Academics widen onslaught on Wikipedia

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Friday January 18, 2008 12:32

by Fu manchu

Tara Brabazon is Professor of Media Studies a the University of Brighton and Director of the Popular Culture Collective. She's an author of a few bits & bobs on internet use, media culture & is building quite a profile for herself for attacking Google & Wikipedia claiming that they undermine educational & didactic processes & more than Harry Potter actively contribute to turning our kids brains (& minds) to utter mushy shite.

Thing is, her arguments are proving to interest & influence far beyond the generally airified chitchat discussions of Media Studies university departments. Today's "Liberation" the French leftwing daily reports how the "Just say No to Wikipedia!" stickers are appearing across the USA in high schools as well as public amenity libraries. The cultural link with Nancy Reagan's "Just say no to Drugs!" ought be obvious.

filling your heads with citations, proofs, ideas & no trivia!

today's article in the media supplement to "Liberation" (French language)
http://www.ecrans.fr/Wikipedia-banning,2684.html

Tara Brabazon's home site -
http://www.brabazon.net/

The collective she is credited with leading ("Popular Culture Collective") http://popularculturecollective.com/

She's written several books the titles of which suggest a thinking & punning mind :-
The Revolution will not be Downloaded (editor; forthcoming), The University of Google, Playing on the Periphery, From Revolution to Revelation, Liverpool of the South Seas (editor), Digital Hemlock, Ladies who Lunge and Tracking the Jack.

Well & cool you might think, there's nothing authoritarian in wikipedia when you want to raise your kids the proper way (trolling for erotic misadventures their teachers might have left on youtube) &ensuring they don't stray far from the Disney Movie "Noah's Ark" Creationism.

So........what can you as a parent do you do about it?
Easy - ban Harry Potter. Chemically castrate your kids if they pass a basic spot skills test in hand rolling cigarettes. Send them to UCD to really listen to Le Pen. Explain to them that the internet is filled with {to quote "The Daily Telegraph" writer Damian Thompson (& author of "Counterknowledge")} psuedo fact hunger

The issues raised are really very interesting as we pass the 5th anniversary of Creative Commons at the end of 2007 & ask ourselves is the 21st century equivalent of 18th century efforts to liberalise education & knowledge suceeding? Yet again we find ourselves in a perversely "gnostic" approach to the teaching of critical thought, & objective history. Yes, Ms Brabazon is tippy toppy clever & writes books with titles whose obvious puns are really only funny to those who have previously considered the cognitive dissonance of watching a television documentary entitled "the revolution won't be televised". But that's clever people with students loans & a lifetime of Guardian reading or Channel4 telly watching behind them. It's not the poor kids of the USA.

At end, I can see many good reasons for banning kids from using internet search engines to pad their essays or cheat research - but only if they have libraries or real live old people to ask "what was 1974 really like?" Likewise, I suppose attacks of such a nature on Google (but no at this moment wikipedia) might break the dominance of "googleware" & bring us back such well buried delights as the former "ungoogle" search engine.

here's a report in English from a local commercial newspaper on Brabazon's ban -
http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/generalnews/display.var....a.php

& following the French link will offer blogs of parents' groups across the USA as they consider following suit. Ironically the Wikipedia foundation has garnered so much support for attempting the very opposite of what the now "cleverclogs" Brabazon & swampfascist Americans are teaming up on. So I'll leave you with Brabazon's own wikipedia entry - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_Brabazon