"Here comes everybody except the anorexics, the cutters and the old people": Tara Brabazon on why she thinks Clay Shirky is wrong

Tara Brabazon, professor of media at the University of Brighton, is known for her her educational philosophy, in particular, her strict stipulations on Google and Wikipedia, outlined in part one of this interview. In part two Journalism.co.uk discusses online democracy with the online theorist.

"How about you be a citizen? Be a citizen before you be a brand," Brabazon, who is originally from Australia, instructs her students.

"We are a lot more than what we buy and sell."

This is one of Brabazon's central concerns: 'branding', something she teaches to her first year class ("I teach Monday morning 9am. They've just come off the street; first year; I'm the first person they see. Can you imagine?")

"I hope we live in a time when Paris refers to a city, rather than a short blonde woman with a really ugly dog. She is a brand, but do you want to be Paris Hilton? And that's the pivotal question of our time," she tells me.

Nonetheless, brand recognition used in an appropriate way, is useful, she says.

While she insists she's not a public person ("I'm not a public person at all. What I try to do the best of my ability is try and represent education well") she herself, is a brand, she says. It's a question I've asked other online theorists too.

"I play the [Google-ranking] game myself," she says.

"How do you think Brabazon.net ended up at the top? It's a PR page. That's not about me: that's what I think about me."

Brabazon does not believe in the 'online participation equals democracy' model, she tells me.

"The problem is with the web 2.0 apologists, of which there are many and Clay Shirky is one," Brabazon says the minute his name comes up in regards to online participation.

"I think his book 'Here Comes Everybody' is dreadful. I think it's very, very poor," she says.

"They [the apologists] are confusing participation online with democracy." They're 'assuming that if communities will get together, communities will intrinsically do good things', she says.

I tell her Shirky has shifted his views a little after seeing how Barack Obama's Change.gov was manipulated by US pressure groups. Good, she says.

"I think what Clay does, bless him, is that he forgets about the people who aren't online," she says.

"Let's forget about the 'nanas' because the 'nanas' aren't online. I'm sorry, but I'm not prepared to let the older citizens of society just slip away. It's disgraceful. It's like they'll die; we can forget about them. Well, I live in Eastbourne. I don't forget about these people." 

Pro-anorexia sites, and online self-harming communities are examples of the negative effect of online gatherings, she says.

It's something Shirky addresses, but doesn't solve in his book, she says: "Here comes everybody except the anorexics, the cutters and the old people!" she exclaims. Or what about the disabled, she asks. "What is a deaf person meant to do with iTunes, for example?"

"When we're conflating the online environment and democracy we have to recognise with some honesty how many people in our population and culture we're losing by making that statement," she says.

Online expression
Online anonymity is a big problem for democratic discussion and she is 'horrified by level of abuse that exists online,' she says.

"It's made worse because it's anonymous. They would never say it to your face. If you're not prepared for your boss or your mother to see it then don't write it," she says.

"Isn't this one of those things where we're confusing blogging and fighting for democracy?" she asks - rhetorically, I presume - before adding that she thinks the 'minority use of the practice' does not represent the 'the 90 per cent of the morass that is blogging'.

But, I ask, how about the occasions when anonymous blogs facilitate freedom of expression - for example, to describe the situation in repressive regimes?

Yes, she agrees - with a but: "That can be used and with critical interpretative skills that can be dynamite - but that doesn't get away from the point that the bulk of people talk nonsense in their blogs.

"Personal stuff, which is great, but keep a diary. Don't publish it, keep a private diary. The bloke you're going out with; what you think of your mother - I don't want to know.

"I've got nothing against the [social media] medium, the mechanism or the portal that doesn't [necessarily] have intrinsic use in the academic environment. It may - but it has to be proven, and that's my argument. If you want to insert blogging or Ning into your curriculum then you have to do that with care and reflexivity, but you don't start up with the technology."

The thinking and the learning has to come first, she emphasises.

School of Brabazon
Her task, as she sees it, is to teach best practices and represent education accurately. She wants to 'transform the reputation' of media studies in the UK, one which casts media studies as an 'easy' or unimportant subject.

"That [UK] reputation doesn't exist anywhere else on earth. For some reason, here media studies is seen to be a very low quality degree," she says.

She remarks that she even gets people asking 'have you been to university?' (she has).

Unashamedly boastful - 'we had a new curriculum validated two years ago and the external examiner who came in said it was the greatest curriculum she had ever seen' - she says she is creating 'integrated packages' for students, in her mission to teach them online literacy.

On and offline: those binaries are 'completely over', she says.

"We [the University] are hopefully forward and ahead. The reason we are ahead is that we don't discriminate between on and offline," she adds.

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