tl;dr – This is the blog for Dr. Eric D Berg, online propaganda and extremism researcher. I will be posting thoughts on philosophical concepts from my research for a general audience, book reviews, how-to’s on spotting propaganda, interesting thoughts on technology and human existence, anything that strikes me!
There is no set publish schedule as-of right now, but I am aiming to do something here about every two weeks or so. More if things come to me!
Hello fellow internet traveler! Welcome to my blog. Depending on how you got here what I need to say in my introduction is a little bit different, so we are just going to give an overview.
Academically, I am Dr. Eric D Berg, who currently holds 4 degrees (a BA, 2 MAs, and a PhD) all in philosophy of various kinds. The longest standing interest, and the one that guided my most of my graduate work has been in how people come to believe the things that they do, and more importantly how outside influences can modify those beliefs. This lead me to propaganda studies, social and political epistemology, semiotics and philosophy of language, and a bunch of critical theory from Africana philosophy.
This is interesting enough, but it is also a very wide array of topics. Narrowing it down is one of the most important aspects of my research and interests: How technology, especially communication technology, creates unique pathways and environments for beliefs to be interacted with and altered. And so a core of my academic work is on the philosophy and phenomenology of technology.
To finish up the academic portion of this, the main kinds of beliefs I focus on are political ideologies and commitments, specifically how these beliefs change through radicalization and extremification. In essence, I want to know why people hold radical or extreme beliefs, what those kind of beliefs are, what the process is to get those beliefs, and how technology specifically mediates that process.
So, academically I am a philosopher whose areas of specialization are technology, propaganda, and extremist studies. My approach is very much grounded in investigative journalism, and open-source reporting. Which means I have existed in some of the worst online environments, read fun manifestos, and collected a bunch of brain-worms for my research. Hence, “Terminally Online.”
For those of you coming to this blog from academia this is something you probably already knew. However, if you are finding this through other means… you now know my day job!
Those other places outside academia could be various video games communities since I am a #-gamer, or more recently online Pagan religious communities of various stripes (but mostly Inclusive Heathen spaces), or union activism circles, and in the rare occasions someone gets interested in an offline space a punk rock or hip-hop show, or someone chatting with me on my skateboard.
Whatever community I am in I tend to try and find the margins and outskirts. Those borderlands of identity where mixing and syncretism across groups happens at breakneck speeds have always interested me the most. Probably because that is usually what feels authentically weird.
And now the academics know what I do when I am not wearing the professional mask… but I still wear the kilt and the mohawk.
This blog will be an expression of those overlapping parts of me; the academic, the punk, the nerd, and internet traveler. I want a place where one post can be a serious application of a concept like “Homo Faber” to a current event, the next to be a book review that could equally be of a Cyberpunk novel or academic text, and finishing it off with a post arguing why listening to aggressive Punk Rock is good for the soul. Educational, informational, provocative, fun.
Home you enjoy your stay at my digital fire, friend!