On the eve of her husband’s election as Circus Peanut in Chief, Melania Trump broke a long campaign silence to address the topic of cyber-bullying. This scourge, she intimated in a speech that otherwise disclosed her teen crush on dreamy President Reagan, would be her central focus as First Lady. No boy or girl should be bullied online!
Coming as it did from the spouse of a troll, this declaration was a bit rich. Just how one advocates for a kinder online culture while also campaigning for a Twitter account from which brutal hyperbole pops like flatus is anybody’s guess.
Equally mysterious, though, is the near-universal call to clean up the latrine of the internet. As though such a thing could ever be done. From both conservative and progressive commentators, the cry comes to correct the crimes of millions nonetheless. “Words have weight,” says Tara Moss in her new ABC documentary Cyberhate. This view of language as the world’s most significant force has been upheld by so many, from Jacques Derrida to Donald Trump himself.
For Trump, as for Andrew Bolt who is interviewed on Moss’s program, it is freedom of language that will guarantee broader freedom for all: we just need to stop those politically correct police! For Moss, as her every interviewee save for Bolt agrees, it is freedom from certain uses of language that will deliver the same guarantee.
For anyone who believes that there are conditions outside language, this show is not for you. Moss’s world is made entirely of language with almost nothing preceding it, and her guest list is made almost entirely of those who make its public use their paid labour.
“Like so much professional media, this program has professional media as its focus.”
Being such a worker myself, I do understand how draining, sometimes debilitating, online threats can prove. But, I also understand that my experience is not illustrative of the broader one. However, featured subject Van Badham, a writer, appears entirely convinced that her plight is representative. As does comedian Joel Creasey, one of several modestly known guests who explain just how much language has hurt them.
I’m sure this is true. Given that I remain in the care of a discount psychologist after twenty years of similar shit, I could not sincerely urge my media peers to “harden up”. I would urge anyone, however, producing a documentary about the newly emerged phenomenon of cyber-bullying to seek comment from well outside the knowledge class. My problems are not everybody’s problems.
If Badham or I are assailed online, we can rely on broad support. Heck, we can even be paid to write entire moving memoirs about our harrowing experience just as soon as it unfolds. These are not luxuries enjoyed by a majority of internet users. To continually draw parallels between a cultural elite—that’s what we are; you can tell, because we keep being invited to use our words with maximum “weight”—and everyday people strikes me as reprehensible.
What does the young woman facing online threats of rape have to learn from me or Badham, women whose work it is to publicly speak? The answer of Moss and several of her knowledge worker subjects is “never to be silenced” and to continue to speak powerfully about being a woman. It seems not to occur to any participant in this program that most women on the internet simply speak about everyday things. The courageous injunction to “never be silenced” is addressed entirely to those media workers who speak about their marginalised identity category. I don’t know where this leaves a majority who are attacked when, say, posting pictures of their dinner or their new kitten.
Like so much professional media, this program has professional media as its focus. The lives of writers and entertainers are now so commonly held by other writers and entertainers to be the most “relatable” ones. Which is perplexing. This is an era where many consumers spit the phrase “mainstream media”. This is an era where prominent media and celebrity endorsement worked to undermine the election chances of a presidential nominee. This is an era where people have good cause to have the shits with a media class whose whining, both progressive and conservative, comes from deep within its own arse. Which might have been an interesting question for Moss to ask of her subjects, actually: do you think there’s a reason that people who work in media cop it?
“There is a little practical advice on this show for the everyday victim. Don’t engage with abusers. Do be aware of your legal rights. There’s some really impractical advice, too…”
Per Married at First Sight, there’s a little neuroscience thrown in. Moss pops herself in an MRI machine and reads offensive tweets. By these means, we can all say, “See! Look at the brain chemistry changing,” and agree that the immaterial nature of language becomes material in the brain. Neuroscience’s unreliable status as a science notwithstanding.
There is a little practical advice on this show for the everyday victim. Don’t engage with abusers. Do be aware of your legal rights. There’s some really impractical advice, too, especially as Moss cheers on the activist Carly Findlay for her empowering decision to post on Reddit*—please, god, never do this—and several interview subjects call for an end to anonymity online. A proposal that would have quashed the formation of movements like Black Lives Matter or the Arab Spring. Nearly everyone asks for harsher legal penalties and wonders why the police aren’t doing anything. Which are only questions you can ask in a world where language has the most weight.
None of this is to suggest that cyber-bullying is not a harmful practice or a topic with which we should not engage. It is to urge for a better intellectual framework when discussing it. “Words have weight,” sounds like a smart thing to say. But it excuses the person saying it from examining those other heavy things in the world. This program is about as post-material as it gets.
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*An earlier version of this story mistakenly identified the web-forum at which Ms Findlay posted. The author’s apologises. This has been corrected.
[box]Cyberhate with Tara Moss is on ABC2 this Wednesday, March 15 at 9.30pm[/box]
