{"id":9151,"date":"2017-04-03T12:13:52","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T17:13:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=9151"},"modified":"2017-04-03T12:17:59","modified_gmt":"2017-04-03T17:17:59","slug":"parsing-the-alternative-media-ecosystem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/04\/03\/parsing-the-alternative-media-ecosystem\/","title":{"rendered":"Parsing the “alternative media ecosystem”"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all know the media ecosystem has been changing rapidly, with media scholars scrambling to understand how and where things are headed.\u00a0“Fake news<\/a>” and “post-truth<\/a>” are the glib catchwords of the day; “filter bubbles,” “echo chambers<\/a>,” “ideological segregation,” “information cascades,” “algorithmic filtering” (along with the all-encompassing “Algoricene<\/a>“), and “meme magic<\/a>” are\u00a0among the more, or less, helpful technical terms being proposed. Exactly when the post-truth era began\u00a0is\u00a0harder to pinpoint<\/a>\u00a0— as is the point at which\u00a0“fake news” becomes (real) “information war<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

An interesting\u00a0forthcoming article<\/a> by University of Washington researcher Kate Starbird examines\u00a0the “alternative media ecosystem” by focusing on\u00a0the production of the\u00a0kinds of narratives that are fairly exclusive to the “alternative,” as opposed to mainstream, “media ecosystem.” Specifically, the piece analyzes conspiratorial narratives, found\u00a0on Twitter and connected web sites, that follow terrorist incidents (including the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings and the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17) and several mass\u00a0shooting events.<\/p>\n

“For each event,” Starbird writes, “rumors claimed the event had been perpetrated by someone other than the official suspects\u2014that it was instead either a staged event performed by \u201ccrisis actors\u201d or a \u201cfalse flag\u201d orchestrated by someone else.” (For more, see the\u00a0Seattle Times<\/a>\u00a0and Starbird’s own<\/a> summaries of the research.)<\/p>\n

From Starbird’s scholarly\u00a0article:<\/p>\n

“After several rounds of iterative analysis to identify commonalities and distinctions across clusters of accounts, we identified three prominent political agendas: U.S. Alt Right, U.S. Alt-Left, and International Anti-Globalist.”<\/p>\n

The Alt-Left was a minority persuasion overlapping with the others, but less integrated with the others. In this, the article supports\u00a0other recent research suggesting\u00a0that it’s the Alt-Right mediasphere that is least<\/em>\u00a0well connected with mainstream media — that is, that far-right media are most unhinged<\/em>\u00a0from what’s considered reality by the rest of the world. (On that, see\u00a0here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>, and\u00a0here<\/a>.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But the “Anti-Globalist” piece in this article is interesting and somewhat novel. It also raises new questions, since the term itself could be better parsed than it is in the article.<\/span><\/p>\n

“[A]lmost all [of the Twitter domains analyzed] focused on anti-globalist themes, highly critical of the U.S. and other Western governments and their role around the world. Additionally, content supporting Russian government interests was present across a majority of these domains.” <\/span><\/p>\n

Anti-globalism comes in many shapes and sizes, and too often the term obscures the differences between critiques of neoliberal economic globalism — which presume a globalism (or “alter-globalism”) as the solution to another globalism (neoliberalism) — and critiques of westernization,\u00a0modernization, American hegemony (or imperialism), liberalism, and so on. <\/span><\/p>\n

Starbird’s\u00a0conclusion discusses a “crippled epistemology” that “may be exacerbated by the false perception of having a seemingly diverse information diet that is instead drawn from a limited number of sources.” In other words, the conspiracy theories emerge from a limited number of original sources, but the social media networks amplify and multiply them to make them appear more credible.<\/span><\/p>\n

