Premium
The Textbattle and the Contention of Youth Identities Online: An Ethnographic Case Study 1
Author(s) -
Jones Samuel Hunter
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0483.2008.01451.x
Subject(s) - contest , ethnography , linguistics , identity (music) , nexus (standard) , dominance (genetics) , sociology , field (mathematics) , computer science , anthropology , aesthetics , art , political science , philosophy , biochemistry , chemistry , mathematics , pure mathematics , law , gene , embedded system
The topics of youth language, computer‐mediated communication (CMC) and hip‐hop language are all established fields of contemporary linguistic research. Research into the nexus of all three fields is however far less prevalent. Whilst papers have been published that provide excellent introductions to the field, little or no study has been dedicated to analysing particular aspects of the online hip‐hop world with reference to the relationship between youth identity and language. This paper exclusively documents and analyses the strategies employed by textbattlers , who interact online in the equivalent of the traditional MC contest or battle and spar for lyrical dominance. The analysis of the corpus suggests the potential for a culture of linguistic hypersensitivity and conscious linguistic performance to arise within this specific online hip‐hop genre, the textbattle . It is in this sense that this genre has particular relevance to the question of how far individuals can be seen to manage consciously their identity through linguistic performance.