Freaks and Queers

"I learned early that words could bruise a body". - Clare

Retard.
At one point in history, calling someone mentally retarded was stickily a medical diagnosis. Now, it is thrown around in middle school hallways, jokes at parties, and has developed as a term that separates one person from another while not within its original origins.
You're so retarded translates into: "that was really dumb of you to say". Its a denotation of intelligence and separates someone by calling them into a different group.
Not that any kind of derogatory word is ever okay to call someone, but retard is one word that I can not tolerate.

USA Haters

UNL Haters is a website that specifically looks at tweets and Facebook posts said by UNL students that are considered racist, homophobic, and sexist. They are submitted through screen shots by other students and placed on this website to "expose tweets from haters, especially those which were deleted".
NoHomophobes.com is a website that in real time posts tweets that have the words, "no homo", "faggot", "so gay", and "dyke". The sites purpose is to be a "social mirror" that brings light to the fact that we use these words not always to be hurtful but to show how often we do it without thinking what we're saying.
After looking into both of these sites it is clear that both sites are not trying to bring out bashing on others, but are merely trying to shed light on a situation that is tolerated. On the UNL Haters website they state, "not everyone featured are haters, many are simply ignorant". I believe that both websites are doing their job as providing our society with a "social mirror", as NoHomophobes.com described it.
I picked the 10 most resent post from both sites and compiled my research from those. From the information from UNL Haters, their tweets and posts range a lot in time difference. Their most recent post was added a month a go and the one before that was added 2 months ago. The 10th post was from 3 moths ago. Out of these 10 posts 60% of them were tagged racist, 30% were tagged homophobic, and 10% was tagged xenophobic. 50% of the 10 were written by the same person, as well as 30% were written by another person. Although it is not known who submits these tweets to the website, one can assume there is at least a few "members" who monitor tweets and send in those which are offensive.
NoHomophobes.com is different that UNL haters in the fact that it is a live feed, constantly streaming in tweets the moment they are submitted to the internet and flagged if they contain any of the words mentioned above. From the beginning of today until I took this screen shot there had been this many recordings of these phrases.

Out of those tweets, I chose the 10 most recent tweets. Out of the 10 tweets 60% had "faggot" and 40% had "no homo". 100% of the sampled tweets did not use the language in the true since of the word. Because this is not monitored by a specific person who submits every tweet, most likely the people who are on this website don't even know that their tweets are being placed here. Not only that, but the sample size isn't limited to a small community, such as UNL, and is more broad and does not single anyone out.

Fan Culture

Gee suggests that there is a certain "identity kit" that defines a particular discourse as "a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group of 'social network". There are many discourses one can be apart of and one of those that I am going to talk about today is the discourse of fan culture and fan art. 

Fan artists create pieces of art based on their favorite characters using many different mediums. Fan artists use anything from painting, photography, literature, and photoshop to interpret and create their own ideas about a particular fandom. The artists, while maintaing their own ideas and understandings of their art still follow and stay within the "guidelines" of their discourse and fandom. 

Lothian states, "writings should be understood as a mode of performance rather than as literary practice, that fan culture is better understood through the acts of writing than by way of completed texts". I think that this is a good look at how this discourse of fan art choses to be seen. They pride themselves in the fact that they are anonymous and that they have the freedom to chose how they interpret a certain piece and that they are "judged" based on how they execute what they are trying to get across as their idea. 

The Need for a Better America - Online Discourse Community Analysis

The Need for a Better America

            When I heard about what had happened in Newtown, CT. on December 16, 2012 my heart broke. 26 people died that day, 20 of them children. Not only did this hit home because I want to be an elementary teacher one day, but I just thought of my niece and nephews and the innocent families. After this incident it seemed that American rose up and came together by supporting the families by donating money, sending letters of condolences, and those who are fighting for tighter gun control laws to be put in place.

I chose to look into #Sandyhook on Twitter because I wanted to see who was saying what and what points they were trying to get across. I looked at 40 random tweets on Twitter looking up “#Sandyhook”. I chose 40 because I thought that it would be an appropriate sample of tweets and would provide an accurate depiction of the people tweeting so that I am able to generalize all of the tweets attached to Sandy Hook. It was my intentions to randomly select tweets from the day of the tragedy, but to my surprise there have been far too many tweets for me to look up what was said on the day that this had happened, so I decided I would pick tweets that were tweeted in the range from just a couple of minutes ago to a few days ago. I thought this would be interesting to look about because I thought it would provide a more broad range of attitudes and increase the different categories.

