Category Archives: Creativity

Ethics in Internet Research (Part 1): Responses to Online Harrassment

This post is the first in a series that will explore ethical issues in digital media research.

This week’s RDM guest blogger, Brooke Nelson, is a second year student at USF’s Master’s program in Applied Linguistics.  In addition to her studies focusing on Teaching English as a Second/Foreign language, Brooke has developed an interest in multimodal digital discourse analysis.  She recently presented her research at the SECOL and A-MODE conferences.

Brooke writes:

I’ve been working on this project about women’s responses to online sexual harassment since Fall 2018. Instagram accounts such as “ByeFelipe” have emerged as spaces where women can share and document instances of harassment and – in some cases – their own responses to such acts of online aggression. Women who have been targets of online harassment on Instagram as well as on popular online dating platforms (e.g., Tinder, Bumble) can post screenshots of abusive messages they have received to the “ByeFelipe” account and, by doing so, share their experiences with others.

I got it interested in this phenomenon because of my own experiences on dating apps and social media. I always knew how I responded to online harassment- with the utmost sass. My favorite was to give them the fictitious number- 1-800-NAH-PASS. I was also partial to sending their Tinder profiles to their girlfriends or wives. However, I had no idea about the creativity that other women employed.  Some of the interesting things I’ve found include the unexpected ways that women exploit different platform affordances as well as the types of intertextual references they draw on when they “clap back” to those who have harassed them.

The first example shows an instance of how one woman creatively incorporates a familiar  intertextual reference when responding to an unwelcome sexual message from a man.  In it, she responds with a slightly modified monologue from the classic film, The Godfather. This iconic movie scene is recontextualized by the female user for the purposes of objecting to the message sent by the male user, while at the same time humorously informing him that such a message is not only inappropriate but also disrespectful.

Next, in the following example, a woman shows how she exploited the platform affordances of Instagram to respond to a male user who sent her a sexually explicit photo.  After receiving the unwelcome photo from this man, the female recipient took a screenshot of a list of his Instagram followers, and threatened to forward his original message and photo to all of his female followers on the social media platform.

Along with this verbal threat, she also included a photo of the doll used in the Saw franchise, which the antagonist in the films uses to deliver horrifying ultimatums.  So in her response, this female user not only exploits the affordances of Instagram (forwarding the harassing message to the sender’s followers), but she also includes a multimodal resource (image of the doll from Saw), which happens to also be an intertextual reference to a popular film series.


Recently, I’ve been thinking about some of the complicated ethical issues that my research raises. My main question revolves around the second example. Is the (re-)posting of this image a type of “revenge porn”?

Revenge porn is typically considered the distribution of sexually explicit images or videos of individuals without their permission. For instance, websites like IsAnyoneUp,dedicated to sharing user-generated content, often featured revenge porn – unauthorized images of users’ former partners along with identifying information about them. As a response, several years ago local governments began to take action against revenge porn and its distribution. But getting back to my own research, Example 2 includes a screenshot that was posted to a public Instagram account, and it was likely posted without the subject’s permission. This begs the question: Is this a new form of revenge porn?

This question seems to evade an easy yes/no answer.  Yes, the example I provided is certainly sexually explicit, and yes, it was likely posted (on ByeFelipe, by the recipient of the image) without the permission of the individual depicted in the photo. However, the individual’s name is blocked out, his face is hidden, and his genitals are covered. Furthermore, the page’s creator edited the images, thus left no identifying information about him included in this post: no address, no social media handles, no location. (It is also worth pointing out that the person who was sent this photo likely did not give her permission to receive this type of image in the first place!) I would argue that the reposting of the image by the female social media user who received the uninvited image (along with her response to it) onto Bye Felipe is intended to draw public attention to the inappropriateness of this more widespread type of behavior (sending unsolicited sexually explicit photos) – and perhaps to also empower other women who are also the targets of online sexual harassment – rather than to publicly shame the individual person responsible for sending this one specific image.   While this question is too large to be thoroughly addressed in one blog post, it appears that with the rise of social mediapages like ByeFelipe, the debate over revenge porn is about to become even more complex.

