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You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape
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.
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.
279 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 2, 2021
21 people are currently reading
446 people want to read
About the author
Whitney Phillips
16 books40 followersWhitney Phillips is Assistant Professor in Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. She teaches classes in media literacy and online ethics; online discourse and controversy; folklore and digital culture; and lore surrounding monster narratives, urban legends, hoaxes, and crime. Phillips holds a Ph.D. in English with a folklore-structured emphasis (digital culture focus) from the University of Oregon (2012); an M.F.A. in creative writing (fiction) from Emerson College (2007); and a B.A. in philosophy from Humboldt State University (2004).
Prior to joining Syracuse University, Phillips was a lecturer in media, culture, and communication at New York University (2012-2013), a lecturer in communication at Humboldt State University (2014-2015), and assistant professor of literary studies and writing at Mercer University (2015-2018).
Phillips’ research explores antagonism and identity-based harassment online; the relationship between vernacular expression, state and corporate influences, and emerging technologies; political memes and other forms of ambivalent civic participation; and digital ethics, including journalistic ethics and the ethics of everyday social media use.
She is the author of the three-part ethnographic report The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online (Data & Society Media Manipulation Initiative, 2018). She has written numerous articles and book chapters on a range of media, folklore, and digital culture topics, most recently “fake news” narratives, technological play with the afterlife, and the role social and memetic media played during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Additionally, she has published dozens of popular press pieces on digital culture and ethics in outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things won the Association of Internet Researchers 2015 Nancy Baym best book award. She is regularly featured as an expert commentator in national and global news outlets, and her work on the ethics of journalistic amplification has been profiled by the Columbia Journalism Review, Niemen Journalism Lab, and Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy. She is a member of the Association of Internet Researchers and the American Folklore Society.
Prior to joining Syracuse University, Phillips was a lecturer in media, culture, and communication at New York University (2012-2013), a lecturer in communication at Humboldt State University (2014-2015), and assistant professor of literary studies and writing at Mercer University (2015-2018).
Phillips’ research explores antagonism and identity-based harassment online; the relationship between vernacular expression, state and corporate influences, and emerging technologies; political memes and other forms of ambivalent civic participation; and digital ethics, including journalistic ethics and the ethics of everyday social media use.
She is the author of the three-part ethnographic report The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online (Data & Society Media Manipulation Initiative, 2018). She has written numerous articles and book chapters on a range of media, folklore, and digital culture topics, most recently “fake news” narratives, technological play with the afterlife, and the role social and memetic media played during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Additionally, she has published dozens of popular press pieces on digital culture and ethics in outlets like The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Slate.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things won the Association of Internet Researchers 2015 Nancy Baym best book award. She is regularly featured as an expert commentator in national and global news outlets, and her work on the ethics of journalistic amplification has been profiled by the Columbia Journalism Review, Niemen Journalism Lab, and Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy. She is a member of the Association of Internet Researchers and the American Folklore Society.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 24, 2021
I'm rather surprised about having to give this review. My experience of Phillips' and Milner's previous works have been remarkably positive, but this I have to say is the opposite.
As a book that calls itself a "field guide" this book brushes remarkably close to the same cognitive and rhetorical flaws the public make. This requires some justification, so let me explain.
As justification, this book points to some specific narratives and linguistic cognition theory that are well documented and academically valuable for discussing political and religious ideology: namely the Satanic Panics and Framing Theory. I am aware that social network empirical evidence supports the idea that conservatives are more hierarchically structured while progressives are less so. While I've also read George Lakoff's framing theory (which is briefly mentioned by the authors in passing) and several of the others mentioned (also in passing). But, this work doesn't do enough explaining for a practical "field guide" that it pitches itself to pedagogically be. In fact, its rhetoric seems to dramatize the theory in ways that take liberties.
