The power of words – a fight on new battlegrounds
A little homework for you: Look up the name “Rick Santorum“ in Google and I promise you’ll be surprised what will pop up as the first hit. Contrary to what you might expect, it won’t be a Wikipedia entrance dealing with the biography of the US-politician or anything the like. This link will lead you to a completey new word in the English language and its definition (see above). The answer to the question as to why this word defintion is given so much prominence in Google unravels a story about a witchhunt against the gay community and a massive counterstrike.
Provoked by the Republican’s constant bashing of homosexuals, in 2003 gay rights activist and columnist Dan Savage initiated a campaign in order to associate Santorum’s surname with a sexual act commonly associated with homosexual love. He asked his fans to create a new definition. Bloggers’ links caused it to rise in Google’s ranking in a way that would put the site top of any query for the name “Rick Santorum” – even before Santorum’s own website! In the following, the whole campaign received a lot of media attention and, after being mentioned by Jon Stewart in his Daily Show, “santorum” even became the most queried term on Google the following day. The situation is described as a classic “Google bomb” and, funnily, the second suggestion Google offers you when looking for “Rick Santorum” is already the combination “Rick Santorum Google problem”!
It is even assumed that Savage’s campaign has contributed to Santorum’s defeat in the 2006 US Senate election against Bob Casey. Indeed, Dan Savage has created Santorum’s very own peculiar, but not less devastating “Google problem”. It was a blow for the image of a Republican hardliner, who frequently makes use of anti-gay propaganda in his campaigns. However, his experience does not seem to have made Rick Santorum a smarter man for next year’s presidential election. He couldn’t refrain from another gay-bashing – even though Dan Savage has promised to repeat the same campaign with Rick Santorum’s first name in answer to repeated offence. And Savage’s reaction was not slow in coming. Therefore, it is just a question of time until we will be able to discover what other surprising meanings the name “Rick” might have.
Yet, Dan Savage’s accomplishment has to be considered a victory on more than one battleground. Foremost, of course, it was a victory for the gay community against discrimination. Savage found an efficient tool to hurt Santorum where it really hurts – by turning his anti-gay propaganda against him and ridiculing him thereby.
Apart from that, in the age of internet and the new media, he very effectively demonstrated the power these new weapons of choice might have – if used the right way. Because they still make use of a very mighty power, the power of words!
The affair Santorum versus Savage already gives us a glimpse of how powerful the internet can be in defining and structuring our communication. But in the recent past, our major critique was that the new media – especially the social media in web 2.0 surroundings – tend to nurture a loss of words. By disregarding grammar and spelling rules, by shortening words to abbreviations, we might lose our language competence – that is a common fear associated with the new media. Certainly, this aspect must not be overlooked in the future, and it will be necessary to take respective countermeasures. However, the mentioned case – Santorum versus Savage – also shows that the new media can provide for the opposite.
Almost everyone nowadays has potential access to the media and can therefore generate media-content – a task formerly reserved for an elite working in the media industry – and thereby manipulate the information we are provided with. This, quite aguably, sometimes might have a negative influence on the quality of the contents. Therefore, it is now up to consumers of information to judge information also in regards to its reliabilty and well-foundedness – a sometimes quite difficult task. However, the increasing availability of information via internet also maximizes the quantity of opinion, thereby breaking up the established hierachies in the flow of information and allowing for fresh viewpoints and new tools of revolution.
So, are we facing a new era? The past decades were characterized by an increasing reliance on information that is provided by the respective elites. This tendency gave rise to monopolistically structured information agencies, backed by strong economic ties, that dictate the way society’s supposed to think. A prominent example is, of course, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire with its influential branches such as the Fox Broadcasting Company.
The times when words were able to influence the course of events, of history, seem to have been long but gone. The times, when pamphlets and books – coming from the bottom, not the elitist top – were able to change the world and the way we were thinking, the way societies were structured. In the past, we had to face a lost belief in the written word and the traditional media – a phemnomenon that what also nurtured by several affairs such as Rupert Murdoch’s recent News of the World-scandal in Great Britain. And interestingly, the upcoming of the new media such as the internet, which actually make use of the written word as well, were frequently condemned as one of the main reasons for this development.
Now, Dan Savage has proven us otherwise. Not only by showing us how much influence a tiny website, a tiny word definition can have on the rhethorics of politicans in the still most influential country of the world. But also by the fact that, within only a few years, he was able to infuse a new word definition in everyday language. He – amongst others – has shown, that the bottom is able to get back in charge and to infuence our society’s path.
Dan Savage’s battle might be a slightly different one than the one of the Arab Spring; however, in their fight, both parties rely heavily on the impact of the media and its potential for rapid information exchange and distribution. All these battles seem to proclaim a new kind of warfare – for in times where people increasingly rely on information, information must be the weapon of choice.
We cannot deny the victories the Arab Spring has won with the help of this weapon already. And Dan Savage’s heritage will be Rick Santorum’s coffin nail for a lifetime – and probably even longer. That is living and developing language at its finest! Which ist why I leave the final words to Bill Maher, who – in his show Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO – brought it quite to the point:
But I get it – you’re bitter because we fought a cultural war in the sixties and the Right lost. Rick Santorum is like that Japanese soldier on the island who doesn’t know the war is over, so he’s still fighting against birth control and butt sex. […] But that war is indeed over. The ideals of the youth movement became assimilated into American society. That’s why we have gays in the military now, and pre-natal yoga classes, and tofurkey. And that’s why Rick Santorum will never be President, and a black guy who snorted cocaine is.2
All power to the words!!!
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