14
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      A Conspiracy of Data: QAnon, Social Media, and Information Visualization

      1
      Social Media + Society
      SAGE Publications

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Seeing is believing, so goes the cliché. In our extremely online world, the particular nexus between visual information and political belief has become one of the thorniest challenges to truth. We live in an extremely visual world in which we navigate social media, search engines, platforms, interfaces, icons, memes, and smartphones. Despite the fact that we navigate visual information at an astounding rate, we have not nationally developed literacies to debunk bad information. I argue that we are witnessing a confluence between extremely online, crowd-sourced conspiracies, whose adherents possess a high capacity for online information gathering, and visualization, meant to communicate data about our world effectively and accurately through optical means which has been co-opted for information warfare. Deploying such informatics further legitimates bizarre, unhinged theories about political reality. QAnon, the extremely online conspiracy theory that has cast its shadow over the Internet, relies exclusively on information visualization to communicate its message and is symptomatic of our inability to combat misinformation that mimics the methods of data analysis and information literacy. I argue that QAnon’s success—indeed, its very existence—relies on (at least) two principal factors: (1) QAnon relies, intentionally or no, on a slippage between data and information that obscures the interventions by Q and Q’s anons in leveraging information warfare, and (2) QAnon supports such a slippage with complex and interactive visualizations of bad information, thereby accelerating apophenia, the tendency to see linkages between random events and data points.

          Related collections

          Most cited references14

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          Conceptual approaches for defining data, information, and knowledge

          Chaim Zins (2007)
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: not found
            • Book: not found

            Introducing Social Semiotics

              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: not found
              • Book: not found

              Data feminism

                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                (View ORCID Profile)
                Journal
                Social Media + Society
                Social Media + Society
                SAGE Publications
                2056-3051
                2056-3051
                July 2021
                August 13 2021
                July 2021
                : 7
                : 3
                : 205630512110360
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Purdue University, USA
                Article
                10.1177/20563051211036064
                456880a2-e9b2-4b62-aae4-600feaadc3ec
                © 2021

                https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

                History

                Comments

                Comment on this article