Distrusting Consensus

Abstract

Although the institutional model of science communication operated well during the corona-pandemic, and relevant public institutions (media, science, politics) garnered higher levels of trust following “rally-around-the-flag” dynamics, other people would develop distrusts towards those institutions and the emerging orthodox corona narrative. Their ideas are often framed as conspiracy theories, and today’s globalized media eco-system enables their proliferation. This looming “infodemic” became a prime object of concern. In this article I agnostically study those distrusts from a cultural sociological perspective to better understand how and why people (came to) disbelieve official knowledge and their producers. To do so, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in the off- and online worlds of people labeled as conspiracy theorists in the Netherlands, which includes the media they consume, share and produce. Based on an inductive analysis of people’s own sense-making, I present three dominant reasons: media’s panicky narrative of fear and mayhem; governments sole focus on lockdowns and vaccines; and the exclusion of heterodox scientific perspectives in the public sphere. Each of these reasons problematize a perceived orthodoxy in media, politics and science, and this uniformity bred suspicion about possible conspiracies between these public institutions. Too much consensus gets distrusted. While we can discard those ideas as irrational conspiracy theories, I conclude that these findings have important implications for the way we deal with and communicate about complex societal problems. Next to keeping things simple and clear, as crisis/risk/science communication holds, we need to allow for uncertainty, critique and epistemic diversity as well.