I had expected the tweets to be focused on the families and the grievances that were still taking place, but the top four categories that I came up with were related with the Sandy Hook hoax, gun control/NRA, and supporting the community.  The percentages are: 

• ·      Sandy Hook hoax video: 60%

o   Believing the hoax video: 79%

o   Not believing the hoax video: 21%

• ·      Supporting the community: 28% 

• ·      Gun control/NRA: 12% 

 I had never seen the supposed “hoax” video over the Sandy Hook shooting nor did I hear about it, so this shocked me when I was looking over my sample. The direction of my research shifted after gathering this information. After seeing the overwhelmingly belief in the hoax, I decided to take a look at the video, “The Sandy Hook Shooting – Fully Exposed”, constructed by a YouTube account by the name of, ThinkOutsideTheTv. Snopes.com is a website that is devoted to uncovering the truth about urban legends, Internet rumors, e-mail forwards, and other stories of questionable origin. Snopes.com is a well-known resource for validating and debunking such stories. According the Snopes.com the purpose of the hoax video is to reveal that “the Sandy Hook massacre didn’t happen and the people we see being interviewed are “crisis actors” hired to play the role of parents, etc., or it did happen but was the work of the government who used Lanza to carry out the massacre. The purpose was to move the anti-gun movement forward”. After critiquing and researching all that was brought up in this video, Snopes.com has concluded that the conspiracy video is false.

This isn’t the first time that America has come up with a conspiracy behind what the media tells us. It happens with almost every major American event. The moon landing, J.F.K., Pearl Harbor, 9/11, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and many more this has been going on for decades. In Michael Shermer’s article, Why People Believe in Conspiracies, he explains how these theorists come up with such ideas. Shermer (2009) states, “Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency. Add to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believe) and the hindsight bias (which tailors after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition”. I think sometimes people get angry in these situations and keep looking for answers and can’t accept the fact that some people are just sick and wrong. A lot of the blame has been put on the government because it’s something still around that we can put the blame on, rather than the shooter who shot himself at the scene.

60% of the tweets I collected were about the hoax video, 79% of those believed what they heard in the video, stating things like:

I think it is really interesting that people are taking what ThinkOutsideTheTv’s video is saying for fact even though they have not proved his arguments sound themselves. Every point that was made in the video has been proven false by other sources, but this is not what is getting the attention. The people who are watching this video don’t really know what the facts are but they are jumping on the bandwagon and acting like they do, completely supporting everything that is stated in this video while prompting their friends and everyone who is “following” them on Twitter to jump on the bandwagon too.

As a culture we are driven by hoax and scandals. Not only has American questioned tragedies before this, but we also thrive for it. Take for example gossip magazines, they witness a couple talking, snap some pictures of it, and the next day have constructed a completely false story with little to no facts stating that one partner hit the other and are in the middle of a nasty divorce. Us as consumers read this and completely take this magazine’s word for it. And as a result start tweeting and gossiping about the scandal all the while the couple is more than okay and just had a disagreement over something little. Why does this fascinate us? Maybe because now, it makes us feel better about our own relationship.

I believe this is similar to the construction of conspiracy theories. Why is there a need for them, and why do people believe them so easily? Could it be so that American seems safer? If we deny that someone actually has the nerve to walk into an elementary school full of innocent people and children to kill them, then that means this was a planned event and that random people like Lanza don’t really exist. I guess the world seems safer in that aspect. 

works cited:

Shermer, Michael. "Why People Believe in Conspiracies: Scientific American." Scientific American 10 

          Sept. 2009: n. pag. Scientific American. Scientific America, Inc. Web. 02 Feb. 2013.

Mikkelson, Barbara, and David P. Mikkelson. "Sandy Hook Exposed." Snopes.com: Sandy Hook Hoax Video. 

         Urban Legends Reference Pages, 19 Jan. 2013. Web. 02 Feb. 2013.