Novelty Twitter Accounts

I’m preparing for my upcoming presentation at the ADDA-2 conference. ADDA is the perfect-sized conference, plus all of the presentations have something to do with online discourse, so it’s always inspiring and a great place to meet researchers with similar interests.  ADDA-2 will be held in Turku, Finland next month.

This year, I’ll be presenting a case study of two of the seven novelty Twitter accounts that are described in more detail in my forthcoming book.

For this presentation, I’ve decided to focus my analysis on the 2 novelty accounts that originally got me hooked on this topic: Kim Kierkegaardashian and Shit Academics Say.

There are some interesting differences between these accounts.  For example, Shit Academics Say speaks more from a voice of collective experience, whereas Kim Kierkegaardashian blends the voices of two real individuals, one living (mega-celebrity Kim Kardashian West) and one dead (19th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard).  The focus of my talk is on how, in spite of these differences, both accounts rely on a similar discourse strategy to construct their tweets: register incongruity.  Register incongruity refers to as a situation where you have a text in which most of the language is in a particular style or tone, except for a few words which are in a tone, or register, that is radically different from the rest.  While register is not a precisely defined concept, it is related to factors such as formality, literariness, standardness, and so on.  Register incongruity creates a clash of styles.

So, for instance, in the following Kim Kierkegaardashian tweet, we can see how two sociohistorically distinct voices, which represent extremely different concerns and realities are juxtaposed.

The Kardashian voice tends to center on themes such as fashion trends and beauty tips – as well as self-promotional discourses that are typical of celebrity tweets.  A novel twist is provided by the inclusion of additional elements that represent the voice of nineteenth-century existential philosopher, Kierkeggard: these include more profound themes of contemplation, despair, suffering, and so on.  Having these two distinct voices (or registers) appear side-by-side in every individual tweet – and the incongruity between those two registers – is the “formula” that underlies the verbal humor in the tweets posted on this account.

Similarly, several tweets from Shit Academics Say start out in one linguistic register, but end in a different one.  For instance, the tweet below begins with a cliché (X is like a box of chocolates), that is traceable to the popular film, Forrest Gump.  But the text following the colon continues in what might be called “academese,” a linguistic register that is characterized by its syntactic complexity, as well as specialized vocabulary specific to this register (words like scope, magnitude, competencies).

Therefore, even though the content and the topics posted on the two accounts are very different from one another, they both rely on the same discourse strategies to create humor.

How pronouns help attract online audiences

Today’s RDM guest blogger, Katharina Lohmann comes from the University of Bonn, in Germany. RDM is very pleased to be able to share Katharina’s work, about a very timely topic — language use in gaming videos. Katharina writes:

Photo: Controller by superanton

If you’re into video games or if you scroll through YouTube from time to time, chances are you’ve stumbled upon a “Let’s Play”. Although many variations of this type of video exist, the essence of it is easily explained: a gamer – the Let’s Player – records him/herself playing a game and simultaneously comments on their gameplay. Let’s Plays are highly popular on YouTube. The Let’s Players I’ve been studying have between 2-22 million YouTube subscribers. This means that Let’s Players are able to attract a huge anonymous audience to watch their videos without being able to immediately interact with them. So how do they do this?

YouTube’s Participation Framework

Linguist Marta Dynel suggests that communication on YouTube has two levels. The first consists of a speaker talking in front of a camera – either with the viewer in mind or addressing the viewer directly. On the second level the hearer interprets what the speaker has said. Building on this, I propose that Let’s Plays have three levels of communication. The first level takes place inside of the game. On the second level the Let’s Player interprets the in-game communication. On the third level the Let’s Player’s audience interprets the Let’s Player’s reaction to the game and the speech the Let’s Player addresses directly at them. Since the audience can’t interpret the first level communication on their own as they could when playing the game themselves, Let’s Players might try to make their videos appear more unmediated through their language. How can this be achieved with the help of personal pronouns?

