Digital communications technologies are rewiring our social world at an unprecedented rate and shaping our collective behavior, from how we work and get food to how we interact with each other and as a society. These changes have the potential to bring about a more informed, equitable, and connected world in the long-term, yet are characterized by immediate challenges such as the spread of misinformation, increasing inequality, and rising polarization. 

Drawing on parallels to climate science and ecosystem degradation, a project team led by Joe Bak-Coleman at UW iSchool recently published a paper that confronting these challenges will require the formation of a “crisis discipline” spanning the sciences and humanities to address. Their project aims to identify what it takes — from publishers, funders, governments and academics — to coalesce our diffuse response into a coherent field capable of rising to the challenges at hand. To do this the project team aims to examine the metascientific processes surrounding our understanding of polarization in digitally-coupled social networks.

The team plans to leverage bibliometric and metascientific techniques, such as literature reviews and network analyses, to identify the epistemic structure of ongoing research which will help us understand where the greatest impact on our opportunity to obtain and use knowledge lies. This map, as well as insight from the formation of other crisis disciplines, will be used to identify practical strategies that organizations, funders, and publishers can use to promote a more coherent response. 

The project team will also examine the impact of industry influence which has been shown to undermine scientific consensus in other areas like public health. They will also examine the extent to which consolidation has been held back by conflicting or inappropriate use of causal tools. 

A series of workshops with funders, editors, and academics is also planned in order to develop practical strategies towards globally representative, effective, and cohesive stewardship of our collective behavior.