Dr. Brett Bourbon, professor of English, and Dr. Renita Murimi, associate professor of cybersecurity, co-authored Organized Skepticism in the Age of Misinformation: Surviving the Kingdom of Gossip, a rare interdisciplinary work exploring how we define, model and misunderstand information.
Their collaboration grew from overlapping interests in the spread of information in online social networks — an area within the emerging field of computational social science. They found that although the field has attracted significant attention from academia, industry and the mainstream media, many of its fundamental concepts remain ill-defined or poorly conceptualized.
“We are in the midst of a crisis about knowledge and knowing that is as much social as it is conceptual.”
DR. BRETT BOURBON AND DR. RENITA MURIMI
Bourbon has written on gossip across literary, internet and technological contexts; Murimi brings expertise in network systems and computational models. Together, their book presents a provocative idea: much of what circulates online functions less like knowledge and more like gossip. “We cannot simply equate information with knowledge and misinformation with falsehood,” the professors advise.
Bourbon also co-authored Thinking With Words: A Literary Groundwork and was named to the advisory board of the Gulbenkian Institute for Advanced Study.