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# System prepended metadata

title: Wiki tutorial

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# Wiki tutorial

## Reflection on *Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation* by danah boyd
In a time not too long ago, the main source people trusted for research materials was largely librarians. There were could be falsified sources, but there were gatekeepers at the publishing and curation level to minimize the reach of lies. The Internet was a massive disruption of that status quo, as danah boyd outlined in a 2019 speech to the Digital Public Library of America conference. She emphasizes that "agnotology," or deliberately fostered ignorance, was on the rise due to bad actors on the web. It's not a brand new concept: Iain Boal and Robert Proctor coined the term in 1995, and certain people have lied others into ignorance for decades. boyd outlines a number of contemporary elements that are pulling people into a world of ignorance, such as terrorists that know how to go viral, and the YouTube rabbit-hole towards "free-thinking" doubt of climate science and social justice.


	
![](https://i.imgur.com/IwgFdWL.jpg)
    (PragerU screenshots divorced from their rhetorical content are often humorously self-defeating)

boyd provides a clear outline of the growing danger agnotology, and provides somewhat of a decisive objective to librarians, but some questions remain. A key elements is that she initially refers to agnotology as a tool of the powerful, but does not express a clear link to who's profiting off the spread of online conspiracies. To be fair, social media platforms and internet companies certainly are, but they're not the entities initially seeding most of these lies (I hope). Is she implying some sort of upper-class control, with capital interests pushing climate conspiracies so that greenhouse gases can keep being burned? Perhaps, but that doesn't clearly explain grand, cult-like conspiracies like QAnon or white supremacy groups. I'd further contend that while her recommendations to librarians to spread their content as publicly as possible are well-intentioned, the online conspiracy machine may very well be too powerful to be overcome without a comparative public movement against it. There are simply more conspiratorial grandmothers on Facebook than there are digital librarians, suggesting that may take regular citizens working to stamp agnotology out as well.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rvI68YO7dVY" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

("The Gravel Institute" represents an attempt to counteract the specific rabbit-hole that PragerU is so committed to pulling users down, but doesn't quite fit the mold of proper academic education that boyd suggests.)
