Violet Blue Versus Stop Porn Culture: Part 2, Anti-Social Networking

Blue's campaign against Stop Porn Culture has made effective use of social media to gather support for her pro-porn cause. Sure, everyone knows one can do marvelous things with Twitter these days. But who, exactly, is she reaching?

One of Blue's recent tweets was, "lesson: how NOT to be a rank f*cking amateur #1: make sure your anti-porn con has its Twitter account before event." Great advice IF your anti-porn con wants to reach people via Twitter. However, none of the professional, academic conferences I attend have Twitter accounts, nor are they "rank f*cking amateur" events, either. Such conferences do appeal to people who don't live and die by Twitter, though. Disinterest in communicating in 140-character blurbs doesn't make the anti-porn side less credible.

Consider the conference context. Stop Porn Culture conference presenters are academics from disciplines including philosophy, medicine, and sociology who have been brought together by their concern over pornography. Sure, one might surmise that there's a touch of ivory-tower-ness, that these folks who breath the rarefied air of academia daily are "out of touch" with the real world. That might be the case. However, it's important to note that their work on pornography has different parameters than what Blue is doing. It makes sense that they use more traditional channels of communication.

So, they're not as concerned with how pretty their Web site is, how many followers or fans they have, whether they're on Twitter, or how much user-produced content they can inspire. Instead, these anti-porn feminists study the actual subject of pornography, not how many people love porn. That's basically what Blue's video contest proves: people love porn. Well, file that under "water also wet" news. The numbers regarding how much porn is out there and how frequently it is viewed have already told that story. People like porn? No shit. Porn producers are exquisitely attuned to supply and demand, and the demand is high. Further, as Sarah Palin's book sales and Tea Party gatherings and Fox News ratings have shown, a bunch of people liking something doesn't mean that thing is unassailably good and right, or that smart people shouldn't question it. Porn is no exception.

I question whether the tools Blue uses: her blog, Twitter, and anti-conference Web pages are any less out of touch than the other side. She's preaching to her wired chorus, essentially, and in the process ignores academics who ply their trade primarily in the great big world offline: in classrooms, laboratories, universities, academic journals, and academic conferences. Their preferred media are NOT the same in terms of publication standards, either: journals and conferences involve peer review, whereas blogs require no such moderation (lucky for me!). That's fine, though, because they're speaking to different audiences with differing agendas.

But Blue implies that savvy use of social media somehow lends her argument credence, and that is not true. As I tell my students, "Any idiot can have a Web site, and many do." A quick glance through YouTube comments demonstrates that saying something online doesn't imbue the message with merit. It's up to the audience to evaluate the credibility of any argument, regardless of the medium used to deliver it. I'm finding Blue's argument to be prettily and widely disseminated but ultimately unconvincing as it perpetuates stupid stereotypes and "reasons" via logical fallacy.

Next time... the victim mentality