The Pronoun “I”

To answer this question I transcribed the first 10 minutes of 9 Let’s Play videos and analyzed how often which personal pronoun is used, because personal pronouns demonstrate who we identify ourselves with and have an impact on the way we perceive relationships. When Let’s Players use the first person pronoun “I”, however, they do not always mean themselves. Instead they can equate themselves with the character they are playing.

10 I: just got MURDERD.

Obviously it’s not the Let’s Player who got murdered, but it’s his character that he is referring to. (Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to tell us about it :-).) The Let’s Player doesn’t simply talk about what has happened to his in-game self. He is his in-game self. This equation makes the Let’s Play appear more immediate to the viewer, as one level of mediation is erased in his talk.

“I do” vs. “We do”

One big challenge for Let’s Players is the conflict of trying to present the Let’s Play as a mutual experience shared by the Let’s Player and their audience, without being able to hide the fact that the Let’s Player is the only one who initiates the actions in the video. If the Let’s Player uses the pronoun “I”, they emphasize their role as the actual decision maker, as in the example below:

348 i don’t know if i’m gonna be able to beat this,

349 but i wanna at least lea:rn..,

350 how these work,

If, on the other hand, a Let’s Player uses the pronoun “We”, meaning the Let’s Player and the audience, the Let’s Player instead emphasizes the mutuality of the experience that is happening in the gameplay:

92 .t alright,

93 we’re in again.

94 (1.4) let’s see where we’re goin’.

When the Let’s Players seem to be unable to connect both concepts, there is a rapid change in the use of personal pronouns in their speech, as in this example:

424 we got a lot of stuff i wanted to do with you,

Here, the “we” indicates a collective decision, but the “i wanted” emphasizes that the decision was initiated by the Let’s Player.

All of this shows that language and the use of personal pronouns has the power to influence “the way we interpret our relationship with others” (Proctor & I-Wen Su). It can emphasize the distance between two people, but it can also help to reduce it, even if those people are being separated by two screens, time and space.

References

Dynel, M. (2014). Participation framework underlying YouTube interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 73, 37-52.

Lohmann, K. (2018). “We got a lot of stuff I wanted to do with you“ How personal pronouns help capturing the audience’s attention in Let’s Play videos on YouTube. (unpublished).

Proctor, K. & I-Wen Su, L. (2011). The 1st person plural in political discourse – American politicians in interviews and in a debate. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 3251-3266.

Example 1&4: EthosLab: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meSIp50ymkU Example 2: Markiplier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA5OMtKTbzc Example 3: Jacksepticeye: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9nL9qISMc

This post is based on my term-paper, written for my B.A. studies “English Studies” at the University of Bonn (Germany). Thank you to my lecturer Dr. Stefanie Pohle for her support!

Memes, old and new

Just when you thought the “cash me ousside” meme had come and gone…

My colleague, Erhan Aslan, and I have recently had an article appear in the Journal of Sociolinguistics about how YouTube users describe and assess the speech of Danielle Bregoli (the “cash me ousside” girl). The abstract is available online here , or you can email me if you’d like a copy of our article.

And a discussion about our article has already appeared on Reddit! Ah, how I love the endless recursivity involved in studying internet phenomena…

In case you haven’t been following the life of Danielle Bregoli, she’s got an active career as a rapper (she goes by the name of Bhad Bhabie), and a small country’s worth of followers on social media (over 15 million on Instagram alone).

Erhan and I have just launched Phase 2 of our study, in which we’ll be analyzing over 200+ different variations of the image macro shown above. Our focus this time will be on how meme creators exploit word play and other forms of linguistic humor.

And speaking of playful and humorous memes, this recent article in the Guardian showcases some delightful examples of parodies of the #himtoo campaign. These examples really highlight parody’s potential for serious critique!

mansplain, mansplaining, mansplained

Metapragmatics refers to the phenomenon of language use itself becoming the object of discourse.  As Judith Bridges (a current Ph.D. student in our Linguistics and Applied Language Studies program) has observed, the word “mansplain” is a perfect example of metapragmatics.  When a person says that someone else has “mansplained” a given topic, that speaker is not just providing a neutral account of what happened; instead, s/he is providing a particular interpretation of a prior interaction.