The book's first mistake is in not motivating the differentiation in treating bad actors manipulating conservatives and bad actors literally being the entire organization of conservatives sharing misinformation. Instead, it creates a narrative drama of Framing Theory instead of using it directly. Frankly, I think Lakoff opens himself up for this kind of interpretation in _Moral Politics_ so it doesn't surprise me that the authors have done so. But it's the ends of this kind of translation that I find questionable. Because of this particular interpretation of Framing Theory, the narrative opens a question about whether bad actors are acting TOGETHER. After all, they're a network with goals, information production, and measurable success. Because Phillips and Milner don't adequately differentiate the difference between conservatives as a cognitive frame and actual organizational theory, this book fails drastically in its goal.
Because it fails to justify the distinction between a conspiratorial organization and the networked crowd of conservative action, the entire book reads as precisely the conspiracy theory it claims to be suggesting doesn't exist. In fact, if the authors had taken these religiously motivated conspiracy theorists seriously, I am willing to bet they would have found that their position on their conspiracies is a straw person argument. Certainly, many believers of these theories literally believe there is an organization of bad actors, but most of the reason these ideas take hold is because it ISN'T an organization, but rather an information flow. Satan, recall, is not exactly an "agent" religiously (as much as "he" is made an idol or described as an embodied son of God). Rather Satan is the existance of temptation that is ever present: Satan acts as disinformation to steer us from God. Satan is a flow of power, the flow of anti-Abrahamic information.
Phillips and Milner's "Deep Memetic Frame" is their idea of a Satan for navigation of academically verifiable Truth. Their own metaphor for how Christian culture is misdirected, is precisely the Christian conspiracy redrawn for their own purposes. This book reads as authoritarian leftists looking at the authoritarian right, and saying "NO u!" It doesn't resolve anything. It digs in deeper.
Phillips and Milner argue that there is no conspiracy of leftists/Democrats/D&D/Satanic Panic that shapes the "deep memetic frames." It goes about generalizing this idea that conservatives are, in fact, a religious movement of people who are organizing to the tune of these linguistic triggers, and this is how bad actors generate an organization of conservatives who will deny all sorts of good information: for fear of a conspiracy of Satan.
This is all fine and good in of itself, but it's not a new idea. Religion studies have LONG known this, and have even applied this line of thinking to the internet. Perhaps the exact metaphor offered by the authors hasn't been used before, but these ideas are well documented in academia. But this isn't a book for academia necessarily. This is a field guide for living in a polluted public online. It is teaching information consumption practice. This is where this book is supposedly novel.
That is to say, this book has a pedagogical goal to the public: 'Here's how to navigate and consume information networks without falling prey to bad actors.' Because of this, the book opts for a less academically theoretical style. However, it fails to properly motivate and distinguish the theories it leans on to the point that the dominant reading surely is exactly the opposite of its intention. And what's worse, it can be read to support the suspicions of conspiracy theorists of the left and right.
Because this is a "field guide" for information consumption and network navigation, it should be pedagogically very opposed to supposing a conspiracy of mind-controlling triggers of conservative movements. This is precisely the structure of the nonsense that conservatives are saying about Democrats and the left. Using the Satanic Panics and similar metaphorical arguments for how the minds of religious fundamentalists and conservatives have been trained to think (while there is literature to suggest something not quite so dramatic) this work leans very heavily into exactly the same cognitive structure as the Satanic Panics.
This is malicious pedagogy for a field guide that suggests escape from exactly this way of thinking! This book suggests a conspiracy of mind-controlled conservatives to argue that such conspiracy theories are ridiculous. This book only draws an even more sturdy boundary between the left and right and gives fodder to both sides that their worst fears are true: a structured religiously motivated conspiracy of the political other.
This book is exactly the book the conspiracy theorists wanted, and exactly the book we didn't need.
As a book that calls itself a "field guide" this book brushes remarkably close to the same cognitive and rhetorical flaws the public make. This requires some justification, so let me explain.
