• What are some of the ethical issues that you are grappling with in your research? What are some of the ways in which you are responding to these questions?

Based on the direction my research is going, I won't be highlighting posts made by individual users of the website I'm looking at, but rather a piece of media produced collectively by the community surrounding the website. Because of this, I don't have to put as much consideration into ethical issues surrounding the appropriation of online speech for research purposes. However, I have been thinking about a different ethical issue relating to my research. I've heard a compelling theory about the 2016 election that argues that Trump and the far right were both able to find so much success and amplification because of the sheer mass of reaction they were able to elicit from the center-left media/academic establishment. (eg. talk shows, news articles, academic pieces, etc.) While the pure pursuit of knowledge is probably a good thing (ironically, the philosopher in me can already begin to think of counterarguments), the action of publishing/sharing knowledge is its own separate action, and thus has its own set of political implications. Although the knowledge that was shared in itself most likely didn't spur on the election of Trump (as it was opposed to him), the phenomena of mass reaction and the corresponding mass outrage, in my view, was able to bring on Trump's victory. This makes me wonder whether or not the sharing of my research focusing on the alt-right is even good for the world in the first place. The academic establishment is founded on a belief that the sharing of legitimate knowledge is an absolute good, as it must to sustain itself, but phenomena like the election of Trump, accepting the explanation from the theory I provided before, challenge this foundational idea. Perhaps the sharing of knowledge is a general good, which sometimes produces bad effects, but produces enough good to be worth it? No real thing in the world can be absolutely good, after all, unless defined as such. However, I wonder if the academic establishment as a whole treats the pursuit of knowledge as a means to generally good outcomes, or as an absolute end in itself. I would personally prefer the first position.

• As you continue your research, have you considered alternative viewpoints in your investigation? If so, how have these alternative viewpoints enriched or changed your project?

My project began as a confused conglomeration of different viewpoints, but has since narrowed itself down into one (still interdisciplinary) field. Answering this question makes me realize that I'm now trying to fit my research exclusively into the field I've selected (semiotics) through modeling it off of existing pieces of semiotic research, and am accordingly slightly lacking the perspectives of other fields. However, I am borrowing slightly from anthropology, by using the technique of thick description. A thick description, in the context of anthropology, is an expository piece that introduces a culture to an outsider, through explaining not only specific rituals and customs, but also the implicit expectations, intentions, and connotations that accompany the externally visible features. Many works of semiotics analyze objects which are culturally accessible to the average person living in modern secular society. However, since my object is niche and very subcultural, I'm writing a small thick description of the subculture, and the specific piece of media I'm focusing on.