Elizabeth Plank is a textbook 21st century public intellectual. Education: she attended McGill University, at which she was on the Dean Honor List, and received her master's degree from the London School of Economics in social policy with specialities in behavioral science and gender studies. Academia: through an exchange program, she worked briefly at the University of Copenhagen, and after finishing her studies at the London School of Economics, she also held positions there as a research assistant and behavioral science consultant. Career: Plank works in various areas of media and communication, having held positions from editor to journalist to web show host. Since her area of expertise is policy in relation to behavior and gender issues, Plank's content usually focuses on "millennial perspective on politics, women's issues, and reproductive rights."
The problem with public intellectuals, of course, is that they are not all-knowing or unbiased, and blindly following and agreeing with them is counterintuitive to the point of their work. How do we then keep the spirit of public intellectuals alive without falling into this Kantian idea of guardians of enlightenment who lead the sheep? Stephen Mack offers an answer:
...It needs to begin with a shift from "categories and class" to "function." That is, our notions of the public intellectual need to focus less on who or what a public intellectual is – and by extension, the qualifications for getting and keeping the title. Instead, we need to be more concerned with the work public intellectuals must do, irrespective of who happens to be doing it.So, let us stray for a moment from Plank's credentials and actually step backward to a key question: what is the use of a public intellectual? One New York Times article points out the important distinction that a public intellectual is not just an academic or a journalist. Another article emphasizes that the true public intellectual is somewhat of an "outsider" and believes "reason and truth could triumph universally through the transformation of public opinion." Stephen Mack's article mentioned earlier also notes that the public intellectual should capture some kind of "anxiety." In short, I would assess that the use of the public intellectual is in their hybrid perspective of expert and critic, as someone who can keep their audience grounded and informed but also can inspire engagement, questioning, maybe even flat-out controversy.
This leads me to the early work of Elizabeth Plank. Plank could have gone into pure policy or journalism, but she chose to write for the Huffington Post, a site which produces a mix of news and blog content. Her work has also revolved around progressivism, sexism, and how politics and culture interlock. A young, female, budding writer fixated on such issues working for a liberal, online source is certainly not the picture of the establishment, and from the beginning, Plank has used her approachable writing style and obligatory action plug to get the average person thinking about what gender inequality looks like in everyday life. Her first article was about the Amateur International Boxing Association requiring female boxers to wear skirts. In a slightly casual but still fluid manner, Plank describes why forcing female athletes to don skirts is such a problem (hint: skirts have nothing to do with boxing). The most notable part of this article is that she includes a link to a petition against the proposed skirt rule, urging readers to voice their disapproval of this sexist idea. In another article under the Huffington Post, Plank writes a comprehensive piece about the wage gap between white men and women of different races and ethnicities. At the end of her post, she includes the hashtag #WithoutTheWageGapIWould, encouraging her audience to express their own difficulties with the wage gap, and then lists things employers and employees can do about the gap.
I will address exactly how Plank persuades her audience later in this post, but here, I would like to note the crucial part of Plank's content that not only qualifies her as a public intellectual but also makes her an exceedingly good one - Plank consistently prompts people to act on the issues she discusses. She is not a passive commentator, she is not a curious reporter, she is, at the core, an activist. She motivates people to bring about the change they want to see, and that's what sets her apart from mere "laptop warriors."
Plank built the bulk of her career through Mic.com, at which she has worked for four years now. In 2015, two years after she started at Mic, she was placed in Forbes' legendary "30 Under 30" list for her engaging content and for doubling site traffic. Her work has often "gone viral," and she is responsible for social media hashtag movements like #AllMenCan, which, similarly to #WithoutTheWageGapIWould, asks her audience to get involved in the discussion and contribute their views on how they and others can create a more equal world. How does Plank manage to regularly snag the attention of the notoriously fickle people of the Internet?
From the start of Plank's public intellectual streak, she has been careful to stay away from overly flowery language, jargon, or expecting her audience to know everything about the issues prior to viewing her content. She commits to the "translation" of deeply rooted controversies for the average citizen, even now, despite the fact she is a more widely recognized figure. In 2016, Plank wrote an article on the Orlando shooting, in which she cited several key pieces of legislation necessary for contextualizing her article while also sprinkling the post with more colloquial terms and humor. For instance, she explains the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act plainly and solemnly, while a few paragraphs before, she writes, "North Carolina has literally politicized where transgender and gender nonconforming people can pee." Plank is able to hit at the hard stuff and also make it relatively easy to digest, and this approach to "reason and truth to transform public opinion" has been, evidently, enormously successful.
By the time she started working at Vox just about a year ago, Plank had started to use humor and social media more and more. In the first installment of her award-winning Vox 2016ish video series, which is also posted on Youtube, Plank interviews Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau, interjecting facts, bystander commentaries, and serious questions with her now characteristic humor: endearingly dorky behavior, meaningful pauses and delivery for emphasis, and sarcasm. In a video on Vox's Facebook from three weeks ago, Plank hilariously engages with the discussion of our new Cabinet in a satirical advertisement. In an ironically cheery tone, the video examines the disturbingly discriminatory platforms of newly appointed members. Plank masterfully uses her humor to highlight how ridiculous and actually upsetting she finds the state of affairs in America today, and with thousands of likes and hundreds of shares, she is clearly striking a chord with the online community.
There is also a huge advantage to using Twitter hashtags (which can get heinous, I know). Plank understands that asking her readers and viewers to contribute their own perspectives can have an entirely different effect on people. While people who dislike Plank may disagree with her purely on the grounds that they don't like her or her humor or her subject matter or whatever it may be, seeing people you know and care about post their everyday experiences can really change your opinion. I revisited the wage gap Twitter hashtag, and here are a few of the many testimonies. #WithoutTheWageGapIWould:
- better provide for my family
- not have to explain that student debt is a great burden on women
- not have to see fellow women as competitors
- not feel compelled to speak in a more "girlish" manner
Taking issues as big and historically tense as sexism and framing them in this kind of everyday way, a form of content translation in itself, demonstrates very easily to people the impact and injury certain groups may feel, how discrepancies in treatment influence policy, and how policy cycles back to inform our culture.
In some of the articles mentioned previously, critics of the public intellectual seem to condemn those who try to uphold the title today via the Internet. Things like "clicktivism," or online activism, are a huge point of contention with the left, and despite the indisputable popularity and power of it, social media is often seen as unhealthy, even a menace to society. But Elizabeth Plank embraces the power of the Internet. She engages extensively through her online writings and on social media platforms, making her content more accessible to her young, progressive audience. She has spread her discussions on sexism and related policy matters, explained the complexities of these issues, and most importantly, incorporated ways for her readers to stay educated, get talking, and empower themselves.
So, once again: how do we then keep the spirit of public intellectuals alive without falling into this Kantian idea of guardians of enlightenment who lead the sheep? The key to success that Plank has demonstrated in her incredible growth in just five short years is the incorporation of audience participation. No one wants to just hear facts, no one wants to just hear opinion. What people want is for them to feel heard, for their issues to be addressed, for them to be able to do something. And on that, Elizabeth Plank delivers.