As justification, this book points to some specific narratives and linguistic cognition theory that are well documented and academically valuable for discussing political and religious ideology: namely the Satanic Panics and Framing Theory. I am aware that social network empirical evidence supports the idea that conservatives are more hierarchically structured while progressives are less so. While I've also read George Lakoff's framing theory (which is briefly mentioned by the authors in passing) and several of the others mentioned (also in passing). But, this work doesn't do enough explaining for a practical "field guide" that it pitches itself to pedagogically be. In fact, its rhetoric seems to dramatize the theory in ways that take liberties.
The book's first mistake is in not motivating the differentiation in treating bad actors manipulating conservatives and bad actors literally being the entire organization of conservatives sharing misinformation. Instead, it creates a narrative drama of Framing Theory instead of using it directly. Frankly, I think Lakoff opens himself up for this kind of interpretation in _Moral Politics_ so it doesn't surprise me that the authors have done so. But it's the ends of this kind of translation that I find questionable. Because of this particular interpretation of Framing Theory, the narrative opens a question about whether bad actors are acting TOGETHER. After all, they're a network with goals, information production, and measurable success. Because Phillips and Milner don't adequately differentiate the difference between conservatives as a cognitive frame and actual organizational theory, this book fails drastically in its goal.
Because it fails to justify the distinction between a conspiratorial organization and the networked crowd of conservative action, the entire book reads as precisely the conspiracy theory it claims to be suggesting doesn't exist. In fact, if the authors had taken these religiously motivated conspiracy theorists seriously, I am willing to bet they would have found that their position on their conspiracies is a straw person argument. Certainly, many believers of these theories literally believe there is an organization of bad actors, but most of the reason these ideas take hold is because it ISN'T an organization, but rather an information flow. Satan, recall, is not exactly an "agent" religiously (as much as "he" is made an idol or described as an embodied son of God). Rather Satan is the existance of temptation that is ever present: Satan acts as disinformation to steer us from God. Satan is a flow of power, the flow of anti-Abrahamic information.
Phillips and Milner's "Deep Memetic Frame" is their idea of a Satan for navigation of academically verifiable Truth. Their own metaphor for how Christian culture is misdirected, is precisely the Christian conspiracy redrawn for their own purposes. This book reads as authoritarian leftists looking at the authoritarian right, and saying "NO u!" It doesn't resolve anything. It digs in deeper.
Phillips and Milner argue that there is no conspiracy of leftists/Democrats/D&D/Satanic Panic that shapes the "deep memetic frames." It goes about generalizing this idea that conservatives are, in fact, a religious movement of people who are organizing to the tune of these linguistic triggers, and this is how bad actors generate an organization of conservatives who will deny all sorts of good information: for fear of a conspiracy of Satan.
This is all fine and good in of itself, but it's not a new idea. Religion studies have LONG known this, and have even applied this line of thinking to the internet. Perhaps the exact metaphor offered by the authors hasn't been used before, but these ideas are well documented in academia. But this isn't a book for academia necessarily. This is a field guide for living in a polluted public online. It is teaching information consumption practice. This is where this book is supposedly novel.
That is to say, this book has a pedagogical goal to the public: 'Here's how to navigate and consume information networks without falling prey to bad actors.' Because of this, the book opts for a less academically theoretical style. However, it fails to properly motivate and distinguish the theories it leans on to the point that the dominant reading surely is exactly the opposite of its intention. And what's worse, it can be read to support the suspicions of conspiracy theorists of the left and right.
Because this is a "field guide" for information consumption and network navigation, it should be pedagogically very opposed to supposing a conspiracy of mind-controlling triggers of conservative movements. This is precisely the structure of the nonsense that conservatives are saying about Democrats and the left. Using the Satanic Panics and similar metaphorical arguments for how the minds of religious fundamentalists and conservatives have been trained to think (while there is literature to suggest something not quite so dramatic) this work leans very heavily into exactly the same cognitive structure as the Satanic Panics.
