling it. Politics — the shaping and implementation of policy to steer collective and […]

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‘Do your own research’: Conspiracy practice as media virus

Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 5, 2021 | Leave a Comment »

Conspiracy movements like QAnon are a kind of cultural virus that spreads rapidly and widely in the new global media environment. Like invasive species, they spread into diverse cultural ecosystems, colonizing them even as they take on new forms that mimic each environment’s original inhabitants. To understand how they do this, we need to understand […]

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A day in the life…

Posted in Academe, Media ecology, tagged , , , on December 30, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

I’m working on a lengthyish post about conspiracy theory (specifically, QAnon) and the “post-truth condition,” but in the meantime I want to post a few tidbits from something I’ve been enjoying reading related to that topic. A Reddit conversation with QAnon researcher Marc-André Argentino includes some smart observations about QAnon, but also useful insights into […]

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Truth, media trust, and the election

Posted in Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 9, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

This article is cross-posted from the media ecologies blog e2mc. While last week’s election has resulted in the announcement of a new president and vice-president, with leaders of many countries around the world recognizing those results (and with global markets rallying their apparent support), the current Trump administration has not recognized them. As with the […]

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The Qanization of the world

Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2020 | 3 Comments »

As I’ve been preparing to cover QAnon in my media course (and trying to keep up with it, since it’s really been ramping up ahead of the election), I’ve seriously begun to think of it is a work of evil genius. Let me explain why. For starters, it’s worth reminding ourselves that QAnon was designated […]

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The new media regime

Posted in Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 30, 2020 | 1 Comment »

Here’s a back-of-the-envelope hypothesis on the “new media regime” and some open questions that follow from it. Two groups are faring best these days under the current (new) media regime.* The first is surveillance capitalists, who have developed ways to monetize and harvest new data technologies directly for the accumulation of wealth. (That covers the […]

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More conspiratology: the internet as monochord & storm machine

Posted in Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2020 | 5 Comments »

At a time when the U.S. itself appears on the brink of collapse — with riots in the streets, a pandemic crippling the country’s heath care system and wreaking havoc on its economy, a president tweeting out nods of recognition to his QAnon fan base and hinting at “the Storm” that is coming — the sense-making apparatus of digital media is rife with opportunities for disinformational entrepreneurs to make headway in various directions. […]

The internet is like a huge instrument — a hyper-complex, Robert Fluddian monochord, that works by allowing for an infinity of connections through which flow the sounds and vibrations of human emotional and affective contagion. When protests erupt across the country over the senseless killing of a black man in Minneapolis, the time scale in which large-scale action occurs speeds up and become affect-driven time, not a time in which collective deliberation is really possible. This means that informational, and therefore “disinformational,” bursts into that monochord become all the more powerful.

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Covid-19 conspiracies and the media: or, Toward an epidemiology of media trust

Posted in Media ecology, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 17, 2020 | 4 Comments »

The global pandemic of Covid-19 has been accompanied by a proliferation of competing narratives of what the crisis is and means, and how it should be addressed. The UN and the World Health Organization have called this an “infodemic,” that is, an epidemic (or pandemic) of information that, in its confusing diversity, has made it […]

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