Thinking Ecologically about Our Polluted Information Networks

PIL: In your 2017 co-authored book The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online (as well as in Whitney’s This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things and Ryan’s The World Made Meme), you describe the ways online communication has not only destabilized traditional media but has created forms of expression that can be simultaneously playful and serious, harmful or “only a joke.” For those with an interest in information literacy, whether in the classroom, the newsroom, or in terms of policy-making, why does understanding everyday speech online matter? As educators, how could we incorporate understanding this vernacular expression into learning how to navigate information? 

Whitney and Ryan: Understanding everyday speech online matters because online speech is, for so many of us, the primary way we communicate with others! Even if we’re physically working in an office or are back in the classroom with students, our lives in the Covid era are so much more mediated than they ever were before. And they were already very mediated pre-pandemic. This opens up all kinds of opportunities for collaboration, connection, and closeness. It also presents all kinds of challenges. 

Whether the resulting interactions are positive or negative (or maybe positive and negative for different audiences simultaneously), it’s important to understand why our networks are the way they are—not just what happened, who said what to whom, or what got posted. You can’t fully understand any one specific story/controversy/meme/joke if you’re approaching it as singular and self-contained. Online, nothing is singular or self-contained! That’s why it’s so important to situate the story/controversy/meme/joke within the network dynamics that make it possible, and that imbue it with opportunity, or challenge, or (more often) both. 

In our latest book, Thinking Ecologically about Social Media (forthcoming with Candlewick Press and MITeen), we identify four such dynamics:

1. Affordances, the things we’re able to do with social platforms, from sharing to remixing,
2. The Attention Economy, which incentivizes the most clickable/sharable content,
3. Algorithms, which invisibly shape our online experiences for better and for worse, and
4. Assumptions about information (which don’t just contextualize how and why people share the things they do, but why our platforms were built to do what they do).

Affordances play an especially important and ambivalent role, for one basic reason: all that sharing and remixing and various other functions of playfulness are, essentially, drivers of decontextualization. Things end up in unexpected places and do unexpected things with unexpected audiences, not all of whom appreciate what’s happening, and in fact, who might be offended or confused or outright harmed even as other audiences are having a grand old time with the same content. 

Just looking at the joke/meme/whatever itself, or just at one audience’s reaction, will only tell one piece of this much larger, much more holistic story. For us, information literacy is about telling complete stories, and understanding network dynamics is key to that process. 

PIL: Your 2021 book You Are Here is “a field guide for navigating our polluted media landscape.” The frame you adopt is ecological: the crisis we are in can’t be solely attributed to particular technologies or to specific political actors, but is rather a form of information pollution. How does framing it this way help us understand it and find ways to counter the phenomenon? 

Whitney and Ryan: The biggest benefit of this framing, we think, is shifting the emphasis away from motivation and toward consequence. When people talk about falsity online, they typically use the terms misinformation or disinformation. Parsing those terms, misinformation means false information spread by accident, and disinformation means information spread on purpose. That distinction is important. 

At the same time, though, that distinction doesn’t much matter. Regardless of a poster’s intentions, false information still spreads. Something that starts out as misinformation can transform into disinformation depending on who shares it and why, and vice versa. Because of that fuzziness, because of the network dynamics we talked about in the last question, it’s often not possible to tell which is which just by looking. It’s hard to counter an individual post when you don’t have a full picture of why something was posted. 

An information pollution framing sidesteps this problem. It emphasizes the consequences of what we share over our intentions in sharing it, and it highlights the broader environmental impact of information as it travels through our networks. In the natural world, for example, the effects of oil spills aren’t confined to the immediate location of the spill. They reverberate throughout the ecosystem. You have to zoom out beyond the immediate contamination site to understand the scope of the problem. The same is true with false and damaging information online. You can better counter a problem post when you triangulate how it got to you in the first place and where it might flow after.

This triangulation helps us consider how we might end up polluting just by going about our daily lives. Industrial polluters are a big problem, but it’s not just the industrial polluters who affect the landscape. Sometimes you can spread polluted information by vocally countering it (like if your fact-check reply to a false story puts the false story into the feed of someone who wouldn’t have seen it otherwise). Sometimes you can pollute someone’s day through benign interaction (like pinging them with a news story when they’re already stressed).

An ecological understanding helps people shift from asking, “How do I protect myself from the lies and hate coming at me?” to asking, “How can I share in a way that protects others from a whole range of harms?” The shift emphasizes the consequences of our collective information footprint over the individual motivations behind individual posts.

