Digital Distrust Theory: On the Internet, Power, and Expert Authority Crisis

• In Event: Unpacking Expertise - I: Data, the Digital, and Organizations

Abstract

This paper proposes a research-based, interpretative approach, that aims to explain how the Internet contributes to the expert authority crisis of the reflexive modernization era (Beck, Giddens & Lash: 1994). Based on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork of online open collaboration communities, I argue that the digital turn brought distrust into social interactions, enhancing a need to verify claims and arguments of others, in a variety of social settings. While the Internet offers a way to disrupt knowledge regimes, with its abundance of information, it also supports the expert authority crisis by inviting un-limited, blind skepticism. This dynamic, easily observable in avid discussions between strangers on social media platforms, is quite noticeable in the relation to experts, such as medical doctors, researchers or academics. I build my argument referring to the fieldwork among grass-root knowledge activists – with an example of pro-mainstream-science and alternative-knowledge advocates operating in a transmedia environment, I investigate how various alternative communication routes are used to influence discourses in areas of science, health and nutrition. I provide a critical insight into how different platforms, acting as infrastructures, help to facilitate, crystalize and materialize various new relations of public engagement among different prod-users, disrupting existing power relations around knowledge production. By analyzing the work of my interviewees, I highlight their ambiguous role in the expert authority crisis of the reflexive modernization era. Through their digital advocacy practices, they become new authorities in the entangled networks of online communication.

Author

• Magdalena Halina Góralska, Koźmiński University in Warsaw