What It Means to ‘Do Your Own Research’
By: Ana Mamic
Tags: Conspiracy Theories, White Supremacy, Extremism, Research, Digital Literacy

The early days of the Internet and of digital technologies, when people were only slowly starting to comprehend their potential, was a time of great excitement. In his 1995 book The Road Ahead, Bill Gates talked about a future Internet which would look like an “information superhighway.”

Few people at the time could imagine what that entailed, and as with all new things we get excited about, few thought about the larger ramifications of having information move faster than people, or any other commodity.

But what we’ve come to understand and accept in the last few years is that the Internet is actually a double-edged sword. By making information available to everyone and eliminating its traditional gatekeepers (academia and media elites), as well as allowing people to organize and collaborate at a grassroots level, the Internet can be a great tool for democracy and learning. (I’ve written more extensively about this here.)

In fact, when talking about the potential of digital technologies, the educator and researcher Michael Peters insists on the importance of this “collective intelligence” assembled on the Internet in creating “knowledge cultures” based on freedom of inquiry.

And yet, as we have witnessed, the flip side of this digital utopia is also collective paranoia which manifests in widespread conspiracy thinking that creates what we can call ‘misinformation cultures.’

Technically, the Internet is supposed to give everyone equal access to the same information. As such, it’s indeed meant to be the vehicle of a knowledge culture characterized by the freedom to ask questions — one of the basic tenets of an open, democratic culture.

In reality, “proprietary” algorithms, owned by Big Tech companies, determine which information is going to be presented to you next after your initial search and click. This at least partly explains how two people researching the term “Holocaust,” for instance, can end up with two different search outcomes, one of which is that the Holocaust was a hoax.

Studies have found that the internet is not just conducive to the rapid spread of tales and hoaxes but also fuels conspiracy-theory logic and culture. First, it democratises knowledge, thereby empowering internet citizens to conduct their own research and open-source intelligence investigations — even if they have no knowledge of source-checking techniques. Second, the online information overload encourages cognitive filtering and pattern recognition processes that distort reality. (J. Ebner, “Going Dark”)

Researcher Shoshana Zuboff says that the digital age is no longer “about what we can earn, but about what we can learn.” As soon as a class of people who own and control the flow of information is created, social inequality increases. In fact, Zuboff calls this “epistemic inequality” — unequal access to knowledge.

QAnon can thus be viewed as a product of the clash between a free culture of inquiry, which encourages independent research and thinking, and a culture of digital surveillance instigated by Big Tech, which monitors user behavior through “cookies,” to then channel it via algorithms.

The end result is that, as a global society, we cannot agree anymore on what constitutes a reality that we all share. By turning information into property and harvesting it for profit, Big Tech has played a crucial role in allowing digital technologies to split our world in two: we now have a world of facts, and a world of alternative facts.

Reality is no longer defined through shared offline experiences and dialogue, but increasingly through isolated online engagement with customized content that reflects your individual preferences and tastes.

These are the basic preconditions for the rise of conspiracy and extremist thinking in public discourse.