This is malicious pedagogy for a field guide that suggests escape from exactly this way of thinking! This book suggests a conspiracy of mind-controlled conservatives to argue that such conspiracy theories are ridiculous. This book only draws an even more sturdy boundary between the left and right and gives fodder to both sides that their worst fears are true: a structured religiously motivated conspiracy of the political other.
This book is exactly the book the conspiracy theorists wanted, and exactly the book we didn't need.
October 10, 2020
Fantastic use of ecological metaphor to describe how polluted our media landscape has become. Interesting framework, concretely applied to such phenomena as the Satanic Panic and the emergence of the New Right. Provides a hopeful outlook on the agency that all media users/consumers have in minimizing their pollution output without blaming them for playing their roles in existing systems. Although the book doesn't go into these theories in-depth, it could easily be applied to work dealing with network theory or cyborg theory & is clearly shaped by critical race theory as well. Easy but dense and thoughtful read.
April 17, 2022
This is the kind of book I wish other people would read, particularly people who work in media and political communications. I learned some new things through the tracing of meme culture and certain social media practices but the authors use up a lot of ink indulging the ecosystem metaphor which, while incredibly apt and useful for the topic, could have been accomplished with fewer words in favour of more exposure of bad actors and “hidden” racists and white supremacists. I would also point out that the use of metaphor is a fantastic mechanism for making complex ideas digestible and breaking down peoples’ deeply held belief systems (something the book touches on) but, while much of the central thesis is captured in the ecosystem metaphor, the authors rely heavily on concepts like moral panic and mimetic frames which are concepts only more academic readers would relate to. In that way, I felt they were working against themselves. The “solutions” they offer at the end have a flare of nativity to them but I can’t argue that any of them are wrong. Overall I think this was an important book that was mostly well done but could have been a little tighter.
March 24, 2021
Review coming because this book is absolutley amazing.
June 1, 2023
Why are progressives and conservatives living in two different worlds? Phillips and Milner provide important explanations for how the media sphere affects our understandings of reality, and deliver an impassioned plea for a media ethics based on the good of everyone rather than the rights of a few. The authors are unapologetic about their commitment to social justice and the rights of minoritized and underrepresented people. They compare our current media landscape to a polluted swamp that disproportionately harms the most vulnerable – a reality based in the algorithmic nature of social media and its inherent straight white male bias. A historical study shows the spread of false news in the era of the KKK, the rise of the religious right in the 1970s, and Reagan’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. They also deploy a wealth of studies to prove that it’s not that easy to change someone’s view of reality; our brains are primed to accept data that confirms our biases and reject data that doesn’t, even if it’s rooted in reality. Phillips and Milner helpfully deploy the distinction between “truth” (things that happened empirically in the world) and “reality” (things experienced as real by people due to their deep mimetic frames). The trick is that things people believe are real can rarely be changed by truth, so arguing with your friend who believes in alien abductions isn’t going to work. Their answer, then, is to carefully provide alternative narratives not based in opposition or “proof” but in the communal good. This book provides a careful and well-documented history of the rise of alternative media and its damage to American community, as well as a commitment to make our media space and our country better (and more true) for everyone.
August 29, 2022
A helpful and approachable book discussing the current misinformation landscape. I thought the ecological metaphors throughout were thought-provoking and salient (there's a whole discussion around "apex predators" in the misinformation landscape that I think I've told five~ other people about... usually a good sign that it was meaningful, at least to me). The discussion around ecological literacy was also really helpful, and a good example of individual- and community-level actions that can be taken.
I'm always looking for good texts that I can use in my classroom (I teach a few seminar-style college courses on misinformation) -- and the section around ecological literacy is really promising. The book discusses politics and politicians a lot, which makes tons of sense for obvious reasons. From the standpoint of choosing college texts, that makes things a bit dicey (at least for me, on contract/no tenure). So, my search continues for texts that get at some of these ideas.
