DW2a

After a bit of research, I have decided to look at facebook as a popular culture site, simply because it has a very large user-base, which is frequently on and updating their profiles. As for where to look on the site, I think it is most likely best to look at the walls of many different people (not necessarily African American), and see if some different aspects or forms of AAVE are discussed or appropriated. However I also think I might want to look outside my own "circle" of friends, so I might also want to search for certain groups that may be related to AAVE, and see what I can come up with. Chances are, it will not be discussed to often, but there should be a good amount of appropriation.

A good point and an interesting thing to analyze, would probably be that although some forms of AAVE are used on facebook, it most likely is never used completely on such a public site, which is not exclusive or largely composed of AAVE speakers/writers. Most likely, many of the posts or walls will simply have comments mixed with some AAVE concepts, and then other forms of SE or computer jargon/lingo.

For example, I found a wall posting that read, "love deezz nuts you aint gettin no money niggaaa, hahaha jk". Now this setence does involve the use of a double negative (ain't, no), and uses "deezz" in place of "these", but it ends with "jk". Now obviously this posting was between two black friends, as the posting ends with "niggaaa", which is commonly not used by whites or most other races. I also found another posting by searching for a group called "homies" and found a post that read, "yo yo yo lookin for a dj to do some hip hoppin, performin, recordin.. anyone feelin da west coast smooth n phat beatz, lets hook up." Now this one doesn't use a ton of AAVE elements (omittion of -g's, "da", etc...), but the thing that is important about it, is that it is not a post from an African American. Rather, it is actually a post from a white user (at least going off of his profile picture).

The examples I provided above were all pretty informal greetings between friends, however I did also find an interesting quotation on a facebook group's homepage. The quotation is a conversation with Paul Mooney, and covers why he believes it is OK to call other black people "nigga". There are some points in the quote that have some elements of AAVE, but a large majority of the quote is in SE. It could be because the quote was given under an interview situation, but it does seem strange that such a topic that does actually discuss a word used commonly in AAVE, would not be written in any form of AAVE (perhaps it was to convey the point to a wider audience?).

To make my point that AAVE is not used often in a full conversation (or never used throughout a whole sentence even), it is important that I take samples from all over. At the same time, I think it is also important that I use examples from not just African American speakers, because that would be ignoring a large part of the facebook population that uses certain elements. Some people may just use the terminology though (bling, golddigger, etc...), so most likely those kind of posts should be avoided, since they more represent a connection to pop culture, in which those words are commonly used.