In 1993, when the German punk band Die Ärzte published the song “Stummer Schrei nach Liebe”1(Silent cry for love), East and West Germany had just recently reunited politically but social and cultural fissure were deep and raw. At that time, the song was written in response to xenophobic attacks in Hoyerswerda, one of many cities in the Eastern part of the country with a growing Neo-Nazi scene. More recently, in 2015, amid growing anti-immigrant sentiments in reaction to the arrival of than 1.000.000 refugees that year, the song was resurrected: A homespun rendition by the senior choir, The Goldies, went viral on Youtube, a social media campaign, #Aktionarschloch, was founded to bring the song back into and to the top of the music charts, and flashmobs organized across German cities to sing the song in public squares. Just last week, the song was referenced once again. This time, its lyrics were recycled in a post by the Heute Show2, a German version of The Daily Show. The post mocked respondents of a large national survey which concluded that 28% of Germans have antisemitic thoughts. The tweet received over 14.000 likes and more than 2000 responses many of which used song lyrics in their humorous posts.
The song has become something of a political, anti-fascist anthem as well as a critique of psychological arguments in the face right-wing extremist violence. Essentially, the voice of the lyrics mocks and taunts the emotional neediness of its unnamed, silent counterpart, a Neo-Nazi (or fascist, or right-extremist) by referring to the psychological commonplaces that are typically trotted out to explain the violence of (mostly) men: parents did not love you, girlfriend broke up with you, you were teased for liking love songs, and so on. But it is the last line of the refrain that contains the real message of the song, a critical commentary that is fed up with and challenges the psychologizing of perpetrators as the original victim. It is a summons to call things by their name. The last line is just one word, shouted over and over again: Arschloch! (If you cannot figure out the cognate, here is a link for a dictionary
Today, as I was reading dana boyd’s (2019)
chapter on bullying I was reminded of the song. More specifically, it was boyd’s
account of Taylor, a new arrival in a Boston high school, and her friend Chris that
really made me want to shout that classic refrain of “Stummer Schrei nach Liebe”!
After having been friends, Chris turns on Taylor in a fit of jealousy, lashes
out at her, spreads rumors, tells others to shun her, vandalizes her locker, destroys
her schoolbooks, sprays ‘slut’ on her locker, makes her miserable, threatens suicide,
escalates and never stops. Because “Taylor didn’t see it that way” but “understands”
and was “distraught” that Chris was afraid, struggling with his sexuality, and concerned
others might ostracize him, boyd concludes “bullies are not evil people who
decide to torment for fun; those are sociopaths” (p. 135). Yet, what do you
make of Taylor’s comments? After millennia of violence against them, women continue
to experience violence as a natural part of their lives. In 2014, not a single
country was identified in which women are “physically secure”3,
in the US marital rape first became illegal in 1993, and the
UN did not declare rape a war crime until 2008.
Although I could not find an entry for ‘bullying’
in various online “Dictionaries of Psychology”, I did find the term under the
entry ‘antisocial personality disorder’ in the “Cambridge Dictionary of
Psychology”4 which is thusly defined:
Like boyd, the APA resolution refers to Dan Olweus -among
others- for a ‘characterization’ of bullying. Boyd, astonishingly, refers to
Olweus’ definition of the 1970s (!) in which he identifies “aggression, repetition,
and imbalance in power” (p. 131) as the three components of bullying. Since none
of the students interviewed by boyd felt (or admitted to) a power imbalance, she
concludes that the posting of “embarrassing or humiliating, grotesque or sexual,
mean-spirited or shocking” (p. 145) social media posts should not be considered
bullying outright but rather gossip that leads to drama in a complex set of
behaviors in which teens vie for attention and social status. Boyd concedes that
these practices are “neither innocent nor benign” and can lead to bullying and even
abuse.
Yet, how do we distinguish? When does gossip become drama?
When is drama really bullying? When is it abuse? Where do they intersect? While
boyd referenced psychology to delimit ‘bullying’, she relies on ethnographic interviews
to understand practices like ‘gossip’ and ‘drama’ which provide local,
situational understandings and resist authoritative demarcations and scaling up
to universal, general claims. Out of this framework the specter of ‘celebrity culture’
rears its head in the form of general musings (?) for boyd does not let us hear
any teenage voices on this topic. They did not see power imbalances in their
lives, would they agree that they are influenced by celebrities? Would they admit
to aspiring to their own “microcelebrity” status?