Furthermore, as Judith points out, “mansplain” is an especially interesting example to explore because it sheds light on gender-related norms, dynamics, and expectations in  communicative interactions.  In her article, just published in the journal, Discourse, Context and Media, Judith examines how the various meanings of “mansplain” (and related forms) are constructed and negotiated in a sample of 200 tweets and Facebook posts.

New research on Tumblr

In spite of being such a popular (and fascinating!) social media platform, not much academic research has been published about Tumblr.   A recent study suggests that this may be due to some of the following constraints:

“Severe research limitations are caused by the lack of demographic, geo-spatial, and temporal metadata attached to individual posts, the limited API, restricted access to data, and the large amounts of ephemeral posts on the site”

While these are limitations for carrying out certain types of research, they do not pose problems for the textual analysis of linguistic creativity and humor that I’ve been working on recently.  In fact, a former graduate student and I have just published a paper about popular “Chat” posts on Tumblr. Our article is available at Discourse, Context & Media: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211695817300326  In it, we illustrate  some of the discourse strategies that Tumblr content creators exploit in order to construct playful and humorous texts.

What goes on in the comments section below parody reviews on Amazon?

Have you ever wondered about whether or not anyone ever writes anything in that “Comments” section that’s found under each review on Amazon?  As far as most reviews go, I’ve noticed that some readers assign a vote of “helpful” if they like a particular review; however, I’ve also observed that the “Comments” sections usually remain pretty empty.

In the last year or so, I’ve been researching different aspects of parody reviews on Amazon.  And I’ve found that although users don’t typically comment on normal reviews… there are, in contrast, many comments in response to parody reviews of products like the following.

Over the last few weeks, my undergraduate research assistant, Chelsea Lo, and I have been building a data set of comments responding to parody reviews.  Our sample consists of nearly 300 comments responding to reviews written about 6 popularly-parodied products on Amazon.  Chelsea and I have found that the most common types of expressions that appear are ones which show a reader’s appreciation of the review writer’s creativity and cleverness, such as:

BEST. REVIEW. EVER.

or:

I keep coming back to giggle at this post.

or (one of our personal favorites):

I hope you got some college credit for this.

A few even took the form of mock wedding proposals:

Marry me. You are the man?/woman? of my dreams.

The next most common responses are those which pose some kind of a reply that’s directed to the review’s author. Often, these types of responses play along with joke, acting as though they inhabit the same fictional world that’s been created by the parody review writer.  For example, this commenter asks the author of one of the Three Wolf Moon T-shirt parody reviews for more information about the missing ending of the narrative he has crafted:

Hey what’s the end what happened between you and the asthmatic???? Don’t leave us all hanging!!!!! Did you end up ordering the shirt in newborn size? Hmmmmm???

These 2 types of responses account for over 80% of the comments in our sample. The remaining 20% of comments are things like: a reply to another commenter in the same strand  (“I second that impulse to “like.””); stand-alone laughter tokens, for example “LOL!! ” or “BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA“; or random popular culture references, like references to Star Wars, or to lyrics of popular songs.

We found only 2 instances of “policing behavior” (e.g., “Seriously?” , “GROW UP”  ) – and these followed some of the more political parody reviews of Avery Binders, which were associated with Mitt Romney’s now-famous “binders full of women” comment.

By and large then, Chelsea and I conclude that vast majority comments in response to parody reviews on Amazon are favorable, showing affiliation with and appreciation of their authors’ creativity and humor.

Restricted entry: online code-switching and long-distance belonging

This week’s RDM guest blogger, Antonella Gazzardi, takes us on a multilingual journey that started in Orlando’s Epcot center – and eventually found its way to Facebook.

