elea%2E2009%2E6%2E1%2E4

E–Learning
Volume 6 Number 1 2009
www.wwwords.co.uk/ELEA

‘Get Some Secured Credit Cards Homey’:
hip hop discourse, financial literacy and the
design of digital media learning environments
BEN DEVANE
Department of Curriculum & Instruction,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

ABSTRACT In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, there exists a deficit
of compelling financial education curricula in urban schools that serve financially vulnerable workingclass students. Part of a design-based research investigation aimed at creating culturally-relevant
financial literacy learning environments, this study is a Discourse analysis of a discussion of personal
finance on a web-based fan forum dedicated to hip hop music and culture. In this analysis the author
claims that the discourse strategies and participant roles present in this discussion are an example of the
organic production of what has been called a borderlands Discourse that bridges school-based knowledge
of financial literacy with the youth culture of hip hop. The analysis presented here highlights the
complex and overlapping ways that discursive hybridity in both representational practices and textual
performances of identity figure importantly in the financial literacy practices of community
participants. The author further contends that the understandings that emerge from this analysis can

help design researchers attempt to ‘engineer’ the values, identities and modes of interaction of hip hop
discourse communities into academically-oriented learning environments.

For the past two decades studies of cognition in education have examined learning practices in
naturally occurring contexts and communities in order to acquire a foundation for thinking about
pedagogy, classrooms and curricula (Resnick, 1987; Lave, 1988; Brown et al, 1989). These studies
provided educational designers and researchers with a new framework for thinking about learning
as a socially situated phenomenon that is grounded in collaborative activity and social identity, and
mediated by tools, external representations and cultures. New ways of thinking about how to
structure classrooms, learning environments and workplaces (Brown & Campione, 1990; Wenger,
1999) resulted from this focus on studying cognitive practices ‘in the wild’ (Hutchins, 1995) –
outside of schools and laboratories and in organic contexts. Likewise, contemporary studies of the
‘indigenous’ literacies and learning practices of video-game players (Gee, 2003; Squire &
Steinkuehler, 2005; Steinkuehler, 2006; Thomas & Brown, 2007) have examined the identities,
dispositions and cultures of video-game communities in an effort to understand the forms and
structures that drive the powerful social learning that occurs in them. While research on new
media literacies places great emphasis on the connection between young people’s social identities
and their digital media practices (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006; Leander & Frank, 2006), designers of
new media learning environments lack a design method for constructing environments that speak
in powerful and compelling ways to the identities of their audience. How, then, do we create

designed experiences in learning environments that, instead of just presenting young people with a
unique or valuable identity to inhabit in a digital space, speak to and draw on their extant identities
in authentic and meaningful ways? Qualitative, in situ methods, which have provided productive
ways for social science researchers to examine social identities, interactions and activities, enrich
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Hip Hop Discourse, Financial Literacy and Digital Media Learning Environments
designers’ understandings as we attempt to ‘engineer’ compelling roles, practices and values into
digital learning environments.
In an effort to develop a set of sociocultural design tools that help designers orient themselves
toward the identities and cultures of their design project’s intended audience, this article presents a
design investigation that uses Discourse analysis (Gee, 2005) to examine a discussion of personal
finance on an web-based fan forum dedicated to hip hop music and culture. In this analysis I claim
that the discourse strategies and participant roles present in this discussion are an example of the
organic production of a borderlands Discourse (Gee, 1999) that bridges school-based knowledge of
financial literacy with the youth culture of hip hop. The analysis presented here highlights the
complex and overlapping ways that discursive hybridity in both representational practices and
textual performances of identity figure importantly in the financial literacy practices of community

participants. I further contend that the understandings that emerge from this analysis can help
design researchers attempt to ‘engineer’ the values, identities and modes of interaction of hip hop
discourse communities into academically-oriented learning environments.
Background
‘Born in the Bronx’: entrepreneurialism and hip hop
Hip hop culture – now a widespread global phenomenon – arose as a response of marginalized
working-class urban youth to economic hardship and social fragmentation in their communities. In
the 1960s the construction of the Cross-Bronx Freeway that displaced tens of thousands of workingclass residents (Caro, 1975), the flight of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs from the
area, and a de facto, unofficial New York City policy of ‘slum clearance’ (Jonnes, 2002) all
contributed to a perfect storm of socioeconomic catastrophe in the South Bronx. By the early
1970s, real estate value had depreciated so much in the area that it was common practice for
slumlords to set fire to their properties, which were still occupied by tenants, in order to collect
insurance policies, leading to a loss of housing capacity that reached 80% in some neighborhoods
(Wallace & Wallace, 1999). In the fall of 1973, a pair of teenage Bronx siblings, brother and sister,
whose Jamaican-immigrant family had been driven out of their previous home by one of these
fires, began throwing parties in the recreation room of their apartment complex – price of
admission: 50 cents – for their high school friends in order to make money to buy back-to-school
clothes. The brother, a young graffiti artist who became known as DJ Kool Herc, reverseengineered his father’s sound system to output extra volume, and developed a technique of backcueing two copies of the same record in order to extend the popular breakbeat-only section of
soul/funk songs indefinitely for party-goers (Chang, 2005). In this way, the music of hip hop was
born of creativity, ingenuity, community and entrepreneurialism in the midst of urban poverty and