Clearly, what concerns social relations in the digital age,
much is the same as it always was, but much is also new - in a paradigmatic
kind of way. As Rymes suggests, we need go out there and talk to people “about
their language” and start to figure out the new. It seems like we cannot
afford to wait, can we? The definitions do not even matter, do they? Young
people online are using language, are involved in interactions, and have
experiences that we -as teachers, as researchers, as parents, as friends- need
a way to describe, understand, and dialogue with. Rymes’ observation that “entrenchment
of assumptions is infamously common on social media” applies, I believe, not only
to the content on social media but also to the way we research social media. We
need tools that remain adaptable and -most importantly- do not flatten our perspective
through hard drawn borders. De Seta’s6 (2018) proposed continua, “a
three-dimensional domain of inquiry” (p. 394), might be such a tool:
I have already included some of my own questions throughout this
blog entry for your consideration. I am adding questions below, adapted from Gabriele
de Seta’s article, to engage you with her functional, epistemological, and
ethical continua.
1. Do online communities -including those with problematic
social media practices- create their own, rule-bound cultures that guarantee
community cohesion that deserve to exist and be protected? Does computer-mediated
interaction encourage deviant behavior that needs to be censored?
2. Should we strive to abstract problematic social media
practices into minimal, generalized definitions or pursue situated and
contextualized descriptions?
3. If problematic social media practices are found to be
productive for certain community users, should the sympathetic researcher take
a stance and contribute to their defence? If activities become abusive should
the concerned scholar denounce these actions?
Footnotes:
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X9CEi8wkBc (Hey! It was the 90s)
2. ZDF Heute Show
Twitter
6. de Seta, G. (2018): “Trolling and
Other Problematic Social Media Practices”
Thanks for your post, Claudia. I appreciate your invocation of German anti-facist punk rockers! This resonates in my mind with our last week's discussion of Acts of Citizen Sociolinguistics as ruptures in the standardized sheen of everyday life.
ReplyDeleteI think your remarks about the dynamics of facism/racism/sexism/anti-immigrant sentiment are also very consistent with Robin Diangelo's discussion of the dynamics of "white fragility as bullying." White fragility seems to be a reaction to ruptures in a sense of power and control, and an attempt to reinvoke the status quo. In the face of "disequilibrium"--as when someone calls out a white person for what seems to be racist or ignorant or disrespectful--the "fragile white" will lash out, start crying, or say something like, "I just won't say anything anymore then." In this way white-fragility becomes a form of bullying because it shuts down any possibility for dialog. I think this is a much better and more empirical understanding of facism, etc. because it addresses the systemic challenges --not simply the internal psychological dynamics. And, she usefully points out that the solution could be pretty simple: Acknowledge that you are ignorant. Ask about what you don't know.
Of course, violent facist white supremecists might be more difficult to reason with--but Diangelo makes a pretty good argument that once we see the entitled nature of white racism, and how it saturates our everyday lives (the "banality of evil" that Sarah invoked last week), we can begin to act as anti-racists through our everyday actions. I would say the best way to start being that "anti-racist" would be to have conversations about language--if someone is offended by our language or the way we are talking, let's talk!
For example, Peizhu's discussionof "rioters" versus "protestors" might be a great place to start to understand differences of perspective in the Hong Kong context. As for the role of the internet--I think it provides us a WINDOW into other points of view--thought not necessarily the best platform for debate.
Thank you for your interesting and through-provoking blog post Claudia! In thinking about your question regarding computer-mediated interaction and the ways in which it encourages deviant behavior that needs to be censored I believe it can be a hard line to say yes and no due to the fact that bullying itself is hard to define.
ReplyDeleteYour question reminds me of in dana boyd’s (2014) article about the mom “surveilling” her daughter Ashley’s Facebook because she feels the need to see the content people are putting out there. It is probably somewhat helpful for the mom’s anxiety, however, it could also make her more paranoid by ‘reading into’ the messages and jokes too deeply. This leads to as boyd (2014) states, encrypting or coding what one might post due to the parent surveilling. However, contrary to popular belief and the belief of the mother, Rymes (2019) states, weather it is happening online or offline it does not really affect the fact that it is still happening at an alarming and increased rate.
