Seeking the Principles of Power and Danger

If you like preprints, here is one for a paper that maps the climate contrarian blogosphere and conceptualisies hyperlinking as means of signaling what is deemed valuable and legitmate: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/64hwg_v1

Next talk is the USYD's Department of Sociology and Social Policy Seminar Series.  Details here . Title : Constellations of Scepticism: Contesting Climate Science and Scientists on the Blogosphere. Abstract Discussions of the role of social media in spreading ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ often centre on misinformation. Falsehoods and conspiracy theories need to be debunked. Yet, focus on misinformation alone can suggest an arena without rules or evaluative logics. This talk engages with the case study of the climate sceptic blogosphere and how they construe, construct, and contest knowledge. Analysis of the climate sceptic blogosphere, one of the first arenas of online alternative facts, suggests that there are rules that organise legitimate knowledge. The organisation of knowledge claims in this sphere hints towards an underlying worldview that makes the arrangement of some claims and stances valued and others devalued. Missing this logic leads to an analysi...

Author/s: Mathew Toll Affiliation/s:  Postgraduate member, LCT centre for Knowledge-Building, University of Sydney. Title: Unpacking the Black Box:The Climate Sceptic Blogosphere and the Idealization of Knowledge . Abstract:  Discussion of the role of the blogosphere in propagating climate scepticism echoes the focus on misinformation implicit in the deficit model. This characterization of the climate sceptic blogosphere suggests an arena without rules or evaluative logics. Yet this is not borne out by a cosmological analysis of climate sceptic blogs. In this paper, preliminary research is presented on the legitimation codes that underpin how ideal knowers and legitimate knowledge are construed on the climate sceptic blogosphere. On the blogosphere there is a commitment to unpacking the black box of science and evaluating it from the position that can be characterized as a toxic knowledge code , a schema for the legitimation of knowledge that emphasises the proced...

Panel Discussion:  Evelyn Honeywill,  Nicola Johnson and myself. Chaired by  Deborah Lupton I attended a symposium convened by Deborah Lupton, Theorizing Digital Society , on Monday held at the University of Canberra. The twitter hashtag was #TDS15 for those who'd like to engage in the conversation around the symposium. Here is a collection of the tweets so far . There were a number of very interesting talks presented on the day. I particularly enjoyed the opening keynote speech by  Susan Halford  on the continuing importance of social theory in the world of big data and web science.  Evelyn Honeywill's paper on network character and broader psycho-social dynamics of  social media and  Jean Burgess and Ariadna Matamoro's paper on issue-networks and mapping techniques applied to the #gamergate controversy were also highlights for me.   My paper applied  Legitimation Code Theory  to  the knowledge practi...

Talking about knowledge and education. Mathew Toll  is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney.  He completed his BA (hons) in 2012.  His current research is in digital sociology and the sociology of knowledge, looking at the deficit model of public understanding of science, political deliberation and knowledge formation online.  Title:   Discerning Knowers: Exploring University Students’ Perceptions of Knowledge Claims. Abstract:   Sociologists often view the authority of knowledge as a reflection of social power. Educational research mirrors with theories that treat knowledge as primarily “knowledge of the powerful” (Young 2009:13).  This study employed conceptual tools from Legitimation Code Theory (Maton 2014) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Eggins 1994; Martin 1993) to explore university student’s perceptions of knowledge claims and if knowledge is deemed to be shaped both by social relations and epistemic relations...