devastation.
The hip hop culture birthed in the Bronx quickly spread ‘as a source for youth of alternative
identity formation and social status in a community whose older local support institutions had
been all but demolished’ by the deindustrialization of urban areas and concomitant economic
recession (Rose, 1994, p. 35; Chang, 2005). Hip hop culture, which values the use of limited
resources in art and entrepreneurship (e.g. a spray paint can for works of graffiti, two turntables
and a microphone for music), is an archetypal instance of bootstrap capitalism (Basu & Werbner,
2001) – an economic form in which business development occurs despite little available economic,
cultural or economic capital. In building a new ethnic enclave economy that consists in large part
of small and medium enterprises, working-class urban youth affiliated with hip hop have, in
addition to ingeniously producing, packaging and selling urban culture, created new forms of
cultural capital associated with a non-scarcity economy (Basu & Werbner, 2001). These workingclass young people engage with the expressive entrepreneurship of hip hop because its allows them
a space for a creative, ‘authentic’ work identity that is not tied to alienated drudging labor or
unstable job markets (Kitwana, 2002; Fernández-Kelly & Konczal, 2005). Conversely, hip hop also
has an ‘aesthetic of entrepreneurship’, a sense that entrepreneurialism is a necessary and
inextricable part of the art form (Muhummad, 1999). The prominence of entrepreneurial values,
however, does not mean that hip hop has accepted the winner-take-all values of the larger
neoliberal society. As evidenced by the growing prominence of an ‘artist-activist-entrepreneur’
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Ben DeVane
identity in the culture (Guins, 2007), hip hop, unlike other culture industries, uniquely emphasizes
values of minority economic cooperation and solidarity similar to those articulated by W.E.B. Du
Bois, Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington (Alridge, 2005; cf. Basu & Werbner, 2001). For
instance, Black Star, widely accepted as a canonical hip hop act, took the money from their first
record contract and invested it in a historical, financially struggling Afrocentric bookstore in their
hometown of Brooklyn, while rapper Paris offers detailed financial asset-building guides from his
website (Guins, 2007). While the discourse of hip hop is largely banished from mainstream social
institutions like schools, it speaks in powerful ways to the collective experience of racially-tinged
political and economic marginalization of urban working-class youth in the United States (Kelley,
1996; Alim & Pennycook, 2007).
Narrative and Storytelling in Hip Hop
Many African-American communities – a major cultural influence on hip hop – have strong ties to
a rich ‘oral culture’ (Smitherman, 1986; Edwards & Sienkewicz, 1990; Jones, 1991; Hecht et al,
2003) and a strong tradition of narrativizing everyday discourse as part of sense-making or
explanatory rhetorical strategies (Smitherman, 2000). Drawing on this rich oral tradition of the
African diaspora, hip hop artists frequently use rhymed narratives, which have been a core part of hip
hop music since its inception, in their raps (Smitherman 1997; Chang, 2005; Alim, 2006). As such,
narrative forms – often called ‘storytelling raps’ by hip hop enthusiasts – are foundational within
the musical genre and constitutive of a core component of the subculture and art form (Rose,

1994). It is important to understand that storytelling is a complex, dynamic and multifaceted form
within hip hop, as artists draw on literary narrative forms and create new poetic devices. In this
way, the successful rapper, commonly called a master of ceremonies (MC), blends reality and
fiction in order to maintain a balance between their position as ‘verbally gifted storyteller and
cultural historian’ for the urban underclass (Smitherman, 1997, p. 4). In the discussion of personal
finance in an online hip hop community analyzed in this article, we see participants narrativizing
financial problems and using narrative discourse strategies to help frame the issue.
Identity and Language in Hip Hop Culture
The world-view of the ‘hip hop generation’ has been fundamentally defined by tremendous racial
inequality in urban labor markets, in public educational systems, in housing markets and in
enforcement attitudes of the criminal justice system towards young African and Latino Americans
(Kitwana, 2005). Many working-class urban young people are skeptical and distrustful of dominant,
mainstream institutions that perpetuate this inequality and instead affiliate with the alternative
institutions and counter-cultures of hip hop. Such alienation with mainstream institutions is strong
enough that Rose, considered by many to be the eminent scholar of hip hop studies, contends that
rap artists are modern-day ‘prophets of rage’, a ‘large and significant element’ of which are
‘engaged in symbolic and ideological warfare with institutions and groups that symbolically,
ideologically, and materially oppress African Americans’ (1994, pp. 99, 101-102). In this way, she
notes, ‘rap music is a contemporary stage for the theater of the powerless’. The relationship, in this
view, between youth who affiliate with hip hop culture and dominant cultural forms is entirely

