Students at Cambridge University. (Photo by Graham Robertson/Getty Images)
Getty Images
An unexpected post went viral over the weekend. In it, I shared the fact that a student from the University of Cambridge received a Ph.D. The woman in question, Dr. Allie Rooks, celebrated the completion of her dissertation with a modest tweet, but somehow sparked outrage online.
See if you can decipher the reason.
As of this writing, the post has been viewed more than 24 million times and has caused the anger of many people.
Wondering why?
Well, about her paper. The book, titled “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose,” focuses on the use of scent in literature, and the large Twitter/X community was outraged by it.
This is an interesting, if upsetting, phenomenon that shows how disconnected online communities can be from reality, and how social media can enable the worst aspects of humanity.
What really happened to Dr. Allie Luke and her “politics of smell” PhD?
On the surface, there’s nothing all that noteworthy about Dr. Ally Luke’s social media posts. Here was someone who had been studying for a PhD for several years and was celebrating the completion of his thesis. It’s just regular graduate school stuff, really.
At some point, this caught the attention of the supposedly right-leaning demographic of Twitter/X and exploded.
Now, I’m not going to share a link to the specific tweet where I posted the hateful comment, as it highlights and encourages harmful behavior, but I’m not going to share a link to the specific tweet where I posted the hateful comment, but I’m sure thousands of people have read Dr. Luke’s comment on the politics of smell. Questioning the research, he said it was “of no value” and “an absolutely ridiculous waste of university resources, time and energy.”
Many of the comments went further, including gender-discriminatory, offensive, and malicious comments.
While some supported and praised Dr. Lukes’ work, the majority of posters were negative.
This meme from the aftermath neatly sums up the reaction:
It is upsetting that Dr. Allie Rooks has been subjected to such severe abuse, but it is a perfect example of how social media can disconnect people from reality and promote the worst aspects of human nature.
What the reactions to the “politics of smell” Ph.D. mean
On the surface, it is understandable that some people would react negatively to the paper “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose.”
This may seem like just a niche, last-minute parody of academia, but here’s the kicker. This paper is not intended for a wide audience. This is a study intended for professional use only, as Dr. Allie Rooks herself points out:
As Dr. Lukes explains, this was written for others in her field of expertise, and of course the general public will find this content thick and borderline nonsense – it is the nature of certain academic documents.
Complaining about this is like looking at a piece of a paper on quantum mechanics and complaining that you don’t understand it. The politics of smell theory is simply not suited to the kind of widespread consumption that this social media storm has unleashed.
But the bigger issue, and what can cause negative reactions to snuff papers, also hinges on how social media inflates people’s egos.
Research shows that people who share articles online and simply consider themselves experts are overconfident in their own knowledge. Combine this with the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people believe they know more than they do, and you get a population whose perception of their own correctness is unwavering.
In the United States, approximately 1.3% of the population holds a Ph.D. Their number is approximately 4.5 million. It’s just a small amount. More than five times as many people saw Dr. Allie Rooks’ first tweet about completing her doctoral thesis on the politics of smell.
It’s safe to assume that the majority of people commenting on her posts do not have PhDs and are unlikely to understand what academic research is all about.
But because of social media, they have an exaggerated sense of their own correctness and understanding of this world.
The reaction to Dr. Allie Rooks’ Ph.D. of Smell sadly shows the worst side of the internet. The part that believes they know more than the experts, the part that completely misses the point of the post, and the part that relies more on mean-spirited insults than argument.
The internet has brought us many positive things, but the very nature and structure of social media does not prioritize understanding and nuance. This was made clear in the response to Dr. Allie Rooks’ paper on the politics of smell.
