DW2b

In my DW2b I will compare my previous web site exploration to Nakamura’s paper. In my evaluation of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) I failed to discuss other types of rhetorical features, such as repetition, but I did pick up on the fact that AAVE is rarely used on the general BET website. But you are able to find bits of AAVE on blogs linked to the BET website.
These BET affiliated blogs, such as “Hip Hop vs. America” incorporate AAVE into their blog posts. I believe that this is in order to further appeal to the African American (AA) population of internet users who are the primary viewers of BET.com and its TV channel. Nakamura describes in her paper that internet sites generally don’t write in AAVE because it does not appeal to the general public of internet users, which they believe to be white Americans. But this trend is changing:
“Increasing numbers of racial minorities and women are acquiring access to the internet…” (Nakamura 410)
This demonstrates the fact that AA trendy sites should attempt to curve their writing to a different population than they currently are. They may be able to get a positive response with AA internet users. But Nakamura says that nearly every website is designed for white users, I saw this not to be true in the “Hip Hop vs. America” blog. I saw several examples of AAVE phonology that can only be seen for the primary purpose of attempting to attract more African American users. Sites such as BET.com are not using AAVE for a few reasons; one being that they might be looked upon as a lesser website and a less educated writing staff due to the AAVE discrimination of white Americans.
AAVE is correctly used in the “Hip Hop vs. America” blog in the following quote,

“Those people who are scared are the people that were content with being on that
level that they was on. The rest of these people, we’re not scared. We are ready
and willing to live and die for a better future for our kids. All races and
nationalities, it’s gonna be so historical that it scares you.”

In this quote the author uses “they was on”, the phrase “they on” is a quality of AAVE, and considered poor grammar by SE standards which suggests that it should have been “they were on”. The AAVE form of this is referring to the past tense incorrectly. The author again uses “gonna” instead of the correct SE version “going to”. This article is mainly directed towards African Americans who can directly relate to this sort of speech while most white Americans don’t know how to correctly speak AAVE