Legal Commentary

Twitter And Playing The Dozens

By Big Tent Democrat

Farhad Manjoo:

After watching several of these hashtags from start to finish and talking to a few researchers who've studied trends on Twitter, I've got some potential answers to these questions. Black people—specifically, young black people—do seem to use Twitter differently from everyone else on the service. They form tighter clusters on the network—they follow one another more readily, they retweet each other more often, and more of their posts are @-replies—posts directed at other users. It's this behavior, intentional or not, that gives black people—and in particular, black teenagers—the means to dominate the conversation on Twitter.

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There are loads of caveats to this analysis, which I'll get to in a moment. But first, a digression into one of the leading explanations for these memes—the theory that the hashtags are sparked by something particular to black culture. "There's a long oral dissing tradition in black communities," says Baratunde Thurston, the Web editor of the Onion, whose funny presentation at this year's South by Southwest conference, "How To Be Black Online," argued that blacktags were a new take on the Dozens. "Twitter works very naturally with that call-and-response tradition—it's so short, so economical, and you get an instant signal validating the quality of your contribution." (If people like what you say, they retweet it.)

I don't twitter so I don't know about this phenomenon, but "playing the dozens" was a staple of my formative years (I went to predominantly African-American public schools.) Anyone know about this?

Full post as published by TalkLeft on August 18, 2010 (boomark / email).