You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape

Whitney Phillips — a media studies scholar who has written extensively on trolling and online harassment — and Ryan Milner — author of The World Made Meme — develop an ecological framework for navigating the contemporary information landscape. Their central metaphor — that information environments are like ecosystems, with producers, consumers, and environmental conditions that determine what thrives — gives readers a vocabulary for understanding how media manipulation, polarisation, and conspiracy theories spread and persist that is more useful than the common framing of individual actors spreading individual lies.

The ecological perspective has direct practical implications. If disinformation is a systemic property of information ecosystems rather than a product of individual bad actors, then interventions that target individual pieces of false content are addressing symptoms rather than causes. Phillips and Milner argue for attention to the structural conditions — economic incentives, platform architectures, audience behaviours — that make information ecosystems hospitable to manipulation. For practitioners who need a conceptual framework that goes beyond individual fact-checking towards systems-level analysis of information environment vulnerabilities, this book provides one of the most coherent available. Available open access from MIT Press.