Volume 58 Issue 2 (July 2023)

This article presents a taxonomy of the information practices apparent in an imageboard discussion thread that was influential in jump-starting the worldwide QAnon movement. After introducing QAnon with a review of literature, the author examines 4Chan /pol/ thread #147547939 (key in introducing multiple key elements of the QAnon narrative) to enumerate and classify the information practices deployed by discussion participants. In conclusion, the article expands beyond existing research's previous focus on outright fabrication, showing that early QAnon participants' information practices are also defined in large part by suspicious and idiosyncratic modes of reading authentic sources, not simply the propagation of falsehoods.

James A. Hodges studies the evidentiary value of digital objects. He is currently assistant professor at the San José State University School of Information and junior fellow in the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.

Predictive algorithms today share more than just semantics with the divinatory practices of the past. This article will map the parallels, contending that the similarities between the two practices are true "propositions" that radically question the way we apprehend the world, the way we draw our knowledge from it, and the way we then act within and upon it. Mindful of the limitations of such a comparative method, it will nevertheless attempt it by deploying a twofold approach. On the one hand, the article questions the epistemological nature of predictive analytics and examines their truth claims with regard to how they represent the future. On the other hand, it focuses on the ontological dimension of predictive analytics and investigates how they shape the world by bringing about the presence of the future in the here and now.

New ideas and theories continue to emerge in the fast-changing field of translation studies. This article attempts to conceptualize translation beyond the linguistic confinement. It begins by reviewing the mainstream translation conceptualizations. It adopts information as the fundamental concept underlying translation and reveals concepts like source and target text, meaning transfer, and language to be more of special cases of the information-based concept of translation; translation is, as a result, expanded to include not only human actions of creation and behaviors, but also actions of other life forms, inanimate or artificial substances that are capable of meaning-making. The article thus proposes the information theory of translation (ITT). It defines translation as a meaning-making process of an agent within its specific informational boundary and time limit to achieve goals. Finally, key problems in translation studies are discussed.

The promise of an open cyberspace driven by an empowered generation of "digital natives" has collapsed, due to the corporate capture of the internet and the psychosocial immiseration of youngsters caused by the instrumental manipulation of them at the screen interface. Certain strands in the twentieth-century philosophy of technology can throw light on these developments in terms of (1) Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the expanding influence of 'Technik' tends toward the treatment of persons as exploitable things, or "standing reserve," and (2) Jacques Ellul's contention that humans would in time and of necessity assimilate themselves to vast and autonomous technological system. Young people are now being largely shaped by "social physics," as big data–derived fodder for the creation of a hive mind in the interests of technocratic social control and corporate profiteering.