A major focus of work on the Internet strand is the question of how ideas, memes, rumours, ‘facts’, etc. disseminate through online networks. Is the online world significantly different from its offline counterpart, and, if so, in what ways? These questions have been of enduring interest to sociologists at least since 1973 when the Stanford […]
An important part of this project is to investigate conspiracy theories as a form of alternative knowledge. Many conspiracy theories posit a massive cover-up of historical truth by governments, historians, the media and the publishing industry have colluded in suppressing. In recent years, there has been a growing vogue for books that take this belief […]
Already in this project we’ve discovered there is not a lot of reliable polling data on who holds which conspiracy theories, and very little that makes interesting comparisons between different groups and settings. We hope to commission some of our own before too long. Current academic writing on the subject often relies on general surveys, many of […]