the internet

Islamophobia’s occurrence in any particular country has little do with the presence of Muslim; it is possible to be Islamophobic when there are virtually no Muslim around. This because the lack of Muslims is filled by the surplus of Islamophobic representations. This surplus of representations is now increasingly reliant on the internet. There are many studies reporting on Islamophobia on the internet, classifying the negative representations, the targeted acts of aggressive online behaviour (trolling) against Muslims. These studies are basically taxonomies, and they share this feature with general literature on Islamophobia, which is concerned with reporting instances of Islamophobia empirically with little time spent on its theorisation. Such an understanding of Islamophobia implies that it is simply dismissed as being a matter of prejudice, bias, and closed views. A Critical Muslim Studies understanding of Islamophobia developed initially in the collected volume Thinking Through Islamophobia (2010), and then subsequent publications shift the focus away positivism to decolonial discourse theory. Using decolonial discourse theory, this study will how online Islamophobia is not just a distortion of Islam, or hatred of Muslims but rather it main vectors for denying Muslim political consciousness.

The aim of this paper is to consider whether critical rationalism has any ideas which could usefully be applied to the internet.  Today we tend to take the internet for granted and it is easy to forget that it was only about two decades ago that it began to be used to any significant extent. Accordingly in section 1 of the paper, there is a brief consideration of the history of the internet.  At first sight this makes it looks implausible that any of Popper’s ideas could be applicable to the internet, since Popper died before the internet came into general use.  However, section 2 argues that Popper’s theory of World 3 does apply very well to the internet.  This application is significant because, as shown in section 3, it leads to the problem of misinformation, which is one of the most significant problems generated by the internet.  In section 4 there is an attempt to solve this problem using ideas taken from Popper’s epistemology. It is argued that there should be changes in education designed to prepare students for the internet age. Teaching in the internet age should focus on presenting to the students not just the accepted theories but also the evidence on which they are based. An illustration of how this might be done is given by considering an example from science teaching, namely the teaching of Newtonian mechanics in the last years of school or first years of university.