Antonella writes:

I am interested in code-switching practices, their underlying creativity, and how they spill over into social media. I am referring to a way of playing with languages that is shared by a small community of practice I belong to – and Facebook is what allows me to be exposed to it daily. Our community consists of Italian expats who mix Italian and English in a distinctive way, which is very much tied to a specific work environment that we all shared for one year: Epcot’s Italian pavilion food & beverage facilities.

For people who must leave this environment when their visa ends and then scatter around the world, language practices that originally emerged in this face-to face context eventually leak over into social media communication, where it’s possible to reach many people across the globe with one fast, cheap, and simple click. So when a Facebook page was opened to share our memories , it was quickly flooded by comments reminiscing about those days, conveyed, of course, using the particular hybrid language that we have come to identify with our Epcot experience.

The most active participants in the FB group are former employees, who post, comment, and comment on comments, using a jargon that can only be understood if you are … one of us.   This is because some of the unique blends only make sense in that Italian-American working context.  Some of these expressions take on entirely new meanings, which are virtually obscure to outsiders – even if they are bilingual. I’ve been collecting samples of this context-specific language for roughly 8 months, and I have classified them in two major categories.

The first category is word blends and expressions that are context-specific to Orlando/Industry expats. For example, an Italian speaker who is fluent in English may quickly (and correctly) infer that “ciargiare” is an Italianized infinitive for “to charge,” since it has become common for many Italians with some knowledge of English to Italianize technology-related words in exactly the same way. These days, everybody understands “postare”, “taggare”, “hackerare”, or “spammare”, blends that bounce back and forth from offline to online exchanges.  So what exactly  is distinctive about our Facebook posts? This is where I think context, creativity, bilingualism, and code-switching all come into play in a uniquely clever way:

What is a cippettone? What does stampare mean here, if it is not the literal translation of “to print”– which it is not. What is pompa time for bananas? What does push push push and pusha babe! mean when the speaker does not specify what needs to be pushed? And, if one’s “final trip” is not the one to the graveyard, then what is it?

“Cippettone” is a blend of the English word “cheap” and the Italian suffix “-one,” which translates into a “big” whatever noun precedes it. In this case, the augmentative (“-one”) is pejorative in connotation: it refers to a very cheap patron. “Stampare” means to stamp checks, a metaphor for a priori adding gratuities to the bill based on the number of patrons. “Pompa time” is when the “pompatori” (literally, people who inflate) get into action, i.e. servers who are known to regularly make much more money than average ones. So “pompa time” is rush hour, when skilled servers can upsell and turn tables as fast as possible, which is what “push push push” and the blend “pusha babe!” mean. Of course, in so doing they make lots of money, affectively nick-named “bananas”, maybe because of their golden skin. And when their one-year work contract is over, it’s time to use  time left on their visa to travel around the United States before heading home: the “final trip.”

The second group of posts consists of somewhat less context-dependent, but still community-contingent, instances of code-switching used by expats for communicating specific types of information.  These language switches often refer back to a past event, or a memory of the time spent working at Epcot.  Here’s are a few examples from FB:

“Se per quelli che erano all’Alfredo, many years ago, ma ve lo ricordate Charlie, il cameriere brasiliano?”           (For those who worked at Alfredo’s, many years ago, do you remember Charlie, the Brazilian server?)

No way!! Il vino la sua ossessione!”                                    (No way! Wine was his obsession!)

“(…) Family numerosa !”                                                                   (Big family!)

These three comments, like many others, use Italian syntax and vocabulary for the most part, but occasional English phrases or words are dropped in that tie their authors back to this specific bilingual community. Because most of the members of the FB group are Italian, there is no need to use “many years ago”, “no way”, or “family” instead of their Italian counterparts here.

This language use is automatic, it expresses being part of a community, and it reinforces the bond shared by those who have had common experiences in this particular setting. In fact, I have found that this jargon is kept alive across continents by those of us who are former Epcot employees – but when we communicate online about things other than our Epcot experience, we very rarely code-switch.  Therefore, the mixing of codes that I have been studying is both functionally and contextually specific.