I'm always looking for good texts that I can use in my classroom (I teach a few seminar-style college courses on misinformation) -- and the section around ecological literacy is really promising. The book discusses politics and politicians a lot, which makes tons of sense for obvious reasons. From the standpoint of choosing college texts, that makes things a bit dicey (at least for me, on contract/no tenure). So, my search continues for texts that get at some of these ideas.
Want to read
April 4, 2021This is an interesting and important new book analyzing the misinformation epidemic.
Phillips' analogy of looking at information as ecological system is brilliant. The different types of misinformation nearly fit as different harmful ecological phenomena. Seeing each different thing as part of a while system finally put things into focus. I've found myself looking at articles now with different types of misinformation and putting them into the different categories.
I heartily recommend this book. It's too bad the people who need to read this book won't do so.
Phillips' analogy of looking at information as ecological system is brilliant. The different types of misinformation nearly fit as different harmful ecological phenomena. Seeing each different thing as part of a while system finally put things into focus. I've found myself looking at articles now with different types of misinformation and putting them into the different categories.
I heartily recommend this book. It's too bad the people who need to read this book won't do so.
December 27, 2022
loved the metaphor to ecology and how important it is, how many ideas of shining light are bot helpful in the long run/media literacy and framing are important to keep in check for yourself, last chapter with the points was great too. loved it, wild to think its been 10 years since roflcon iii, i went to that and was glad it got mentioned in the book, had a good reflection on the event
June 9, 2024
Dnf. Super repetitive
October 7, 2023
'We're in the mess we're in because the individual has, in so many ways, from so many different directions, been privileged over the collective.'
#DeZinVanHetBoek #TheEssenceOfTheBook
This is an excellent nonfiction book.
One big reason I think so is because of how the authors position themselves. They are media scholars who are both very knowledgeable in their field AND are capable of making their work accessible to a larger audience. They are open and honest about where they stand - expressing their concerns and even reflecting openly on how they themselves unintentionally may have contributed to media pollution in the past. And they don't pretend to have any easy answers.
Another is for the case they make: the book provides an interesting analysis of the different facets of the network crisis we're in and what causes that crisis. It shows how a focus on facts (and fact checking) is ineffective in fighting disinformation and information chaos: we need to focus on frames, on deep memetic frames. And it raises important questions, for instance about a topic that I am concerned with a lot: are media literacy, and news literacy, initiatives on the right track? Answer: no, there's reason to think these interventions backfire. The metaphor of media as a polluted ecosytem holds throughout the book.
A must read for anyone involved with or interested in media literacy and news literacy, but also for everyone who wants to know how we got here.
(No, I did not get paid for this review. I am enthusiastic because I have studied news literacy for some time and arrived at similar conclusions).
Dutch readers can read a longer discussion of this book on my blog.
#DeZinVanHetBoek #TheEssenceOfTheBook
This is an excellent nonfiction book.
One big reason I think so is because of how the authors position themselves. They are media scholars who are both very knowledgeable in their field AND are capable of making their work accessible to a larger audience. They are open and honest about where they stand - expressing their concerns and even reflecting openly on how they themselves unintentionally may have contributed to media pollution in the past. And they don't pretend to have any easy answers.
Another is for the case they make: the book provides an interesting analysis of the different facets of the network crisis we're in and what causes that crisis. It shows how a focus on facts (and fact checking) is ineffective in fighting disinformation and information chaos: we need to focus on frames, on deep memetic frames. And it raises important questions, for instance about a topic that I am concerned with a lot: are media literacy, and news literacy, initiatives on the right track? Answer: no, there's reason to think these interventions backfire. The metaphor of media as a polluted ecosytem holds throughout the book.
A must read for anyone involved with or interested in media literacy and news literacy, but also for everyone who wants to know how we got here.
(No, I did not get paid for this review. I am enthusiastic because I have studied news literacy for some time and arrived at similar conclusions).
Dutch readers can read a longer discussion of this book on my blog.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews