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title: Wiki Tutorial - Leyan Li

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# Wiki Tutorial - Leyan Li
### Reflection on [Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation](https://points.datasociety.net/agnotology-and-epistemological-fragmentation-56aa3c509c6b)

Fake news or information is intentionally created and, more importantly, intentionally spread. At the same time, fake news pieces are often more emotionally triggering in terms of content - which means they have much higher chances of being retweeted / reposted by netizens. 

A larger number of people start to doubt what might have been common sense in the past, making it much more difficult to conduct radical discussions because the starting points vary. In reality, fragmentation of epistemology may lead to various actions. For instance, it reminds me of the case of [*“The War of the Worlds”*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_radio_drama)), a 1938 radio drama which led to panicking listeners believing an upcoming alien invasion. 

Back to now, when people believe crucial public issues, such as climate change and the pandemic, to be fake and constructed by people with power, it will be extremely impossible to make collective efforts.  

Or under another circumstance, when a group of people are collectively misled by such agnotology, the world could be distorted. When Chinese netizens talk about Hong Kong’s social movement in 2019, the “rioters” were portrayed by the nation's propaganda system to be against CCP’s rule and to have harmed Hong Kong’s social stability, ignoring what the protesters demanded and why they began protesting after all. The country’s great firewall may also be interpreted as intentionally establishing a field of “data voids”, as mentioned by the speaker. 


![image alt](https://www.colorado.edu/polisci/node/4793/attachment)


The speaker mentioned at last that it wouldn’t be enough to simply make high quality content publicly available. Does it mean to intentionally try to reach out to larger audiences? If so, how should we do that? We definitely shouldn’t use the same method as agnotology, but given the reality that “high quality contents” are not as triggering as conspiracy theories in essence, how should we achieve that? One possible solution may be making high quality content more interesting and engaging, just as what [*Vox.com*](https://www.vox.com/) does in their video products.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qXdjt8ZBQbE" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