oppositional.
Some contend this oppositional identity relative to dominant American discourses and
institutions is primarily evidenced in the social language of hip hop. Smitherman (1997) argues that
the communicative practices of the ‘Hip Hop Nation’ speech community are akin (but not
equivalent) to Halliday’s (1976) notion of an ‘anti-language’, a lingua franca produced to prevent
people outside the group from understanding it (e.g. cockney rhyming slang). Accordingly, hip hop
artists are ‘disturbing the peace’, or ‘sociolinguistically constructing themselves as members of the
dispossessed’ (Smitherman, 1997, p. 11; see Alim, 2002), by resisting the linguistic hegemony of
standard English (see Bourdieu, 1991a). This divergence is exhibited in their (sometimes conscious)
adoption of the syntax and structure of African-American English, their frequent use of profanity,
their incredibly inventive production of slang and their usage of complex layers of metaphor
(Smitherman, 1997; Alim, 2003, 2006; Perry, 2004). This last practice strongly suggests how close
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Hip Hop Discourse, Financial Literacy and Digital Media Learning Environments
the language of hip hop is to an anti-language, as Halliday argued that it was a ‘metaphorical
character that defines the anti- language’ and that ‘this metaphorical quality appears all the way up
and down the [language] system’ (1976, p. 578). In examining the non-standard spelling
conventions regularly used in hip hop, Olivo (2001) buttressed this argument, contending that the
differences non-standard orthographic practices not found in African-American English or other

dialects serve as evidence that the anti-language devices in hip hop language ‘function to create and
sustain hip-hop culture as an “anti-society”’ (p. 67). While Smitherman and Olivo may overstate
their case – the popularity of hip hop among white youth (Kitwana, 2005) certainly shows that hip
hop is not a strict anti-language – hip hop culture (and hip hop identity) stands in opposition to
many dominant American institutions and cultural forms. How, then, do design researchers, many
of whom are culturally located well within said institutions and forms, appeal to the ever-growing
number of youth affiliated with hip hop, a youth culture fixated on ‘authenticity’ in discourse
(McLeod, 1999), without colonizing it?
Theoretical Orientation
Research trajectories in psychology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, literary studies,
education and social theory have argued against the notion of identity in contemporary societies as
a static, singular ‘core identity’, and instead argued for a notion of identity as fluid, multiple and
dynamic – continuously reproduced by both discursive and extant-material social practices (e.g.
Foucault, 1977, 1980; Bakhtin, 1981; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Butler, 1993; Hall & Du Gay, 1996;
Gee, 1999). This view holds that people both perform their identity in different ways depending
upon the social context and have their identity defined for them by the social norms, practices and
discourses of a community. Identity, then, is in part positional (Holland et al, 1998), having to do
with personal relationships, social status, and larger systems of power in communities or activity
groups in which a person participates or belongs (Gee 1999, 2000). An individual will enact a
distinct role or version of who they are, as well as have who they can be defined for them, in

different social arenas – at work with co-workers, at home with family, at a church with coworshippers, at a bar with their friends, etc. These different identities, however, are not always
bound strictly by the social groups and activity, but are frequently overlapping, negotiated,
contested and hybridized.
Language is one means through which a person expresses their identity relative to their
immediate social space and social group as well as broader social discourses and systems of power
(Bakhtin, 1981; Gee, 1999; Holland et al, 1998). Sociolinguistic research has shown the importance
of linguistic practices – pitch-register, dialect, phonology, morphology, genre, word choice, etc. – as
indexes of a person’s social position, cultural models and relationship with others in the
conversation (Gumperz & Hymes, 1972; Bourdieu, 1977). Gee (1999, 2005) contends that human
communication (as well as actions, thoughts and feelings) is always constituted in relation to a
Discourse, or ‘way of being in the world’, that is affiliated with some activity, social group or
institution. Discourses, however, are both an idealized and empirical analytic construct, as the
boundaries of their ways of thinking, acting and knowing are sometimes not easily identifiable or
rigid. Some Discourses, like those of an insular religious sect, demand a tremendous amount of
orthodoxy, while others, like a diverse group of ‘regulars’ at a neighborhood bar, allocate to their
members multiformity in their dispositions. In the same manner that the identities of members of a
Discourse group are not reified and unchanging, the utterances and talk of communities and social
groups are rarely homogeneous or static. Bakhtin called this occurrence of Discourse hybridity
heteroglossia, the presence of ‘a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and
interrelationships’ (1981, p. 263). Keeping in mind this dynamic, hybrid nature of language and

identity, how then do we understand the role of language and identity in relation to this interaction
and financial literacy practices ‘in the wild?’

