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.

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).

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