User:Annasandri/thesis/first thesis outline

░░░▒▒▒first thesis outline░░░▒▒▒

►What?

I would like to analyse conspiracy theories as way of creating collaborative and combinatorial storytellings through the story of the environments - digital and not digital- that enabled their proliferation. I would like to structure the discourse around four main steps:
1.Peripheries: Combinatory literature in the passage from the book to the web
✒"The Garden of Forking Paths" Short novel, Jorge Luis Borges, 1941
✒"The Library of Babel" Short novel, Jorge Luis Borges, 1941
“I leave to the various futures(not to all), my garden of Forking Paths.”
"The universe (which other call the library)[...]"
How literature embraced the combinatory logic and fore-sighted the hyperlinked web. In this passage I will use Jorge Louis Borges' hypertexts fictions as a starting point to describe the human tendency of creating combinatorial storytellings and how this is linked with the web structure.

2. Deep-linking: Network's structure and conspiratorial thinking - The internet as the apophenic machine
✒"The Apophenic Machine" Molly Sauter, Real life Magazine, 2017
In this passage I will describe similarities and patterns between networks' structure and the human behaviours and biases that lead to conspiratorial thinking.
3. Dizzying powers: when conspiracy theories enter platforms designed for profit
♫ "Rabbit hole" Julia Longoria, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Brad Fisher, Dan Powell, Kevin Roose, and Andy Mills, The New York Times, 2020
"Feels Good Man" movie, 2020
In this passage I will describe how conspiratorial thinking has been re-arranged in and by platforms like YouTube or Facebook and how politics eventually exploited it. I would like to structure this part by telling the stories of people who were driven into internet rabbit holes and conspiracy theories and the algorithms that made it possible.
4. The combinatory game: convergences between conspiracy theories and alternative reality games
✒ "This Is Not a Game - Conspiracy theorizing as alternate-reality game" Jon Glover, Real Life magazine, 2020
In this passage I will analyse the game-like structures that make this journey so immersive and dangerous nowadays.

►How do you want to write it ?

I think I will use the format of a research paper that do not really mention my graduation project. I want the chapters to be developed trough a timeline of events that leads to the current situation. Maybe I will use some elements, patterns and characters of fictional texts as starting points for "the plot" of both the thesis and the graduation project. I would like the thesis and the graduation project to function as separate elements but also to "speak to each other".

►Why?

I want to point out how the combinatory logic and behaviour that exists in the human mindset is linked with the systems we build to share information and express the danger that emerges when the storytelling happens on platforms made for profit.