DW 2b

In my last post, I summed up information on the appropriation of AAVE (and a little bit of the discussion of it), on facebook.com. Now something very interesting about analyzing facebook, is that almost all of the users provide pictures of themselves that represent them in posts and if their pages are visited. Therefore, it seems to take away a lot of the annouminity of the internet, at least if one is willing to assume that most people put up actual pictures of themselves.

Adam J. Banks, in his writing "Taking Black Technology Seriously", talks about the appropriation of AAVE on the internet. He wrote this in 2005, so the concepts and examples he gives are relatively current, and so can be considered applicable even today. A main point in his writing is that the internet's language is almost entirely oriented to the persona of a typical white male user. Facebook provides perfect examples of this, since almost all of the ads and interface are in SE, and address issues that would be of concern to middle to upper-middle class people. They are about sporting events, video games, and dating sites, at least on my account. I do know that they also change depending on the information you provide about yourself, however it is important to note that there is nothing in one's profile that identifies their race. Therefore, the ads will not specifically target one based on race, which is probably a good thing, as the types of ads that come up could easily be very stereotypical and controversial.

What I found to be very interesting though, is that AAVE seems to actually be portrayed in a more correct format on facebook, when it is used. Some of the examples that Banks gives involve just simple phrases like "Hit me up", which actually don't even sound too much like AAVE at all (perhaps the expression is believed to be originated from it). His examples of tonal semantics pretty much say that when a word is completely capitalized or put in parenthesis to show an action (e.g. (((hugs)))), it portrays usage of AAVE. To be quite honest, this almost seems untrue to me, simply because I also portray actions when I chat with friends (although like *hugs* instead), and all capital letters in a word always imply a tone of excitement of anger, regardless of the dialect used. On the other hand, my examples included double negatives, ommission of -g's on the endings of words, and slang like "phat". These examples are much more useful if one is trying to show how AAVE is appropriated on the internet, and it actually seems to me that Banks' examples are more useful in supporting my theme that when AAVE is used, it is almost always used in bits and pieces.

If Banks' was trying to specifically target black users who use AAVE, a site like Blackplanet is probably a good place to look. I did not specify such a thing when I started searching, so on facebook, I actually found that a lot of the appropriation of AAVE was done by non African Americans. Also, sometimes the person using AAVE had a profile picture that did not actually show somebody (usually a drawing of some sort instead). They very well could simply be a non-African American who's incorrect usage of AAVE could very well be a form of stereotyping. Regardless, the appropriation can be found on both sites, but I would argue that the fact that it is on facebook stands against Banks' supposed assumption that AAVE is appropriated mainly in "underground" websites.