A good place to start talking about these things with students\u00a0is Katherine Schulten and Amanda Christy Brown’s New York Times “lesson plan<\/a>.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We all know the media ecosystem has been changing rapidly, with media scholars scrambling to understand how and where things are headed.\u00a0“Fake news” and “post-truth” are the glib catchwords of the day; “filter bubbles,” “echo chambers,” “ideological segregation,” “information cascades,” “algorithmic filtering” (along with the all-encompassing “Algoricene“), and “meme magic” are\u00a0among the more, or less, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[689701],"tags":[454983,454982,454986,4478,454981,454985,454984,650],"class_list":["post-9151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media_ecology","tag-fake-news","tag-filter-bubbles","tag-kate-starbird","tag-media-ecology","tag-media-politics","tag-mediasphere","tag-post-truth","tag-social-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2nB","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11589,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/02\/19\/in-defense-of-ecological-metaphor\/","url_meta":{"origin":9151,"position":0},"title":"In defense of ecological metaphor","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 19, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"In my writing about media, I've been using the words \"ecology\" and \"ecosystem\" fairly liberally. In a new piece called \"The Limitations of the 'New Ecosystem' Metaphor,\" The Columbia Journalism Review's Lauren Harris argues that this metaphor is misguided. She interviews media scholar Anthony Nadler, who has claims that the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/02\/Mycorrhizae_1.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":11568,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/01\/31\/the-information-coup\/","url_meta":{"origin":9151,"position":1},"title":"The information coup","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 31, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Shoshana Zuboff's analysis of \"The Coup We Are Not Talking About,\" published in today's Sunday New York Times, is an essential follow-up to her book Surveillance Capitalism, applying that book's analysis to the situation we are living through. This other coup is the \"epistemic coup\" which, she writes, \"proceeds in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media ecology"","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/29ZuboffOpen-superJumbo.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/29ZuboffOpen-superJumbo.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/29ZuboffOpen-superJumbo.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/29ZuboffOpen-superJumbo.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/29ZuboffOpen-superJumbo.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":11253,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2021\/01\/05\/do-your-own-research-conspiracy-practice-as-media-virus\/","url_meta":{"origin":9151,"position":2},"title":"‘Do your own research’: Conspiracy practice as media virus","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 5, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2019s original inhabitants. To understand how they do\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cultural politics"","block_context":{"text":"Cultural politics","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cultural_politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/the-kraken-legend-or-beast.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/the-kraken-legend-or-beast.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/the-kraken-legend-or-beast.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/the-kraken-legend-or-beast.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/01\/the-kraken-legend-or-beast.jpg?resize=1050%2C600&ssl=1 3x"},"classes":[]},{"id":11165,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/10\/26\/an-average-pandemic-era-pre-election-sunday\/","url_meta":{"origin":9151,"position":3},"title":"An average (pandemic-era, pre-election) Sunday","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 26, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"I've begun posting updates on media coverage related to the U.S. presidential election (and related issues, such as social media disinformation) on my blog e2mc, which I've restarted to accompany my course \"Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics.\" Here is the latest post, which summarizes some key stories from yesterday's Sunday\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media ecology"","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/e2mc\/files\/2020\/10\/1603632404_the_new_york_times_-_oct_25_2020_downmagaz_com-edited.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":9089,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/07\/02\/media-hygiene-101\/","url_meta":{"origin":9151,"position":4},"title":"Media hygiene 101","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 2, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"My book Ecologies of the Moving Image provides some suggestions into how we can become better consumers and co-producers of media. But these suggestions come\u00a0couched within a 400-page treatise of media (and environmental) philosophy that includes a history of cinema, analyses of various films, and much else. While the focus\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media ecology"","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2017\/07\/10577223-Practice-Safe-Text-Green-Road-Sign-with-Dramatic-Sky-Clouds-and-Sun-Stock-Photo-275x183.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4719,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2011\/06\/18\/on-noospheres-and-noesis\/","url_meta":{"origin":9151,"position":5},"title":"On noospheres and noesis","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 18, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Tim Morton makes the useful point that E\/Z's notion of the \"noosphere\" can only be functional if it discriminates between some kinds of thing such as cognizing with neurons versus other kinds of thing such as cognizing with plant hormones, or resting on a table, or spanning a river. 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