Caps Blog Post #3 Pieper

Language and rhetoric play an extremely important role in communication.  Different messages can be communicated not only by what you say, but also by how you say it.  Just recently, Fox News called out President Barack Obama for code switching back in 2007 when addressing the residents of New Orleans.  Code switching is a term “in communication that refers to the phenomenon of changing languages, dialects, or even accents.” (Martin & Nakayama, 2010, p. 249)  They accused President Obama of switching his dialect, accent, and even claimed he was insinuating subliminal racial insults.  I, however, think that changing the way you communicate given the audience you are speaking to is a smart and effective method to better get your point across.

Here is a video clip from the Daly Show where Jon Stewart shows and talks about the video that Fox News reported on.    It is actually extremely hilarious, so I would highly recommend watching.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-3-2012/oh-the-spew-hannity

(Stewart, 2012)

For starters, I had never been on Tumblr prior to reading the UNL Haters page for this class.  I became visibly upset by some of the things I read on that Tumblr page.  Wow.  The ignorance of some people is absolutely astonishing.  I did not need to look further than the first post to be embarrassed by my fellow students.  

 (Webb, 2012)

How ironic is that tweet?  Kelsey is demanding that sexual orientation awareness be suppressed because it is “against [her] religion” and she believes that she has a right to disagree.  How is she failing to recognize that if she should have the right to disagree then other people should have the right to express their sexual orientation. 

Moving forward, it is obvious that UNL’s campus has some serious issues with hateful language.  People hide behind social media and dish out their hate behind a twitter name or facebook page.  However, I did also see people posting on the Tumblr page saying how they were grateful for this page for calling out the racist, sexist slurs these people were posting on social media.  The most effective way to deal with this kind of hate is to be extremely blunt with the person publishing hateful language.  Call them out.  Right there on their twitter or facebook page.  They need to know that what they are saying is wrong, hurtful, disrespectful, and down right rude.  They might tell you they were kidding and to not take things so seriously, but at least you made it known to everyone following that person that there are others that find what they say offensive and wrong.

Martin, J.N., & Nakayama, T.K. (2010). Intercultural communication in contexts (5th ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw Hill. 

J. Stewart. (2012, October 3) Oh the Spew-Hannity. Retreived from http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-3-2012/oh-the-spew-hannity

K. Webb. (2012, October 4) Retrieved from http://unl-haters.tumblr.com/