Professors of communication Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner offer a map to understanding the toxicity of the media environment today; how it got that way; how it is part of the United States' overarching history; and what, if anything, might be done about it. You Are Here cleverly uses pollution as a metaphor throughout to describe what the authors term a media environment crisis. They draw on concrete examples of pollution, human interventions in ecological environments and climate change to illustrate and make explicit the ways society and Internet culture spread bad or toxic information.
Importantly, Phillips and Milner show that the problems of today are tied to media constructions of the 1980s, as well as parallel post-Civil War journalism practices. They highlight conspiracy theories, the history of trolling and how even those with the best intentions can inadvertently serve to amplify problematic media and voices. These historical contexts add depth to an analysis of the current moment that argues against the idea that the present day is a purely unprecedented time, divorced from any other points in U.S. history. Novel to the authors' approach is their focus on how whiteness has shaped Internet culture, naming something outright that has been identified by BIPOC in Internet spaces for years. Both of these components bolster the call for a network ethics that shifts the focus from users as individuals to how people are connected, in order to reshape media literacy itself and address the problems of the current media landscape and where it is headed. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer