Organized Skepticism in the Age of Misinformation: Surviving the Kingdom of Gossip

by Brett Bourbon, Renita Murimi

Overview

Drawing from philosophy, information theory, and network science, Organized Skepticism in the Age of Misinformation: Surviving the Kingdom of Gossip offers a novel conceptual framework that views information as a form of gossip.

This book challenges the idea that truthfulness is a necessary, or even a relevant condition, of information. Instead, this book develops a conceptual framework in which information is understood as gossip, which fits within a more general account of information and knowledge as constrained but contingent social practices. Using this framework, this book provides a nuanced understanding of the “grammar” of gossip that permeates both online and real‑orld environments and sheds light on the often overused and confused terms of our time: information, misinformation and knowledge.

This book offers a fundamental reconfiguration of the evolving virtual interdependence of humans and information technology. It is a key resource for students and scholars in areas relating to social media, information diffusion, human/computer interface, and computational social science.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032493473
Publisher:	CRC Press
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Brett Bourbon is Professor of English Literature at the University of Dallas. He is also a Visiting Professor in The Program of Literary Theory, University of Lisbon. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and was a professor at Stanford. He was awarded a Mellon post-doctoral fellowship and a Fulbright Award. He has published many essays and four books, including Finding a Replacement for the Soul: meaning and mind in literature and philosophy (Harvard UP, 2004), Everyday Poetics: Ethics, Love, and Logic (Bloomsbury Press, 2022), Jane Austen And the Ethics of Life (Routledge Press, 2022), and Thinking with Words: A Literary Groundwork (with Miguel Tamen) (Routledge Press, Forthcoming 2024).

Renita Murimi is an Associate Professor of Cybersecurity at the University of Dallas. She received her PhD and MS in Electrical Engineering from New Jersey Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in the areas of cybersecurity and network science. She has received the Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Exploration grant. Her research has been widely published in journals, book chapters and conference proceedings. She is also the author of an upcoming book titled Ten Modern Cryptographic Algorithms (Forthcoming, No Starch Press).

Table of Contents

◾ Introduction

Part I A Crisis of Knowledge and Everyday Epistemology

Chapter 1 — Problems with the Concept of Knowledge

Chapter 2 — Knowledge Is Necessarily Contingent and Normative

Chapter 3 — The Practices of Redescription (Paradiastole)

Part II Information and Misinformation

Chapter 4 — What Is Information?

Chapter 5 — Shannon’s Theory of Information

Chapter 6 — Data, Counting, and Writing

Chapter 7 — Is Information Subjective or Objective? Or Neither?

Chapter 8 — Is Misinformation a Kind of Information? (Or Must Information Be True?)

Chapter 9 — Truth Is Seldom the Motive : The Complexity of Human Motives

Part III Gossip and Rumor

Chapter 10 — A Critique of Current Models of Information Diffusion

Chapter 11 — Gossip and Rumor

Chapter 12 ◾ A Discursive Grammar of Traditional Gossip

Part IV Online Interfaces

Chapter 13 ◾ Online Information Diffusion as Gossip and Dreamscape

Chapter 14 ◾ The Grammar of Online Self‑Gossip

Chapter 15 ◾ The ‘Information Ecosystem’ and Gossiping AIs

Part V Conclusion

Chapter 16 ◾ The Dynamo and the Internet