Some people would say Sept. 11 was the work of the American government, or that President Obama's birth certificate is a fake. Peter Starr, the new dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, would tell you otherwise.
Starr is working on a Web-based multimedia book entitled, "We the Paranoid," about the paranoid culture of modern America. Starr combines cutting-edge multimedia with scholarly text to explore how conspiracy theories and distrust of the government can impact American culture. "We the Paranoid" is revolutionary in its design, with 11 videos, 150 pages of text and two spaces of interactive features such as online quizzes and polls.
Starr got the idea for "We the Paranoid" in 1995, on the morning of the Oklahoma City bombing.
"The bombing got me thinking about fear and paranoia, and how both sides of the political spectrum have been pushing this paranoia style for many years, dating back to pre-revolutionary times," Starr said.
Starr argues in "We the Paranoid" that paranoid culture persists in American society because many Americans are uncertain about who really holds power in the government. When people are uncertain about who holds power, they are more likely to believe conspiracy theories that tell them to mistrust certain people or certain establishments, Starr said.
He said his book is mainly about the way that culture is shaped by paranoia style.
"What the book is really about is not so much paranoid style as it is about the cultural artifacts -- particularly movies -- that show the way in which we are brought into a paranoid world view," Starr said. "These types of movies appeal to us because they simplify our world and tell us who we should be up against."
Starr chose to make "We the Paranoid" in multimedia format to reflect the changing face of media and academic publishing. University presses are in crisis, Starr said, and libraries do not have as much of a demand for hard books as they used to because many people do their research online. Armed with a "fairly robust" budget from his work as a dean, Starr set out to create a multimedia book that is different from anything anyone has done before in the university press.
Though Starr came up with the concept for "We the Paranoid," he has worked with many different people to get the multimedia book up and running. Starr wrote all of the Web site's text and made many of the videos but he relied on outside help to assist him in building the Web site and developing its interactive components.
Starr also worked on "We the Paranoid" with film students in a class that he taught last semester at the University of Southern California. For their final project, the students produced videos for Starr's YouTube channel about "We the Paranoid." The videos cover a wide variety of topics such as cults, the role of paranoia in medical discourse and the paranoid structure of modern religious movements.
"We the Paranoid" is an ongoing project with no set finish date, Starr said. At the moment, Starr is working on three chapters about the Internet as a medium for conspiracy thinking. Starr said the Internet has fostered many recent conspiracy theories such as the 9/11 "truth" conspiracy, which asserts that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were the work of the government, and the "birther" movement, which argues that Barack Obama was born in a foreign country and his birth certificate is fake. The Internet makes it easy for a person to spread a conspiracy theory to a wide range of people in a short amount of time, Starr said.
Paranoid culture is sure to remain a driving force in American culture in the near future, he said.
"We're living in a time where 'us against them' has become the dominant mentality of discourse," Starr said. "Paranoia culture has made a resurgence this decade and it doesn't seem to be fading out any time soon."
You can reach this staff writer at jryan@theeaglonline.com.