PIL: You put information pollution in historical context, for example examining the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s as a moment when information pollution spread quickly through networks that predated the internet. We tend to think of our current crisis as a novel problem introduced by new technologies. What important insights can we gain by looking at information pollution historically? What really is different about the ways current technologies contribute to its spread? 

Whitney and Ryan: In You Are Here, we emphasize the role that social platforms played in creating the network conditions for information pollution to flourish. In particular, we explore and critique various assumptions around information, humor, and the general belief among certain online participants that the internet wasn’t “real life.” Together, these assumptions created an environmental justice nightmare when the groups harmed by these assumptions were not heeded or even acknowledged, most notably within the technology sector, allowing years and years of pollution to accumulate. It is critical to make these critiques and to hold platforms accountable for their action, and very often their inaction, to meaningfully combat the most harmful kinds of information. 

And, people didn’t suddenly start to seek out conspiracy theories—for example—solely because of Facebook’s algorithm. Recommendation algorithms have done a bang-up job ensuring that more people can more easily find conspiratorial information, and again that warrants sharp critique. But platforms didn’t create users’ identities out of nothing; users brought their identities and beliefs and assumptions to the platforms. When you identify Facebook—or any other platform—as the source of a resulting information problem, you’re unlikely to consider much older and deeper causes of that problem, and further, your solutions will be restricted to the surface level.

Here, the surface refers to the specific problematic things people post to Facebook (or wherever). The surface, of course, matters; important things are happening there. But focusing just on what we can see and count and hashtags doesn’t address why so many people come to Facebook (or wherever) already inclined to believe so many falsehoods about Covid or the 2020 election or QAnon or whatever else. Echoing our earlier point about the dynamics of social media, if you’re not looking at the how and the why of a problem—including the deep histories that predate our present moment by decades or even generations—then you simply won’t have enough context to effectively respond to the what.

PIL: Given how complex natural ecologies are, it can be difficult to know what steps to take to fix polluted environments or to address climate change. Likewise, repairing our information systems seems an insurmountable task given the historical, political, cultural, and economic factors that have shaped them. What actions can we take as individuals to make things better? 

Whitney and Ryan: We’ve grappled with this question over and over! There’s a paradox at the heart of our argument. On the one hand, we’re asking readers to zoom out and think big about big interconnections and collective responsibility; on the other hand, we’re speaking to individual readers and asking them to adopt individual behavioral changes to help clean up the sludge. So zoom out and consider all the major pollutants that are so massive and so mechanized AND keep your own allotment safe and clean. Does your green little garden matter all that much if it’s parked among vast factories spewing relentless smog?

We don’t want our takeaway to be myopically individualistic, a futile call for bootstraps solutions to systemic problems. Giving up plastic straws won’t solve the climate crisis, and blaming individual citizens for not recycling hard enough won’t unmelt the ice caps. Behaving your best won’t fix a structural catastrophe. Cleaning up our information ecosystem will require policy shifts and a realignment of the economic incentives that keep pollution profitable.

At the same time—more paradox ahead!—individual actions do influence the ecosystem because of affordances, the attention economy, algorithms, and the assumptions people bring to information. Social media are built to spread the aggregations of individual users. Trending topics, viral videos, targeted ads, and curated content are all the outcome of small choices piling up into collective consequence. They’re drops becoming a flood. When we dunk on a politician’s obvious lie, when we laughingly linger on a conspiracy theory, when we shout about an outrage to tell people to stop shouting about the outrage, we’re putting pollution right in front of others. 

We also pollute when we make our online allotments hostile places or anxious places or reactive places. We’re creating pollution chain reactions that ripple out through our own networks and the networks connected to our networks. We can’t shut off the internet hate machine, but we can express ourselves with perspective and goodwill, and let that energy ripple out instead. We can cultivate networks characterized by reflection and humanity, two things disincentivized by the economics of social media.

The answer, of course, isn’t keeping quiet and holding hands. There are issues, like systemic injustice, worth vocal anger and speaking truth to power. Even righteous truth-telling, though, can benefit from mindful care. The goal is learning how to bend your individual choices, whatever they may be, toward the benefit of the collective. Enough of that and we just might have a chance. 

