Following on from my last post, last week Professor Starbird conducted a lecture on rumours, and how influence and improvisation shape online conversations.

It’s an hour long lecture but if you’re clever you can watch at a slightly higher speed.

My key takeaways are too long to summarise here – and I have not digested it properly yet anyways – but it’s powerful and thought-provoking.

But Professor Starbird herself kind of summarises everything with this slide:

“[We must] improve our own digital literacy to better understand how our sense-making processes have been hijacked by strategic manipulators and the attention dynamics of online informational systems.”

I will be heading off on my travels this Saturday, and I now have even more food for thought.