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The Phenomenon of the "Intellectual Dark Web"
Drake, Daniel ; Miessler, Jan (advisor) ; Lütke Notarp, Ulrike (referee)
This paper investigates the topic of the "Intellectual Dark Web" - a supposed grouping of academics, authors and other personalities, whose opinions are deemed to be controversial. Due to a lack of academic coverage, the paper pinpoints the background from which this term had arisen and tries to find out whether the group can be considered a coherent entity. The research part of the thesis is divided into two phases. In the first, the three most prominent protagonists (Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and Ben Shapiro) are subjected to a Critical discourse analysis from which the five most recurrent themes emerge. These are identity, free speech, anti-left, anti-elite, and appeal to reason. Subsequently, ten content pieces for each of the authors are analysed to find out whether these five topics overlap across time and different types of media formats. The biggest overlap was detected in the anti-left rhetoric, although there seemed to be a subtle difference in what the respective men mean when they use the word "Left". Similar conclusions were made on the topic of identity and the opposition to elites. The analysis also showed that in addition to the identified common topics, each of the authors focuses on a somewhat different area, in which, due to their different ideological and, above all,...
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