It is so interesting how this topic is so broad and yet so sensitive that it is hard to address directly. It stems as you have said from xenophobic or fears of the Other which are extremely difficult to unpack and change a person’s worldview. The important thing to mention though and as Rymes (2019) does and boyd (2014) that it is imperative we talk about it because if we do not, it snowballs into more of a problem.
At my school, not surprisingly, bullying is also a “taboo” word. It is the teacher’s responsibility to teach “bullying” and we are not provided in any way about how to teach it echoing what Rymes (2019) states in her conclusion that we feel unequipped to do so. Our district is even as ‘serious’ about the topic as to have us physically sign that we have taught bullying each marking period. If a child reports someone is bullying them, we have to tell the lead teacher and there are multiple forms they need to fill out regarding it. There is no question about the severity of bullying, however, does signing off on something and filling out paperwork help stop the bullying? Rymes (2019) affirms this idea that our language around bullying has become so weaponized and we do not know how to talk about it let alone how to go about handling those tough situations and I could not agree more.
I came across a new tool created by a Wharton alum to help parents monitor their kids' use of social media in the hope of preventing bullying. I'm not sure how it works but here is the website : https://www.kidas.net/ and the interview in which I heard about it: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curbing-cyber-bulling-kidas-taylor-durham/?trackingId=1H7RkrA%2FaYXjsO9tzPDEfg%3D%3D
DeleteI know many parents who keep a close eye on their teenagers' use of social media (locking up their phones at night and regularly checking their content). While I see this as a clear invasion of privacy and something I would have never forgotten my parents for if they had done it, I'm not sure what I'll do when time comes.
I think bullying is everyone's responsibility though, starting with school, parents, but also changing our representations, what we think is funny, the way we advertise (and the other thread provides great examples of that).
So what to do about bullies? If they are young, try and understand why they act like that as it seems to emerge from a place of pain. If they are older, start a conversation or ignore them?!
Yes, thank you Claudia for this thorough and thoughtful post! You bring up so many different instances and implications of (technologically-mediated) bullying. I'm not sure how I could possibly and adequately address each one. So instead, I'm going to focus on one part of the first question you posed to us readers: "Does computer-mediated interaction encourage deviant behavior that needs to be censored?" A key dynamic that I think this question hinges on is between the idea of technology as a perpetrator vs. vessel for harmful behavior like bullying. In other words: can computer-mediated interactions encourage deviant behavior, because computers *are* bullies? OR, can computer-mediated interactions encourage deviant behavior because they *give bullies* sharper tools they can use to harm others? I think it can be easy to get caught up in the philosophical nuances of computers as agentive vs. more passive entities. And I think that you acknowledge the pitfalls of discussing language so much to the detriment of actually *applying* it to do good, when you ask "...When does gossip become drama? When is drama really bullying? When is it abuse? Where do they intersect?"
ReplyDeleteFrom what I've gathered so far in this class, "citizen sociolinguists" can be powerful experts on language because their expertise is so localized. I think that applying this idea of many small people making individually small, but collectively dramatic/significant, positive contributions towards combatting the negativities of the world can be an enlightening way of thinking about how we can all become empowered to stand up against bullying (and many other social woes, too!) Regardless of what we call "bullying", or how situationally-specific/malleable our definition is, we *all* have the potential to use our voices & actions to disrupt harmful behavior we witness in the moment. In this way, what matters most is the power of action that our voices can give us; not the nuances of how we label this very human strength.
On that note, I want to leave everyone with a clip from a speech that former President Obama gave this past weekend (accessible here if you aren't already familiar: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-cancel-culture.html). In the clip, Obama differentiates "call-out culture" from actual activism, arguing that people can't just *say* things and become activists - they must also *act* in ways that support their words. I think that it can sometimes feel overwhelming to figure out how to turn words into action (at least, I know it often does for me!). Yet I think that the beauty of citizen sociolinguistics, whether applied to situations of linguistic discrimination or more general bullying, is that is does give every person a way to translate their convictions into action: by using their words to spark important dialogues about power, expertise, and understanding. So in that way, I think that "computer mediated interaction" is less something that needs to be censored, and more something that we can all try to approach with more intentionality and compassion.