Hey guys big brother is watching and it seems he might be family!
There is a new site called NoHomophobes.com that is monitoring the number of times many commonly-used anti-gay terms -- including "faggot" and "dyke" -- are used daily, weekly and yearly on Twitter.
Hey I wonder if they can set up a similar site to monitor how many times the N word is used or worse Kardashian....lol.
Guys I went to the site and it is truly amazing how this thing works. The site not only keeps track of the terms it momentarily flashes the Twitter ID of the person and the context and Tweet in which the term was used. Can you say, Busted!
You can see in the snapshot I took above just how many times certain terms like "faggot" and "nohomo" were used just today!
The numbers are pretty incredible. According to the site "so gay" was mentioned over 800,000 times since July and seemingly the ever popular term "faggot" has been mentioned over 2.4 million times in the Twittersphere!
I am not sure what surprised me the most: how high the numbers tabulated or the fact that all my high school bullies are now on Twitter and have no social life.
We are all familiar with the headlines of bullying which has become even more pervasive with the use of social media. Remember the good old day when you knew you were OK if you could outrun your bully, not so much these days.
Youth are being targeted through social media and the teasing and taunts have reached epidemic levels.
Dr. Kristopher Wells, the Associate Director of University of Alberta’s Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services, says that their agenda was to highlight the "astonishing" frequency in which homophobic language is used in our society.
Dr. Wells shared a tweet from one youth, "Now you know my daily reality.'"
"Faggot" Tweeted 218,946 last week.
I guess it will be 218,947 after I tweet this post. Sad.
Wow
Posted by: shyla | 09/27/2012 at 04:02 PM
Professor, I think we have two problems at work here.
1) People who are bullies, who believe that if a person does not agree with their viewpoints, it gives them the right to result to childish name calling.
2) People who believe that words don't really matter that much...and this group is actually the one that scares me the most because of the power that their words really do have.
I'm rereading "Metaphors We Live By" (Lakoff & Johnson). It's a linguistic book I got in college. These two linguist propose that not only are words powerful but that they actually profoundly effect how we perceive the world around us - especially when we are referring to abstract concepts. When we talk about love, we have to frame it in terms of something more concrete. For example, take the notion "Love is fire". We can see this at work in our normal language. "I'm consumed by him.", "She's hot.", "My heart burns for you." (even though that last one is a little hokey). Of course there are many, many concepts in our culture that are defined in terms of something more physical or concrete. The funny thing is that we ACT like love is fire. We try to get close the one we love, but not too close, or we'll "get burned". So we do this little dance with each other trying to get close enough for comfort but not close enough to get hurt.
My point is - language IS powerful, and it DOES matter what we say because we are constantly adding to the discourse and culture with our language.
I wish more people considered what they say before opening their mouths. Bullying and belittling is never okay or acceptable. Period. I'm glad that these folks are bringing this to attention. We need more of that. Recognition that there is a problem is the first step to solving it.
Posted by: HannaH Jane | 09/27/2012 at 04:38 PM
Hannah,
You are so correct that words and language have power and we have to take some accountability in how we use those words and power. Whether it is homophobic, sexist or racial slurs or even attempting to co opt terms like the N word we have to recognize the power and intent behind their use. Thank you for adding some significant points of discussion on this topic.
Posted by: professorlocs | 09/28/2012 at 06:26 AM