Language and violence

Disclaimer: this should not be read by anyone.

So I am taking this online course on Digital Literacies and Online Participation and today I attended a tweetchat following the hashtag #ONL201. This is my first blog post and I had been putting it off for a number of reasons, which are listed below: 1) blogging sounds old-fashioned – I haven’t blogged since I was in college (between 2001 and 2004 or so), 2) blogging seemed very personal back then and you had to actively ask people to read your blog by giving them the address, but now it seems overtly public and anyone can find your blog if they want to, as email accounts are connected and finding someone online is not that hard, and 3) following the previous comment, publicizing personal information can sometimes lead to violent responses from online commentators and I have been avoiding digital toxicity. During my ONL201 tweetchat, I became familiar with a view of blogging that takes for what it is supposed to be: a digital diary. Diaries are not supposed to be read by anyone, so the problem of linguistic violence should be an issue. At the same time, blogs are personal, but they also go online, and unless you specifically set your post to ‘private’, anyone can read it. In fact, I had that option, but chose to leave this post as ‘public’ and to add a disclaimer at the beginning of the text telling the reader that they are not, under any circumstance, to read this. Yet, here you are and I am carefully luring you here while I am putting off the main theme of this post, which is the interconnection between language and violence. If you know me, then you know that I did my PhD thesis on the performativities of linguistic violence in the Brazilian World of Warcraft official discussion forum. I’ll leave the performativities aside and focus on how language and violence are related.

Basically, whenever we use language, particularly when we call people names, we feel our bodies react (Butler, 1990). Getting lost for words, saying strange things, getting butterflies in our stomach and sweating are a few of the somatic reactions we can have.

Besides, our heads cannot talk by themselves, as many comedy movies might make us believe. Use the video above for reference if you like. We obviously need our whole bodies to speak: tongues, mouth, teeth, lungs and larynx at least, not to mention body language, like the position of our arms, how close we are to one another, in which direction our eyes are pointing, whether we are looking up or down at our interlocutor and other possible corporal arrangements.

Contrary to what many believed to be the case when the internet had its first boom of popularization (around the year 2000), cyberspace did not become a village of people who got together in terms of their shared interests instead of of their physical location, or, at least, this was not the only outcome. With the increasing access to internet, the online spaces and communities that we are part of are permeated, as Correll (1995) correctly pointed out, not only by fully-fledged and prospective members, but also by visitors who try and sometimes manage to disrupt the internal coherence of said groups. This is usually done in three ways: 1) exploring internal contradictions of groups, 2) using hurtful language when there is a disagreement and 3) resorting to irony where it is not needed. The first two are dealt with together in the next paragraph. Then I move on to the last topic.

Contradictions and hurtful language

Historically marginalized groups have had a tendency to establish groups as safe places and then to isolate from the rest of the society. While physical violence is not as common, linguistic violence is ubiquitous (like I said, language is material, so the distinction between physical and linguistic is only operational here). The fear of being injured by language leads these groups to isolate. However, they are still part of a larger society and are dependent on this society to live, as this society is dependent on them in turn. Because of this, there comes a point where these groups have to open up and establish a dialog with other interlocutors. This call to openness sometimes interpelates undesired interlocutors who have nothing to contribute. These are the people who ultimately get silenced and who forfeit the right to be part of these sensitive discussions. This loss of speech freedom emerges where the arguments are not directed at other propositions, but at people (what is called an ad hominem argument). This often happens with uncalled-for associations between historically marginalized groups and the destruction of the world as we know it. Common associations involve exaggerated claims that the human race will go extinct or that communism will magically take over capitalism. Strangely enough, the destruction of the environment and the irresponsible consumerism common to many never comes up as a possible explanation. It is for this reason that when someone comes out online, things can get rough. I, as a white middle-class gay man, have felt threatened quite a few times.

Irony

Finally, a more general form of violence in digital discussion groups is the use of irony. This usually happens between newbies and veterans, where a newbie asks an easy question that would be answered more quickly and/or more effectively by means of using Google. Instead of just not answering or directing the question to the proper place, veterans will often belittle their interlocutors. Besides, it is not rare to see a series of people taking their peers up on their conduct, in a way that one person is shamed for asking a simple question.

• CORRELL, S. (1995) The ethnography of an electronic bar: The lesbian cafe. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 24 No. 3. pp. 270-298.