You Are Here

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.

Phillips and Milner describe how our poisoned media landscape came into being, beginning with the Satanic Panics of the 1980s and 1990s—which, they say, exemplify “network climate change”—and proceeding through the emergence of trolling culture and the rise of the reactionary far right (as well as its amplification by journalists) during and after the 2016 election. They explore the history of conspiracy theories in the United States, focusing on those concerning the Deep State; explain why old media literacy solutions fail to solve new media literacy problems; and suggest how we can navigate the network crisis more thoughtfully, effectively, and ethically. We need a network ethics that looks beyond the messages and the messengers to investigate toxic information's downstream effects.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“You Are Here... is an invaluable guide to our problems around news, truth and fact.” — New Scientist“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 MobilizationWhitney 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).