Submitted by jenny on November 29, 2006 - 2:17pm
I've been catching up on discussions about this tricky MLK URL fiasco. Seems that some jerk has created a racist page on Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet the URL (martinlutherking [dot] org) would make it seem as if this is a legit site for learning about King. One trip to the site should make it pretty obvious that this is a racist site with zero cred. Should is the keyword in that sentence. As Jessie Daniels explains, however, the truth is that this realization doesn't hit some vistors:
If you look at the Alexa Web service rankings (which tracks website traffic), for the cloaked white supremacist site (www. martinlutherking. org) and for the legitimate civil rights site put up by the King Center (www.thekingcenter.org), the number of hits are almost identical and in the tens of millions. In my research, young people (ages 15-19) were unable to distinguish between these sites in meaningful ways. One young person referred to both sites as “biased” because one was “created by an individual” (the cloaked site) while the other was “created by King’s widow” (the legitimate site).
Blimey. Obviously, the scary aspect of this site's Google ranking is that students tend to read the first thing that pops up on a search for their topic. That's why some people decided to respond with good ole' fashion Google bombs. Take down the site's chances of being read by raising the Google index of "legit" sites, such as the King Center's page. Still, say the rhetoric folks, it's more important that we teach students to look beyond Google index rankings as some kind of legitimation. Heck, we might even focus on something about ethos. But Google bombs work, too.
This thread around the web caught my attention because I'm currently writing about MLK's rhetoric and the issue of circulation. Notice here that what is at stake here is a rhetorical matter: a distortion of King's actual impact and social effect. Sites like the racist martinlutherking [dot] org risk obscuring the actual message King crafted, as well as his lasting rhetorical legacy. But, at the same time, notice that the rhetorical counter-response has little to do with the content of any message. The Google bomb has more to do with a force of circulation and de-circulation. More powerful (perhaps) than fighting that idiot racist page with counter-discourse is to simple take it "out" of circulation. Break it off from the active ecology. You can do this through Google bombs or by the more savvy "nofollow."
This make me wonder how--or if--we address circulation in rhetorical pedagogy. We are rich in content-oriented pedagogy. (The "fight discourse with discourse" method, if you will.) But what of this "no follow" rhetoric?
this reminds me of the days earlier this semester when three preachers came to campus wearing ALL HOMOS GO TO HELL t-shirts. one of my colleagues -- i think he's a lecturer in CAS, but, despite my efforts, i've not been able to find out who/where about him -- listened for a while with his students and then, after -- hmmm -- citing aristotle and "reason-giving" -- argued to the assembled that the best thing to do would be to LEAVE rather than to listen. a bunch left, but the spectacle continued. spatial circulation? or a more oral/f2f sense of circulation??
jenny -- i'd love to hear where michael warner gets you and doesn't get you as you think about/play with circulation. been too long. :/
Tempus loquendi, tempus tacendi
As a very smart grad student mentioned tonight, the rhetorical tactic might be best described as "divestment."
yesh ... so many student coalitions were successful at getting universities to divest from their holdings in south african-apartheid capital-grubbing ventures in the 1980s.... nice to see, again, how tropes scope and "reduce" to attempt to explain persons and movements. here's to very smart graduate students....