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Ben DeVane
Methods
Context of Study: design-based research
This study is situated within a broader design-based research investigation (Brown, 1992; Collins,
1992). Design-based research, also known as design research or design experiments, is the practice
of ‘engineering particular forms of learning and systematically studying those forms of learning’ in
a given context (Cobb et al, 2003, p. 9). As a methodology, design research aims to better
understand how to create productive ways of learning by examining the interaction of researcher
interventions, which are often centered on computer-supported learning environments or
curricula, with communities of learners in quasi-naturalistic settings like classrooms (Collins et al,
2004). While design-based research stands in contrast with psychological methods in part because it
allows more active roles in the study to participants (Collins, 1992; Barab & Squire, 2004), its major
focus is often on successfully implementing and evaluating a design that was chosen and planned
by researchers prior to an engagement with the learning context. This approach has been criticized
for ignoring the agency and identities of teachers and students (and others) who participate in the

research (Olson, 2004; Engeström, 2008) in an effort to seek legitimization within the broader
discourse of ‘scientifically valid’ educational research (Shavelson et al, 2003). Some scholars have
called for new modes of design research that incorporate the local knowledges of participant
groups (Barab et al, 2004; cf. Bell, 2004) and speak to their linguistic practices and cultures (Lee,
2003). In an effort to understand how to design learning environments that are relevant to
working-class urban youth culture, this study examines the social practices and modes of
interaction in one discussion about personal finance on an online hip hop discussion forum.
This study serves to inform my doctoral thesis, a design-based research project entitled
‘Rethinking “Hip Hop Tycoon”: social identity, youth culture and the design of games for
learning’. This project probes two general questions: (a) how to design a game for learning financial
and entrepreneurial literacies that speaks to the identities, social practices and cultures of
marginalized urban middle-school youth; and (b) the efficacy of this identity-driven learning artifact
in helping these working-class youth build the financial literacies necessary to navigate a segmented
labor market in a recessional economy. The project seeks to leverage the entrepreneurial values of
hip hop culture in a ‘mobile media’ game design to help working-class young people in a large
urban Midwestern city develop their knowledge of finance and entrepreneurialism. To better align
the learning environment and design processes with these young people’s culture, identities and
practices, this project uses sociocultural design tools that have been drawn from other methodological
approaches – critical design ethnography (Barab et al, 2004), focus groups (Merton & Kendall, 1946;
Krueger & Casey, 2000), verbal think-aloud protocols (Ericsson & Simon, 1984); and knowledge
assessment tasks (Chi & Koeske, 1983) – in order to better deal with the relationship between
financial knowledge and cultural identity. As such, the design process is informed by two
preliminary design investigations: a survey/focus-group study of the digital practices and gameplay patterns of working-class urban youth (DeVane, 2008) and this study of talk about financial
literacy in online hip hop forums.
Data Collection
Data was collected from a finance and business-related sub-forum of a large online message boardbased community for the discussion of hip hop music and culture. One of the largest hip hoporiented communities on the Web, this site was organized around many topical ‘forums’, which in
turn had many discussion threads dedicated to a particular topic. This interaction was chosen from
the most active ‘thread’ in a sub-forum that was not maintained by one of the community’s
volunteer moderators. This thread was not selected for analysis because it is completely
representative of discourse in the community, but rather because it illustrates different genres of
discourse and interaction that regularly occur there. The community overall has about 200,000
users, 100,000 distinct threads and 5,000,000 distinct posts since it restructured its data warehousing
and forum interface in the summer of 2007. The community has 18 sub-forums dedicated to the
discussion of a variety of topics, ranging from hip hop music, video games, jokes and banter, and
car customization to politics and society, women’s issues, nutrition and fitness and, in the case of
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Hip Hop Discourse, Financial Literacy and Digital Media Learning Environments
this data, personal finance and business. The relative popularity of topical sub-forums can be
surprising – the sub-forum for discussion of politics and society was the second most popular
behind the one allocated for discussion of music, ostensibly the community’s primary shared
interest.
The relevant forum thread for this interaction was active from August to December 2007.
The data chosen for analysis represents four of the forty-three unique posts in the thread. ‘Trebred’,
a pseudonym for a regular participant in the large online community, created a thread to seek
assistance with what he perceived as his significant unpaid debt and attendant poor credit ratings.
The data presented here includes both Trebred’s original post and a sub-thread about another
poster who had difficulties similar to those of the thread author. The relevant posts of this subthread are encapsulated in one large post by ‘Souer’. She ‘quoted’, or includes with attribution, the
entirety of other posts in her own, then included her own remarks underneath. Like many others,
this sub-forum has identifiable social norms and a community of regulars who participate. Souer,
unlike the other posters, was a regular participant in this sub-forum at the time the data was
collected.
Data Analysis
Because I am examining how identity, status and affiliation function in this social interaction, I
utilize the framework of ‘D/discourse analysis’, a ‘theory and method for studying how language
gets recruited “on site” to enact specific social activities and social identities’ (Gee, 2005, p. 1; cf.
Fairclough, 1995). The primary function of human language in this view is to support social
interaction, to enact an identity within a given social group and to perform affiliation with a
culture, institution or social group. In this way, Gee (2005) distinguishes between instances of
communicative practices, or small ‘d’ discourses, and language used to perform ‘ways of being in
the world’, or big ‘D’ Discourses. This understanding of language differs from ‘transmission
models’ of human communication that view language as a transparent media, or ‘wrapper’, for
decontextualized information (cf. Lasswell, 1948; Shannon & Weaver, 1949). Meaning in language,
however, is situated in linguistic forms, social functions, modes of expression, cultural models and
social activities. To better frame these situated, social meanings in my analysis, this data is
organized around idea units (Chafe, 1979, 1980; Gee, 1986, 2005) or a chunk of language focused on
sharing a somewhat small piece of information, as my base unit of analysis. These idea units, which
are also called lines, have been organized into stanzas that center on a theme, function or
perspective (Scollon & Scollon, 1981; Gee, 1991, 2005). When my analysis focuses on the textual
devices that the authors are using to perform social work, I organize the text into stanzas to better
represent situated meanings in social interactions.
At times I supplement ‘D/discourse analysis’ (hereafter described as ‘discourse analysis’) with
other synergistic methods from sociolinguistics to look at different social aspects of an interaction.
At times, this article uses methodological tools drawn from functional linguistics (Halliday, [1973]
2004) to examine the oppositional social aspects of hip hop language, and interactional linguistics to
look at interactional frames (Gumperz, 1982a, b). At other times, I use narrative analysis to
examine how community members structure their requests for help to invite collaboration (Labov
& Waletzky, 1967; Linde, 1993). Drawing from a large amount of empirical data, Labov (1972)
argued that fully formed narratives had the following structure: abstract, orientation, complicating
action (event), evaluation, resolution and coda. This analysis uses a modification of Labov’s framework
by Linde (1993), who argued that Labov’s structure of narrative roughly characterizes storytelling,
but that the ordering of the structure is often manipulated and elaborated upon by individual
storytellers. In his studies of the use of narrative by urban, low-income African American youth,
Labov notably found that such young people tended to eschew an evaluation section in favor of
doing the complex narrative work of embedding evaluation, or distributing evaluative devices
through their narratives.

