Online Minorities Post
This week’s articles were Sarah Florini’s “Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin’: Communication and Cultural Performance on “Black Twitter” (2014), along with J. David Cisneros and Thomas K. Nakayama “New Media, Old Racisms: Twitter, Miss America, and Cultural Logics of Race” (2015).
After reading them, I decided to focus on the Twitter accounts of the channels I am following, to see what examples of taste, “Signifyin”, and old/new racism tensions I could find, if any. Once I decided to focus on the Twitter platform, I narrowed my lens further to look at we are mitu and Facts. I felt that they may provide the most interesting examples.
we are mitu is created for an audience of Spanish-speakers, specifically Latinx. I assumed this would allow me to cultivate examples of all three concepts. With Facts. I was interested to see what kind of difference, if any, may exist between a US and an Irish perspective on the three concepts.
Starting with we are mitu, there are numerous examples of taste and signifyin’; taste being a marker of cultural difference and signifyin’ as the wordplay used to define the markers of taste. This is seen in the case of we are mitu, as they are a subculture, or group, existing in relation to mainstream US culture. As a channel created by individuals who identify with their ethnic Latin-American heritage, the Tweets they send are rooted in Latinx culture. An explicit example of this is seen in one of their retweets:
we are mitu often features Tweets about pop culture individuals with ties to the Latinx culture; like Salma Hayek, Jennifer Lopez, Selena Gomez, Jose Fernandez, and Lin Manuel. Taking into consideration, Florini’s statements on Black Twitter users showcasing their identities through displays of “cultural competence”, when looking at we are mitu’s feed, I saw that in order to understand many of the references in their Tweets I would have to be competently familiar with Latinx culture (224). Not only familiar with the culture, also to be linguistically familiar with the culture as well. On their Twitter feed, I say how they demonstrate signifyin’ predominantly through their mixing of the English and Spanish languages, a combination of languages sometimes referred to as “Spanglish”. Spanglish is being used as a signifier to their audience of who we are mitu is and who they believe their audience is. Many Tweets show evidence of a dual cultural identity, when we are mitu uses Spanglish in humor posts like:
and
to connect with their audience. This signifyin’ reinforces the shared sense of identity between them and their audience as it is assumed the audience will comprehend their message. Interestingly, although we are mitu’s Twitter feed caters to US Latin-Americans, they also have a secondary mitu Twitter account:
This account actually appears to cater to an audience of a different taste. Nearly all the Tweets are memes or GIFs with only a line or two of text, all in Spanish. Although my mother is Mexican, she doesn’t speak Spanish, and her parents typically spoke Spanglish, especially as they grew older. For me, I took High School Spanish classes but didn’t keep up with it, so I really have no sense of what @somosmitu Tweets are. I can manage an understanding of @wearemitu’s Tweets because they utilize English and I am at least partially familiar with the cultural references. Looking further at we are mitu’s Twitter feed, I didn’t find an example of “old” and “new” racism. But I think their feed did well in exemplifying Florini’s view of signifyin’ on Twitter being “a tool for the performance of personal identity…and generates a sense of collective identity and group solidarity” (234).
Once I had finished looking at we are mitu, I moved on to Facts. Channel but I ended up being disappointed as their Twitter feed was solely promotional Tweets:
I did notice that although there wasn’t much on their feed, I did notice only one screenshot included a person of color out of the first thirty tweets I looked through. If I hadn’t read Cisneros and Nakayama’s article I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it, since I am used to the silent “white” social norms of the US. So to me, it appears Ireland may have similar social norms to the US. However, since there is not much on Facts.’s Twitter feed, and since Twitter addresses “an invisible and acontextual audience” within a collapsed context, it is difficult to reach a concrete conclusion (117).
In reflecting on both feeds, it seems we are mitu, being a subcultural account which caters to an audience of particular taste, has an alternative perspective as it identifies with an alternative Latinx perspective. Facts., although not based in the US, appears to have a mainstream perspective, as its Tweets look to be representative of mainstream US “white” social norms, creating an identity which would match with an audience whose tastes are (the “white”) socially normative.