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Moderator hat - this thread is not for discussing either why Barbelith has or has not failed us, or indeed is or is not a community - that sounds like a matter for the Conversation or possibly the Conversation, depending on the angle.
To drag the subject back onto what might possibly be gleaned from the original objection:
from the point of view of some on this board, others are going to appear like a lower class based on their ability to string a sentence together, assemble a coherent argument, and so on. Simply put, nobody knows what I am wearing right now, but everyone can see what I'm typing. So,the pecking order is redrawn according to different rules, and "pikeyness", meaning the occupation of a "lower class". And, since the stratifications are infirm, the lines of better and worse can be drawn in all sorts of different ways - factual information, originality of conception, emotional sincerity and enthusiasm of earcock-reception, to name but a few. The difference being that these groupings and stratifications are probably more fluid than that of "us" and "townies" (whatsoever "us" may be), and easier to get out of; in extremis one can always come back with a new name and a new identity. People are removed and enrolled in "us" on a post-by-post basis, potentially - a common misconception on Barbelith is that if somebody agrees with you they are your friend and if they disagree they are your enemy, allowing protean dialogues of membership to form and reform constantly. We don't have the same set of grounding signifiers (sock colour, for example)...
An interesting adjunct to this springs from my recent anthropological reseaarches on Livejournal. One of the livejournaleers, a big ol' goth, is almost a dictionary example of BB's original position on the use of "pikey":
We watched Ken Loach's Ladybird Ladybird last night (fuck knows what the title's supposed to refer to; there wasn't even one ladybird in evidence throughout the film's running time, let alone two). It's a really grim piece of cinema, but in a really fucking grim way. It's about a pikey called Maggie who has her eldest son, and subsequently her other three kids taken into care. Then she gets into a relationship with a Paraguyan refugee called Jorge, and they have two kids, each of whom gets taken into care. An end caption reveals that Maggie and Jorge went on to have three more kids.
Unsurpisingly it's kind of difficult to feel much sympathy for a pikey such as Maggie, but that doesn't stop it from being an involving and watchable film. It's not what you'd call entertaining or enjoyable though, although it does inevitably come alive in the two short sequences which feature Ray Winstone, seemingly auditioning for his starring role in Nil By Mouth.
Along similar lines, I heard on the news yesterday that pikey kids (or 'children from poor families', as the BBC put it) are three times more likely than non-pikeys to get run over. Now, I can understand why pikeys are more likely to die of heart disease and lung cancer (obviously due to all the lard and fags), but it made me wonder what aspect of being a pikey it is that makes them more susceptible to being hit by cars. Is it that the kids are too busy eating lard and smoking fags to use the Green Cross Code, or is it that their parents are too busy eating lard and smoking fags to keep an eye on them? Or is it just that drivers aren't so bothered about hitting pikey scum?
Now, from my point of view somebody not knowing why "Ladybird, Ladybird" is called "Ladybird, Ladybird" pretty much marks them out as subhuman, but that's just me. The characters in the film are easily otherable due to their style of dress, language &c. (smelling the irony here?), whereas the writer is otherable not because of those readily available speech cues, but rather because he is, to my eyes, unable to understand the crippling irony of his situation, and his sentence construction sucks ass.
Is one of these blanket and the other case-by-case? And are tehy both ultimately underpinned by class, taking both the subculture of goth and the class issues that may have led to limited language skills on the part of the writer into account? |
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