For nearly a week, the world’s gaze has been trained on South Africa, where the World Cup is underway. This is the first time the tournament — the most popular sporting event in the world — has been hosted on the African continent, so different cultural experiences were expected (even joyfully anticipated!)
Anticipation may have turned to dread in response to the vuvuzela, the monotone, plastic stadium horn that African soccer fans love to blow throughout a match. Since their introduction during last year’s Confederations Cup, there have been countless calls to banish the horns, and news outlets across Europe and the US have even discussed ways to decrease the sound of the vuvzela in TV broadcasts.
Since the start of the tournament, numerous Facebook pages have popped up calling for an end to use of vuvuzelas, and you’ll find a pretty consistently negative “buzz” against it on Twitter.
But speaking of Twitter, I’ve found an interesting parallel between the vuvuzela and the social media world’s favorite love/hate platform. Like the vuvuzela, Twitter is “monotone” — 140 characters limits (or some say it limits) how effectively you can convey a message. Twitter use was fairly limited and “tech niche” in the beginning, but has been exposed to a significantly larger global audience (read: Oprah) in the four years since — often to cries that it’s just “noise.”
Companies have banned Twitter at work, citing claims of reduced productivity. Columnists take up an anti-Twitter stance regularly in the pages of mainstream newspapers. Even comedians take Twitter to task in their acts — “after all, isn’t it just people talking about what they had for lunch? What’s up with THAT?”
There are even apps whose sole reason for being is filtering Twitter’s noise. And sites that aggregate tweets onto their pages often receive feedback — sometimes rightfully — that they’re too redundant.
Of course, as the value of Twitter as a communications tool has become more ubiquitous, the complaints have lessened somewhat (or at least devolved into nitpicks about how people use it, not if they should bother.) Unfortunately, the World Cup in South Africa is only one month long, not nearly enough time for westerners to develop an affinity for the vuvuzela, or a desire to understand what the “noise” means to the people making it.
Obviously, billions of tweets offer more content than a simple “bzzzzzzz” — if you dig in and check them out, and ask the people writing them why they’re doing it, and what the freedom to communicate this way means to them.
But the next time you’re watching a match — say, South Africa and Uruguay this afternoon — think about what that “bzzzzzzzz” is really communicating. If you ask a South African, they’ll tell you that the “noise” is a form of celebration unique to them… that the “beehive” sound people complain about in the West is actually the sound of a whole community united to celebrate something powerful… that nowhere else on earth will you hear what you’ll hear in their stadium — and that they won’t let the value of a unique form of celebration be drowned out by the (similarly monotone) whining of the non-African spectators.
Plastic trumpets might not seem like they have much in common with social platforms, but they do in one special way: namely, if the people that use them find value in using them — and if annoyance is your only counter — who are you to say they shouldn’t?
(image via ethekwinigirl)