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Ben DeVane
Findings
Narrativizing a (Social) Problem
Literature in the learning sciences has emphasized the important role that representations of
problems play in social problem solving and other joint activity. The ability to create useful
representations of a problem space, for instance, characterizes the difference in expert and novice
competency in solving physics problems (Chi et al, 1981). Similarly, the quality of a problem
representation, and its constraints and affordances, has important effects on students’ discourse
during collaborative problem solving (Bell, 1997; Suthers, 1999; Ploetzner et al, 1999). Studies of
problem solving foreground and emphasize the importance of a well-structured representation in
problem solutions and cognitive activity (Larkin & Simon, 1987; Kotovsky & Simon, 1990; Zhang,
1997). In this influential cognitive framework, the ability of people, either individually or
collaboratively, to successfully engage with a problem is dependent foremost on the clarity and
robustness of the problem representation.
If one considers the initial post of Trebred, the post that starts the discussion (excerpted
below), from this perspective, Trebred’s post might be considered an odd way to request help with
a bad financial situation. While it does a large amount of social work, it does not provide readers
with a well-structured representation of the problem or much in the way of specific information
about it. Instead, the text utilizes narrative devices in order to communicate to its audience a
general impression of the problem and to convince them to care about it. In order to accomplish
these ends, the author constantly evaluates the ‘facts’ of his condition. The text not only uses a
range of evaluative devices – exaggeration, reproduction of phonology, repetition, etc. – to attempt
to gain the readers’ sympathy by helping them feel what the author wants them to feel, but deploys
other devices in a very structured way that move the reader from feelings of alarm and empathy
for the author’s situation to a more concrete discussion of the specifics of his problem. As a result,
two thematic sections emerge from the text – the first (reproduced below in stanza form) seeks to
attract the community’s attention and emphasize the dire nature of the author’s predicament,
while the latter starts guiding potential discussion of a solution.
Thread Post 1, Thematic Stanza 1: Trebred’s Urgent Problem
TI: I have horrible credit I OWE EVERYBODY, PROBABLY YOU!!!
a For real.
b My credit is bad
c I havent checked my score in a while
d but it’s probably at the lowest possible number.
e I have about $10,000 in debt
f minus my student loans.
g You name it I got it ...
h car repo, payday loans, credit cards, family friends, apartments, utitility [sic] companies, cable
companies ...
i I OWE EVERYBODY

