It is undeniable at this point that there is an active memetic war being waged online that does not respect the boundaries of those still developing but has cleverly positioned itself to profit off the market gaps left by alienated and outdated models of identity. BAP follows in the wearied footsteps of the increasingly sidelined veteran of the high school football field of the alt-right, Jordan B. Peterson, in playing Fagen to those underserved by watered-down neoliberal gruel that tastes of absolutely nothing and malnourished lines of little Oliver Twists who beg for more.
Teacher librarians must be increasingly vigilant to counter the predations of such “perverts” lurking outside the gates of male fragility. Opening conversations around the intersection of self-image, emerging ideological identity, and relationship of trust with media can be supported by sharing with students knowledge of the stratified nature of information and truth increasingly sublimated in digital landscapes. This is critical as we have witnessed in Melbourne recently as communities of insurrectionists have moved to darker parts of the information forest, escaping algorithms of the mainstream but becoming increasingly lost in its depths. During the period of the #murdochriots, the diverse community of opponents to public health and the interventions of the Andrews government found themselves cowering in darker and darker circles of paranoia, their walled citadels exposed as grass huts torched by an embattled and angered segment of society far more digitally literate. The collapse boarded on the cruelest of revenge scenarios in which those once threatened and intimidated get in their kicks.
For those invested in true social change, this sea change exposed some unquestionably pent-up attitudes of exhaustion with late neoliberalism, that has re-branded itself as post-truth. Playing tricks on those less able than oneself should offend the values of any true, blue Aussie. The symbolic violence to legitimate protest movements visited upon the steps of the Shrine does not excuse the manipulation and downright mean-spirited bamboozling of the illiterate. (Significantly, most of the taunts from the Left mocked the vernacular of the rioters.) TLs are challenged to address how to best foster and cultivate attitudes and dispositions towards the hostile battleground of information in a way that balances the need for community defense with mercy and restorative measures to heal those who fall casualty to malicious manipulations of ideologues and their competing political agendas.
Dickensian as it may be, the automated revolution, flows on through our broken cultural matrices with an irresistible force. Channeling the flow of information like chi, TLs know the old rites and rituals of information foraging still reveal the same founts of knowledge established long ago but can engage in the alchemy of transition, mixing and blending discourses, fabulating the digital environment instead of terrorizing it. (Masny & Cole, 2009)
Masny, D & Cole, DR, Multiple Literacies Theory: A Deleuzian Perspective, Sense Publishers (2009)