PIL: You both teach in the field of communication studies at universities, but learning about media literacy starts much earlier in K12 schools. We understand you are collaborating on a new book, Thinking Ecologically About Social Media: Connection, Consequence, and Shared Responsibility. This book will engage middle grade students in thinking about information pollution in their online experiences. What are some of the key issues you want to address with young readers? How might your approach differ from the kinds of media literacy instruction that most middle schoolers encounter? Has writing for a younger audience influenced the ways you think about teaching college undergraduates? 

Whitney and Ryan: Thinking Ecologically is a culmination as much as it is an adaptation. Looking back on our solo and collaborative work, “think ecologically” has been the empirical and ethical point we’ve been driving toward. So when we got the chance to share what we’ve learned with folks just getting online for the first time—just plugging into group chats and setting up social media profiles—connection, consequence, and shared responsibility were the natural themes.

We hope those themes are valuable for all ages. No matter who we are or what we do online, the information we engage with is never discrete and the people we interact with are never atomistic. To make sense of our online environments, and especially to act ethically within them, we need to pay close attention to those connections, technological and social, and how both complicate our relationships with information and other people.

This emphasis on relationships widens how we conceptualize media literacy. There are lots of different ways to approach the topic, but the narrowest versions focus on the things themselves: they center on checking sources and evaluating claims and thinking critically about the truth and logic of what someone is encountering. Those are good skills, obviously. But thinking ecologically also invites you to consider, for instance, how you and others are feeling as you engage. Are you doomscrolling to the point that you’re overwhelmed? Are you overwhelmed to the point that you’re snapping at your friends in the group chat? We want students to get the correlation between feeling better and sharing better; it’s as essential to media literacy as tracing sources and checking facts.

We worked hard to convey this culmination to a new, younger audience. As scholars, we’ve tried to be as inclusive as possible in our writing. Really esoteric, technical, discipline-specific writing has its place, but when it comes to public-facing work, it risks alienating audiences who might not have specific disciplinary training, but who absolutely have experiences with and concerns about the issues we’re describing. And we don’t just mean non-academic audiences, either; the kinds of academic theories, assumptions, and genealogies that are second nature to communication scholars might be totally unknown to scholars in, say, the earth sciences—so the audiences you risk alienating include other researchers in different disciplines. 

But even that approach is limiting, as books written for adults—however accessibly they might be written—leave out an enormous audience of young readers. Young people are, in so many ways, on the front lines of these conversations, so we wanted to write something specifically for them. The ideas are all the same; what we cover in the book is the same as what we cover with our students, journalists, and friends and family. Young people can handle these ideas no problem because, for one thing, they’re smart, and for another, they live the dynamics we’re describing every day of their lives. The difference between how we talk to them and how we talk to older readers is how we package those ideas—specifically, we ground all the theories in the social media interactions (and controversies and jokes) of a recurring cast of middle grade readers. In hindsight, that seems like something that adult readers would benefit from too!

So maybe that’s how we’ll frame more of these ideas more of the time going forward. But for this book, the goal really was: how can we make these issues come alive for teens? The issues are already alive in that they are lived, every single day. The trick is making that connection clear, including the basic and most critical truth that, whatever our age, whatever our background, whatever our politics, we are all in this together. 

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Whitney Phillips holds a Ph.D. in English with a folklore emphasis from the University of Oregon, an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College, and a B.A. in philosophy from Humboldt State University. She currently is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. Previously she taught at New York University, Humboldt State University in California, and Mercer University in Georgia. Her timely 2018 report for Data & Society, The Oxygen of Amplification, helped journalists adopt better ways to report on extremists and political manipulators. She writes regularly for Wired and other publications and frequently collaborates on articles and books with Ryan M. Milner.

Ryan M. Milner is an associate professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the College of Charleston. He holds a B.A. from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Kansas. In addition to his books and scholarly articles he has contributed to Time, Slate, The New York Times, and (with Whitney Phillips) the Washington Post and Publisher’s Weekly.

Smart Talks are informal conversations with leading thinkers about new media, information-seeking behavior, and the use of technology for teaching and learning in the digital age. The interviews are an occasional series produced by Project Information Literacy (PIL). PIL is an ongoing and national research study about how students find, use, and create information for academic courses and solving information problems in their everyday lives and as lifelong learners. Smart Talk interviews are open access and licensed by Creative Commons.​

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Suggested citation format: “Thinking Ecologically about Our Polluted Information Networks,” (email interview) by Barbara Fister, Project Information Literacy, Smart Talk Interview, no. 37 (6 April 2022). This interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 3.0 Unported License.