Woman Banned from Yelp! for Breaking Online Community Norms

One of the highlights from this semester has been my Lang & Tech students’ contributions to what I call “Digital Show & Tell.”  Each class session, a different student brings in some sample of internet discourse and explains to us what they find interesting about it.  We’ve talked about copypasta, Tumblr chats, CoffeeDad, Redditt’s photoshop battles, confessions on scarymommy.com, and many other weird, wonderful, creative – and very often, humorous – internet phenomena.

Today’s RDM guest blogger, Judith Bridges, chose to focus on one particular Yelp reviewer, who has been appearing on different social media sites for her uniquely irreverent approach to reviewing.

Judith writes:

My digital show-and-tell is the case of Nathalie Walker who wrote reviews of businesses on Yelp! where she went on dates, basing the review content exclusively on how the date went. If the date was a disaster, that business got 1 star. When the date resulted in a four-and-a-half-year-long relationship, that business got 5 stars.

Nathalie has Instagram  and Twitter accounts, where she posted screen-shots of her disorderly Yelp! reviews to share them with her friends. Below is an image she posted on Instagram of her first four date reviews on Yelp!:

Instagram YelpReviews

 

Soon after, she was notified by a Yelp Support employee named Pam that her behavior disobeyed Yelp’s Content Guidelines. Nathalie used this opportunity to ask Pam out on a date. Nathalie continued to share screenshots of her email dialogue with Pam on social media. Her multimodal communication practices, i.e. sharing screenshots on Instagram and Twitter of her unruly behavior on Yelp, eventually helped her date reviews go viral after Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, Yahoo, Self and other websites featured her hilarious story. She even got positive tweets from ex-boyfriends —  as well as the writer of the song alluded to in the review above.

I believe this example is notable because it shows how in online spaces, there are norms of communication, established by the online community, which regulate the discourse in that particular space. As Kiesler, Kraut, Resnick, and Kittur (2011) point out, “normative behaviors may be codified and articulated or may be left implicit, and they may be contested by some members at times, but most of the time, people will agree about behaviors that are acceptable, and those that are not” (p. 3). Rules for online communication can either be developed, negotiated and co-constructed by  users, or they can be set a priori by  moderators who regulate people’s communicative behavior (Kytölä & Westinen, 2015). When someone disobeys the set conventions in a particular online space, this behavior stands out. In some cases it can be considered trolling, but in  the case of Natalie W, her  unique approach to review writing makes her texts comical. For regulated sites like Yelp!, texts that challenge community norms are removed, but that didn’t stop Natalie W. from continuing the comedy show on other platforms, and this is likely what helped her story go viral.

Blommaert and Varis (2014) explain that virality comes from the re-entextualizations of existing signs, or “meaningful communicative operations that demand different levels of agency and creativity of the user” (p. 16). Although Blommeart and Varis (2014) focus on memes, I would argue that what Natalie W. has done on Yelp! (and sharing the screenshots on other social media) performs a similar action of taking something recognizable, giving it a new and unique twist , and re-contextualizing it across various social media sites.

It’s worth noting that Natalie W. was aware of the impact negative Yelp! reviews can have on a business, especially a small one. This is why she only left these reviews for only large companies who wouldn’t be hurt by a 1-star review, such as a football stadium or Times Square. “If someone decides not to attend Yale University because of a one-star review some bizarre Internet girl wrote on Yelp!, that person probably should not be attending Yale University,” she said.

References

Barnes, Z. (2016, Jan 11). “This woman got banned from Yelp for her hilarious date reviews.” Self.com Retrieved from http://www.self.com/trending/2016/01/this-woman-got-banned-from-yelp-for-her-hilarious-date-reviews/

Kiesler, S., Kraut, R., Resnick, P., & Kittur, A. (2011). “Regulating Behavior in Online Communities.” In R. Kraut & P. Resnick (Eds.) Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design (pp. 125-178) Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Kytölä, S., & Westinen, E. (2015). “I be da reel gansta”—A Finnish footballer’s twitter writing and metapragmatic evaluations of authenticity. Discourse, Context & Media, 8(1), 6-19.

