Thank you, Miranda. I’m now following you on Twitter.

For anyone reading who’s not spotted us on Twitter, we’re @BadRepUK.

Great link, some fantastic stuff on there. Man, I need more a) hours in the day to read and b) more hours in the day to write. Maybe just extend the entire day twice over? Kthx.

Sigh, I wrote a lengthy comment and then read the links from this post, which said what I was going to say, but much better. This seems to happen a lot on the internet… it’s hardly worth saying anything at all.

But I’ve already written it, damn it, so, er, I’m posting it anyway (you should all stop reading now and go and read the links):

And also, that there are various cultures which are more likely to voice these ideas, and that some of those cultures are active in particular online spaces and some are less so. There was a link about a few weeks ago – probably Sarah tweeted it? – about Twitter demographics, and in the US (not sure about elsewhere) there are big differences between ethnic groups, with black and Latino users much more active (proportionally speaking). I think I’ve also heard (this may be me talking out of my arse, but it may be that danah boyd has done something on it) that among (some, obviously) black communities it’s used as a social network in a much more personal way (more akin to Facebook), as opposed to the more semi-professional, news-and-links-aggregating, interest-driven usage that I personally tend to see it as more. So people in those communities are maybe more likely to use sexist hashtags in a down-the-pub kind of way. Whereas an equivalent sort of vaguely sexist majority-white community is just down the pub making blonde jokes which don’t show up on the radar because they’re not having those conversations on the internet.

Facebook ‘likes’ are often pretty sexist too… and I would imagine the demographics are very different.

I think this was the link: http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2010/12/30/twitters-user-demographics-visualised-infographic/

Twitter allows them a platform on which to spew their thoughts and publish them to streams that other people are viewing, or create their own streams which get noticed when they trend.

The sad thing is that this exposes just how many people are actually shitheads, and that is what is depressing. Why is this? Presumably a mixture of upbringing, culture, education and media influences.

Thank you! :-) bell hooks is so kickass, I haven’t read nearly enough of her work.

And yes, you’re right – part of the reason I included theory B was because there have been some quite coy posts about hashtags that fail to mention the dominance of young African American twitter users in the hashtag streams and it is very striking. I don’t think it’s sheer coincidence, but it’s clearly not as simple as “black people are more sexist” either. Sigh.