The 911 Truth Movement's You Tube University

[David Rose]

"The University of You Tube"

The present crisis within the university is a time to look out to
other research communities and their practices. The much maligned,
ridiculed and marginalised "9/11 Truth Movement" has at its heart a
community of researchers collaborating via the internet but only
meeting occasionally face to face. As with the JFK conspiracy
community, the aim of the 9/11 truth movement (or “truthers”) is to
critically analyse the official account of a traumatic event and look
for anomalies and contradictions that may expose a hidden conspiracy
or cover-up. Truthers are deeply suspicious of the mainstream media
(and mainstream academia) on account of perceived corporate and elite
control of these institutions. They also distrust the alternative or
“progressive left” media for similar reasons. Converged digital media
has allowed Truthers to build an “alternative, alternative media” that
enables peer to peer and one to many broadcasting of current news
stories, told from a conspiracy or truth perspective. The rapid, viral
growth of the Truther ideology, its association with extremism and the
rejection of all officially sanctioned accounts of social life, has
led to concern and action by some American government agencies. A
member of the Obama administration (Cass Sunstein, now the
“Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs”)
has advocated cognitive infiltration of the 9/11 movement and this
proposal has been supported by the UK think tank Demos.

As part of my research I organised a debate at Goldsmiths between two
researchers from the think tank Demos (who have written a report critical of
conspiracy theories, associating them with violent extremism) and a
group from the 9/11 Truth Movement. This very lively debate was filmed
and the unedited rushes uploaded to Vimeo. Some Truthers then
downloaded the rushes and made videos that continued the debate, in
particular the question of what caused WTC Building 7 to collapse on
9/11.

Can this approach to research produce useful knowledge or just more
“conspiracy theory”?

Background

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFxLtGuLTdA

http://www.america.gov/conspiracy_theories.html

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585

http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/thepowerofunreason

Debate unedited rushes - downloadable

http://www.vimeo.com/16395101

http://www.vimeo.com/16395775

9/11 Truth re-mix / participatory video produced

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0FbYJ9fgMo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XNO85qVrgM