McNeal, S. (2016, Jan 10). “Woman gets kicked off Yelp after posting a bunch of reviews of her dates.” Buzzfeed.com. Retrieved from http://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemcneal/yelp-date-reviews#.hsZwdVEK5

Varis, P., & Blommaert, J. (2014). Conviviality and collectives on social media: Virality, memes and new social structures. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, 108, 1-21.

Get your Pumpkin Spice here

This week, RDM shifts from the usual focus on online reviews, as guest blogger Zoë Vercelli addresses one of the hottest topics in social media today: pumpkin spice.

Basic White Girl

 

White Girl Yoga Pants

Zoë writes:

You’d think Florida was on the cusp of a white Christmas, given the recent ubiquity of fall colors, flavors and… marketing strategies. So begins Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte season, a beverage so embedded in American culture that it’s earned its own acronym, the PSL (or at least one that Starbucks hopes will catch on). Anyone in even a casual relationship with social media has probably noticed the schizophrenic oscillations between revering and mocking all things autumnal, played out in dozens of internet memes similar to the ones above. All seem to draw clear correlations between loving lattes and one’s race, gender, and socio-economic status. The PSL trope tells us that pumpkin spice is catnip for White Girls; that a PSL is a dead giveaway that you are a “Basic B*tch”; and that only the upper-middle class (or aspiring) can afford that daily grande latte anyway.

At first glance, one may associate this love/hate relationship as simply reflecting our cultural attitudes toward the Starbucks brand – which introduced the PSL in 2003 – but I believe the memes index much deeper levels of cultural associations. First, the racial: it is clearly assumed that the PSL, and more broadly the notion of pumpkin spice and all things “traditionally” autumnal, are cultural touchstones for the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant pseudo-majority in the United States. Why is that? We as cultural observers sometimes forget the tremendous role that climate plays in shaping our deeply held values and perspectives. Autumn and winter are part of our white European DNA. Don’t believe me? Try to imagine religious Puritanism arising from a hot and sultry region. The cultural construct of “coziness” is a lodestone of tradition for wintry northern European and Scandinavian peoples; the Danish call it hygge, a warm intimacy that a friend describes as “tucking each other in for the winter.” But is it fair to say that “pumpkin spice” indexes an entirely different set of cultural associations for White People than for everyone else?

Caught up in this notion are certainly our gendered attitudes toward the limited roles the aforementioned White Girl can play. In particular, the concept of the Basic B*tch indexes the painful uncoolness of the White Girl – the kind who breaks out the seasonal potpourri, cries during It’s A Wonderful Life, and also speaks fluent Starbucks (so make that PSL a venti non-fat double soy-whip with stevia to go, please). The special viciousness of other women when criticizing the Basic B*tch, if anything, belies a deeper discomfort regarding our own limiting roles, implying there are, at most, a handful of ways to be a Woman, some better and some worse. Even Hillary Clinton attempted to subtly ditch her white uncoolness recently, telling fans during a press conference that she “used to like” PSL.

Finally, simply patronizing Starbucks requires a certain amount of disposable income – a grande will run $4.50 or more – so any socio-economic correlations we sense as a culture are easy to draw. But why is loving autumn and fall flavors associated even further with class? Our cultural construct of autumn indexes concepts of leisure time, elaborate holiday gatherings, and luxurious flavors that were once exorbitantly expensive. Exotic spices such as cinnamon and cardamom were only introduced to the European palate as a result of the spice trade beginning in the Middle Ages with India, China, and (then) Ceylon, and were revered as delicacies available only to the upper class. Is it possible that over a thousand years later, our class associations with these flavors are still holding strong?

Either way, I am a White Girl who dearly loves autumn, but I’ll skip the Pumpkin Spice Latte, thank you very much. I’d just spill it on my new Uggs, anyway – and you can’t get soy whip out of suede.