I have an essay coming out with Internet Policy Review! Here’s the draft summary of the piece, which will be published at the end of the month (I’ll update this post with the link as soon as it comes out).
‘In “knowledge societies,” solutions to local and global emergencies like energy crises, climate change, and public health risks increasingly depend on the public’s engagement with scientific knowledge and expertise. With people increasingly using social media to engage with scientific knowledge about complex phenomena, the mediating influence of these platforms becomes all the more important.
While there is plenty of research and policy attention for what the contemporary media environment means for democracy and political discourse, there is far less emphasis on what this situation means for science itself – how science is valued publicly, and its meaning in the platform era. The urgency of addressing the new challenges that platforms pose to science and scholarship is growing in a context where institutions of academic knowledge production across the globe are currently already undergoing stress tests on various fronts. With platform leaders further aligning with anti-science politics, we see an intensification of earlier concerns about the societal power of large social media platforms when it comes to defining what knowledge, truth, and reality are in the context of major policy issues.
Given that these are themes that academic knowledge institutions have an obvious stake in, it is important that the academic project (re-)define and (re-)stake its claim to these ideas in the face of the changing knowledge regimes driven by platform power. This piece argues that the rise of platforms’ epistemic power more than ever necessitates information and knowledge governance that safeguards independent academic knowledge production and communication. It also reflects on some of the possibilities and challenges associated with such governance solutions.’
Donya Alinejad 