Of the anti-intellectual Right and the fun-timey Interwebs

A few months ago my mother (thanks to the strange combination of her love for me and her somewhat Luddite-adjacent position in relation to contemporary information technology) looked my name up using the Yahoo! search engine. She found, much to our mutual surprise, an article written about a paper I gave at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in early 2012. I had never seen it before.

The piece appeared on the conservative Accuracy in Academia* web site. It lambasts my (albeit amateurish) paper, and me. Apparently I “indignantly claimed” some things. And, what’s worse, I wasn’t all that psyched about state and/or corporate surveillance. Nor was I celebratory enough of the liberating and happiness-producing capacity of the internet for concerned citizens who love capitalism and the police, naturally. And, for God’s sake, I did not take the language of a corporation’s promotional materials as a clear and honest delivery of their political, cultural and social commitment to the common good. Oh, and I didn’t talk enough about literature. Because: disciplinary boundaries.

Accuracy in Academia “wants schools to return to their traditional mission-the quest for truth.”** And they’re worried about what young, radical intellectuals like me might mean for the future of our country. To go after this lofty goal, the organization claims to “expose political bias.” 

Just so you know, I gave the paper on a panel devoted to trends in Marxist thought. And, while I take Accuracy in Academia’s scathing review of my work as a badge of honor, I think I was chosen as the target (despite being the only graduate student on the bill) because my paper was considerably lighter and more digestible to outsider audiences than the exceptionally rigorous and densely theoretical works offered by my fellow, far more seasoned and respected panelists.

If it weren’t for Yahoo! (and my mom), I’d never have seen this thing. It doesn’t show up on a Google search of my name for pages.*** I’m not sure if its existence is good or bad for my nascent academic career, but its burial deep in the internet jungle does give me some hope that conservative, anti-intellectualism veiled as civic, pro-education activism doesn’t hold as much purchase in the American political landscape (or at least its virtual info-scape) as many of us often worry that it does. 

I also take from this happenstance discovery that you never really know all of the magical machinations of your public presence. Because: Interwebs!

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*I love this organization’s name. I’d liken it to some of my favorite super pac titles: “Endorse Liberty,” “FreedomWorks,” and the Romney-loving “Restore Our Future.”

**Um. Yeeeah. Okay. Simple.

***Speaking of academic explorations: I’d really like to know what Lacan would think about what has to be a somewhat common compulsion, sometimes motivated by paranoia, to Google one’s own name.+

+I’m officially coining the term ‘autogoogle’ for this act. The gerund: autogoogling.