Monthly Archives: October 2016

From Internet Rules!…to Bad Hombres?

A couple weeks ago, I attended the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) in Berlin.  This conference has been held every year since 2000, and it’s dedicated to exploring all things internet-related = it’s impressively multidisciplinary.   This year’s theme was “Internet Rules!”  (polysemously referencing ideas related to who rules the internet?” as well as “what are the rules of the internet?”).  I attended 4 days of mind-blowingly good presentations, on topics ranging from humorous memes, to peer economy platforms and post-colonial computing, to what happens in our digital afterlives, to big-data visualizations.

I participated in a panel on “Sociolinguistic perspectives on everyday digital practices,” where my colleagues talked about topics such as: academics’ stances on digital writing practices (David Barton), the role of hashtags in Hong Kong’s umbrella movement (Carmen Lee), and the implications of surveillance for our digital interactions (Rodney Jones).  In my own talk, I used the conference theme as a point of departure, in exploring various types of “rule-breaking” in the Amazon review space – as well as related metadiscourse(s).

Returning from Berlin, I bounced right back into the classroom, and in my UG “Language & Society” course, one of our readings this week was Jane Hill’s “Language, Race and White Public Space.”  (I make it a point to work some discussion of “mock Spanish” into any Sociolinguistics course that I teach…but this is the first time I’m teaching this content to undergraduates.)  More than half of the students seemed to understand how covert racism operates in the examples that Jane Hill presents…but I could tell that a few students still weren’t completely convinced, as they tried to argue for alternative interpretations of the “mock Spanish” examples discussed (e.g., “they’re just having fun,” ” lighthearted Spanish practice,” “I wouldn’t take it so seriously” …)

And then presidential debate #3 happened.  Any lingering doubts about the reality of mock Spanish were instantly erased: the following day, my students came to class and ALL they wanted to talk about was Trump’s use of “bad hombres”! As my colleague, Adam Schwartz, explains so beautifully in this post, “bad hombres” may be the most emblematic example of mock Spanish that we have seen to date.  And as it continues to generate more memes and become more embedded in our online collective consciousness, I know I’ll be using this example in my own teaching for many years to come.