Implications & Comments

Working together these researchers conclude that this is an exciting new way of defining a knowledge terrain, in which a constantly changing series of networks throws up emerging shoots in new places. Nevertheless it would be politic to tread carefully, warily. Without cartographic guidelines it is easy to connect the wrong nodes, cultivate the wrong shoots. In the same way as an invasive species can burst through a fence and over-run our intellectual space, so the false concepts and fake news that have overrun parts of our world and our understanding of it must be guarded against. In the same way as a rhizome may be broken, it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. As will fake news, false concepts and conspiracy theories.