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This book offers a novel conceptual framework that views information as a form of gossip. It provides a nuanced understanding of the "grammar" of gossip that permeates both online and real-world environments, and sheds light on the often overused and confused terms of our time: information, misinformation, and knowledge.
List of contents
¿ Introduction
Part I
A Crisis of Knowledge and Everyday EpistemologyChapter 1 ¿ Problems with the Concept of Knowledge
Chapter 2 ¿ Knowledge Is Necessarily Contingent and Normative
Chapter 3 ¿ The Practices of Redescription (Paradiastole)
Part II
Information and MisinformationChapter 4 ¿ What Is Information?
Chapter 5 ¿ Shannon's Theory of Information
Chapter 6 ¿ Data, Counting, and Writing
Chapter 7 ¿ Is Information Subjective or Objective? Or Neither?
Chapter 8 ¿ Is Misinformation a Kind of Information? (Or Must Information Be True?)
Chapter 9 ¿ Truth Is Seldom the Motive : The Complexity of Human Motives
Part III
Gossip and RumorChapter 10 ¿ A Critique of Current Models of Information Diffusion
Chapter 11 ¿ Gossip and Rumor
Chapter 12 ¿ A Discursive Grammar of Traditional Gossip
Part IV
Online InterfacesChapter 13 ¿ Online Information Diffusion as Gossip and Dreamscape
Chapter 14 ¿ The Grammar of Online Self¿Gossip
Chapter 15 ¿ The 'Information Ecosystem' and Gossiping AIs
Part V
ConclusionChapter 16 ¿ The Dynamo and the Internet
About the author
Brett Bourbon is Professor of English Literature at the University of Dallas. He is also a Visiting Professor in The Program of Literary Theory, University of Lisbon. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and was a professor at Stanford. He was awarded a Mellon post-doctoral fellowship and a Fulbright Award. He has published many essays and four books, including Finding a Replacement for the Soul: meaning and mind in literature and philosophy (Harvard UP, 2004), Everyday Poetics: Ethics, Love, and Logic (Bloomsbury Press, 2022), Jane Austen And the Ethics of Life (Routledge Press, 2022), and Thinking with Words: A Literary Groundwork (with Miguel Tamen) (Routledge Press, Forthcoming 2024).
Renita Murimi is an Associate Professor of Cybersecurity at the University of Dallas. She received her PhD and MS in Electrical Engineering from New Jersey Institute of Technology. Her research interests are in the areas of cybersecurity and network science. She has received the Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Exploration grant. Her research has been widely published in journals, book chapters and conference proceedings. She is also the author of an upcoming book titled Ten Modern Cryptographic Algorithms (Forthcoming, No Starch Press).
Summary
This book offers a novel conceptual framework that views information as a form of gossip. It provides a nuanced understanding of the “grammar” of gossip that permeates both online and real-world environments, and sheds light on the often overused and confused terms of our time: information, misinformation, and knowledge.