In the first thematic section of the thread-starting post the author, Trebred, does little to detail his
financial problems or explore possible solutions to them, but rather seeks to characterize their
exigent nature by using hyperbolic intensifiers (Labov, 1972). Nowhere is this more evident than in
the post’s title. The types of intensifiers used in this sentential title include an exaggerated quantifier
(‘EVERYBODY’) and a textual reproduction of expressive phonology (a clause in capital letters
followed by multiple exclamation marks). This reliance upon intensifiers continues throughout the
first section of the post: Clauses ‘a’ and ‘b’ are examples of the use of repetition – another type of
intensifier – to strengthen the author’s description of his circumstances. Clauses ‘c’ and ‘d’ again
repeat the author’s claim about his credit, but do so using another exaggerated quantifier (‘lowest
possible number’, line d), to which two clauses are devoted. Clause ‘e’ again reinforces and repeats
the author’s claim using a non-exaggerated quantifier. This segment then progresses into a ritual
utterance in clause ‘g’, which further reinscribes and intensifies the point just made, followed by an
enumeration of individual debts which repeats, and provides anecdotal evidence for, the claim of
overwhelming debt. The author concludes this thematic section with an exaggerated,
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Hip Hop Discourse, Financial Literacy and Digital Media Learning Environments
phonologically expressive repetition of his catch phrase from the title in clause ‘i’ (‘I OWE
EVERYBODY’) to return to the theme set out in the title. Throughout this thematic section,
Trebred seeks to balance a sense of urgency in his text.
In the second thematic section of his post, the author tries to move toward a discussion of
possible solutions to his problem without leaving behind the alarming nature of his predicament
(employed in the first thematic section to gain his audience’s sympathy). Here, the author focuses
on possible solutions while still reminding readers of his dire circumstances using less obvious
means. Indicative of this shift are the comparatively fewer evaluators found within it than in the
previous section. This section still evinces the author’s feelings about his situation, but it deploys
new narrative devices alongside the previously prevalent intensifiers to accomplish that goal. Using
comparators (Labov, 1972), another family of evaluators, as well as intensifiers, the writer seeks to
remind the reader of the dire nature of the issue. Comparators juxtapose ‘events that did occur to
those which did not occur’ (Labov, 1972, p. 381) in order to provide a framework for the audience
to evaluate the importance of those events. Because event negation ‘expresses the defeat of an
expectation that something would happen’ (Labov, 1972, pp. 380-381), comparators often take the
form of negatives, which tell the reader what happened while simultaneously summoning
alternative imaginings of what could have been.
The author’s use of evaluators within the second section of the text is prominent and strategic
with regard to the message he wishes to convey, maintaining a sense of urgency while at the same
time explicating the problem space and shaping solutions. The comparators used are future-oriented
comparators (Toolan, 2001) that deal with future, hypothetical actions instead of events that have
already occurred. Through their use, the author contrasts not what has happened with what has
not but rather two possible events or courses of action. He positions the choice he favored against
the one he opposes:
Thread Post 1, Thematic Stanza 2: Trebred’s More Specific Problem
j I got a pretty good job makin decent money
k so I need to start payin this shit off.
l Where do I start though.
m Collection Agencies want all this money
n that I cant come up with with one big lump sum.
o I dont want to file bankruptcy [sic] because
p that shit stays one [sic] your credit for what?? 7 years?
q I figure I get to I can pay these muthafuckas off in about 2.
r What should I do Financial Guru’s????

Clauses ‘j’, ‘k’ and ‘l’ serve as a transition from an emphasis on the severity of the problem found in
the first thematic section to an examination of the specifics of the author’s problem in the second
thematic section. The framing of the problem starts with clause ‘m’ in which the intensifierquantifier ‘all’ is used to emphasize the large amount of money owed to collection agencies. In this
way, the clause serves two functions: it informs the audience that there is a substantial dollar
amount owed and it maintains the intensity of the former section. Likewise, the use of negation
comparators in clause ‘n’ helps the author contrast what he can do with what he cannot do while
maintaining an emphasis on the size of his debt. In clause ‘o’, this use of negative future-tense
comparators continues as the author evaluates different solutions for his predicament. The author
positions his desire to stay out of bankruptcy against the possibility that bankruptcy would cause
more harm to his credit than his current outstanding debt. Clause ‘q’ marks the first time that the
author contemplates the possibility that his debt might one day be retired, marking the first time
the author uses a positive tone since the section transition in clauses ‘j’ and ‘k’. Described as an oftused conversational ‘move’ in the Conversation Analysis literature, this optimistic projection is often
used as an exit device in troubles talk, a form of conversation in which one participants’ problem is
discussed (Jefferson, 1988), serving to encourage the reader to answer the author’s final request for
help and advice in clause ‘r’. The audience is then left to decide whether or not they should try to
aid the author.
Trebred’s reliance on narrative structures (such as multiple forms of evaluative devices) is
mirrored in the overall structure of his post as well. The post is not a traditional narrative but
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Ben DeVane
rather a narrative presentation of a problem to a social group; thus, its structure differs from the
archetypal narrative described by Labov (1972) and Labov & Waletzky (1967) while still containing
recognizable narrative elements. Table I shows an analysis of the post based on Linde’s (1993)
framework for narrative structural clause types.

