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

by Whitney Phillips, Ryan M. Milner

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262539913
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	03/02/2021
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	1,019,581
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Whitney Phillips is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University and the author of This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press). Ryan M. Milner is Associate Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston and author of The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media (MIT Press).

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Introduction: Mapping Network Pollution 1

1 The Devil's in the Deep Frames 17

2 The Root of All Memes 49

3 Tilling Bigoted Lands, Sowing Bigoted Seeds 81

4 The Gathering Storm 115

5 Cultivating Ecological Literacy 149

6 Choose Your Own Ethics Adventure 181

Acknowledgments 203

Notes 205

Bibliography 237

Index 259

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Our country is under attack by our foreign adversaries and their domestic partners, and we need to better understand what’s going on. You Are Here helps us do that and helps us understand how we can all stand together and fight back.”
—Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist and Craig Newmark Philanthropies

“Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner have a knack for taking a topic you think you understand and then rearranging your entire worldview, leaving you gobsmacked and wanting more. This mind-bending book connects the past to the present and the digital to the environmental to reveal the roots of today’s disinformation panic.”
—danah boyd, author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

 “This excellent book gives us timely and much-needed guidance for thinking about the overall information ecology that we are immersed in—including pathways to a better future.”
—Jessica Beyer, University of Washington; author of Expect Us: Online Communities and Political Mobilization

Editorial Reviews

You Are Here... is an invaluable guide to our problems around news, truth and fact.” — New Scientist

From the Publisher