About

My studies focus on three different aspects of communications and how the intersect: trust, knowledge and technology. Trust is a concept I study critically – emphasizing the mostly overlooked dysfunctions of too much or unjustified trust (see for example my paper on Trusting Others). When exploring Knowledge I turn to epistemic philosophy, in order to enrich the poor theorizing that tends to characterize the social literature of knowledge (see in the literature review of my Dissertation). Technology is explored in my study in regard to the other concepts: how technology influences citizens’ and journalists’ trust and knowledge (see for example my Digital Sources paper).

News and Social Epistemology

Journalism still matters! 

Communication scholars are increasingly concerned about the social implications of Post-truth politics and the spread of Fake-news (and other forms of misinformation). For democracy to endure, people must stay informed – but can they “know” anything about major political, internal or financial public affairs? Is legacy media a good enough source of information? Is social media, with its “diversity” and “hive mind” qualities, better than traditional journalism?

To answer these questions I analyze how knowledge is disseminated in society, with a theoretical framework I developed based on theories from social epistemology. Social epistemology is a branch of philosophy which has two benefits for a social scientists investigating knowledge: on the one hand, it is build on discussions about the nature and essence of knowledge – dating back hundreds of years to the days of Socrates and Plato; On the other, it is innovative, with works of scholars who continues to develop our understanding of how knowledge is established and spread in our structurally-complex, increasingly-mediated, rapidly-changing, digital environment.