Table I. Trebred’s narrative problem representation.

In the first nine clauses (a-i), the author employs heavily evaluated narrative to orient the audience
toward his problems. By using evaluation prominently in the orientation, the post displays to its
audience the author’s feelings about his predicament and suggests that perhaps they should feel the
same way. However, this section places its explicit evaluation of the author’s predicament only at
the start of the text and uses only embedded evaluation inside narrative clauses until the evaluative
coda of the section in clause ‘i’. Likewise, the second section also places explicit evaluation at the
beginning and the end of the section, and uses only embedded evaluation in the middle of the
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Hip Hop Discourse, Financial Literacy and Digital Media Learning Environments
section. This structure places heavy emphasis on the author’s feelings about his problem around
the boundaries of the telling, so to speak, without interrupting his report of the problem’s specifics
with explicit evaluation. The evaluative interruptions are placed at the beginning of each section as
the author orients (and reorients) his audience towards his problem and then at the end of the
second section where the author evaluates potential outcomes and solutions. This embedding of
evaluation maintains an emphasis on the author’s feelings – and thus his values – while allowing for
a relatively smooth and engaging telling of the narrativized dilemma. In this way, he maintains an
interesting and rhythmic reportability (i.e. the engaging happenings of the story) while presenting
his values and sentiments, which he presumably hopes align with those of his audience (e.g. selfdeprecation in lines a-d; use of hip hop vernacular in lines j-q, performance of limited financial
expertise in lines o-p). Thus, the author does not just tell his story in a compelling fashion but also
presents a certain version of himself in his narrative that aligns with the values of the community.
As one examines the text in increasing detail, it becomes more apparent that the text does a
tremendous amount of social work for it to be considered a mere presentation of a problem. The
presence of socially-oriented narrative features – narrative structure, audience-aimed evaluation,
balance of reportability and credibility, etc. – suggests that the text, while certainly not phatic
(Malinowski, 1923), is an artifact whose design is intended to establish a social relationship between
its audience and the author – certainly at least to the same degree that it is designed to present to
them a problem to be solved. These narrative features, moreover, are mobilized in a unique
manner as the author seeks to present not a conventional narrative but rather a personal problem
in story-like form. This choice suggests that the author’s goal, however tacit, is to establish himself
as within the Discourse of the sub-forum community; indeed, in some ways we could argue that
this need to establish identity is perhaps more important than the need to accurately convey a bevy
of detailed information about his financial problem. Trebred’s presentation of his problem and
solicitation of advice are nuanced social interactions that are designed to parlay his entrance into a
community. In this context the development of financial literacy here, it seems, is intricately bound
up in the production of social identities.
Hybrid Identity in Text
Trebred’s request for help spawns several discussions of credit-related financial problems and
concomitant debates about possible solutions in the thread. Just as Trebred’s post illuminates that
the how narrative can function as a social connector in collaborative problem solving, the
discussion that followed his plea for help demonstrates how identity, collaboration and culture
interact in the financial literacy practices of this hip hop community. After Trebred presented his
case to the community, ‘EndlezFlowz’, a pseudonym for another forum participant, takes
advantage of the opening presented by Trebred to present his own credit and debt problems,
inquiring as to the credit score he would need to buy a home:
Thread Post 37 Excerpt: EndlezFlowz’ Problem
15 few ... In the next three yrs I wanna buy a crib. I was
16 about to call ccrs but i decided not to. How high would my 17 score need to be to get a home?

In response, several forum participants attempt to establish their credentials as knowledgeable
insiders in the discourse of financial literacy by offering both Trebred and EndlezFlowz advice –
among them, Naledje and Souer (excerpts below). As each respondent attempts to establish himself
as an insider to both the discourse of finance and the discourse of hip hop, he too engages in
substantial social work of the sort evidenced in Trebred’s post. In their case, however, it is social
work of a markedly different form. While Naledje’s response is relatively textually austere, Souer’s
rejoinder uses more linguistic devices to perform identity-driven social work. The preceding
requests are longer, contain significant narrative components and explicitly express doubts about
their own knowledge of credit and finance. Naledje takes a very different tack, tersely stating that
EndlezFlowz needs a credit score of at least 620 to get a better interest rate and, in order to do this,
he needs to pay his bills and get secured credit cards:

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Ben DeVane
Thread Post 38 Excerpt: Naledje’s Advice
1 You have to have an average score of at least 620, even
2 with that, I would get it higher, so you don’t pay an
3 outrageous intrest [sic] rate. Pay off them bills get some secured
4 credit cards homey, you got time.

