Society

From the spider’s web of the social media feed to the printing press of Gutenberg, this article traces how knowledge has always travelled through unstable, branching pathways — and how the digital age has intensified that instability into something genuinely new. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, it argues that authority over knowledge no longer resides in identifiable institutions but flows through constantly shifting networks, where expertise competes with opinion and evidence with virality. Moving from the Protestant Reformation to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and India’s Cockroach Janta Party, the piece shows how old struggles over power, identity and trust resurface in new technological form. It contends that the real crisis of the digital age is not a shortage of information, but a deepening uncertainty about how to evaluate it — and who, or what, gets to decide.