At no time in his 40-word declarative response does Naledje use any overt narrative or
conversational devices to attempt to convey his authority or expertise in the subject matter – he
does not, for example, explain the rationale behind his advice. He does, however, use non-overt
devices for asserting authority within his text. For example, the terseness of the prose and the lack
of any explanatory justifications can be construed as a projection of confidence, while deontic modals
– expressions that convey requirement or necessity on the part of a speaker – like ‘have to’ (line 1)
are used to convey authority in casual conversations (Palmer, 2003). Naledje only explicitly
attempts to establish solidarity with EndlezFlowz one time, when he refers to EndlezFlowz as
‘homey’ (line 4). Instead, he uses the social language of hip hop – exhibited in the hip hop slang and
tense markers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in his text – to establish himself as
someone who is ‘speaking within’ the discourse. These AAVE markers include Naledje’s use of a
demonstrative them (Mufwene, 1998) when he refers to ‘them bills’ (line 3) and substituted ‘got’ for
‘have’ (Weldon, 1994). While he does not show great interest in building a relationship with this
newcomer to his community, Naledje does take the time to explicitly acknowledge EndlezFlowz as
a peer and to make at least a small bid at establishing some minimal solidarity. In such ways, the
design of the text presents the identity of the author as reserved and confident, yet knowledgeable
and casually interested in helping others in the community.
Of course, the way in which a person performs and displays their identity within a given
community through language – in ways that are recognizable by their fellow members –is never
straightforward and uncomplicated. Naledje’s manner of performing identity and establishing one’s
relationship to the community greatly contrasts with that chosen by Souer, a subsequent
respondent. Compared to Naledje, Souer’s text seems to defy simple analysis. In her 214 word
rejoinder to Naledje’s response, she negotiates a tension between elevating her status within the
community through a display of expertise in financial matters and building solidarity with the
community. She employs a range of conversational and communicative devices in order to
accomplish this, sophisticated at times and seemingly rudimentary at others.
a
b
c
d
e
f
g
h
i
j
k
l

Text from post
if you pay them off and they remain on your credit report
your score will only go up a few points.
the amount of points depends on how much the debt was
and how long ago it was incurred.
you have to keep in mind the score is all statistical.
now if you pay it off and it is removed
then it will go up more.
so you should either try to negotiate with them
and get something in writing that they will remove it if it's paid off
or hire one of those places that can negotiate that for you.
i wouldnt necessarily do the latter though.
may be a waste of money.

Discourse type
Formal Personal Finance
Formal Personal Finance
Formal Personal Finance
Formal Personal Finance
Formal Personal Finance
Formal Personal Finance
Formal Personal Finance
Formal Personal Finance
Formal Personal Finance
Formal Personal Finance
Informal Personal Finance
Informal Personal Finance

Table II. Souer’s specialist first section.

In her first paragraph (see Table II), Souer exhibits a sophisticated understanding of credit scores in
a social language (Gee, 1999) or register (Halliday, [1973] 2004) that appears markedly different from
other posters in the thread. Her first paragraph of text flouts the ‘standard’ rules of written English
at the same time that it cleaves to them. An immediate example of this seeming contradiction in
the social languages present in the text is that Souer chooses not to use capitalization, but still uses
the very traditional double space to indicate a full stop at the end of sentences. More generally, the
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Hip Hop Discourse, Financial Literacy and Digital Media Learning Environments
text’s tendency toward the social language of Standard English is apparent through the lack of
auxiliary verb omissions, a common feature of African-American English, as well as the shortage of
contractions, indicating formality. One plausible reason for the lack of auxiliary omission is that Souer
used many deontic modals (expressions that imply requirement or necessity on the speaker’s part)
to convey her authority and impose obligation on the author. The presence of so many
uncontracted auxiliaries (‘will’ in line b, ‘have to’ in line e, ‘should’ in line h, etc.) conveys formality.
Words like ‘incurred’, ‘statistical’ and ‘negotiate’ all perform an expertise in matters of finance
generally and credit specifically. Toward the end of the paragraph, Souer begins to use
contractions, thereby transitioning towards a more casual tone, with the last sentence seemingly so
casually composed that it omits the subject. This change in inflection from formality to informality
indicates that Souer is preparing the reader for a tonal shift in the next paragraph.
Text from post

Discourse type

l

what dayne is saying is that doing shit the right way going forward

m

has a greater effect on the score than working backward.

Hybrid Hip Hop/Informal
Personal Finance
Formal Personal Finance

n

So if you start paying shit on time every time now

Hip Hop

o

itll increase each month.

Informal Personal Finance

p

again, the increase will depend on the amount, type of credit it is, length of the
debt, etc.

Formal Personal Finance

q
r

to be honest no one can give a clear cut answer
bc alot of shit comes into play including your debt to open credit ratio.

s
t

just follow daynes advice
and get some secured cards to start putting some positive things on your report

Informal Personal Finance
Hybrid Hip Hop/Informal
Personal Finance
Informal Personal Finance
Formal Personal Finance

Table III. Souer’s hybrid second section.

If the language of the first paragraph indicates that Souer is seeking to establish her expertise and
authority in the discourse of finance, the very first sentence of the next paragraph shows that Souer
has a different purpose for this subsequent section (see Table III). She continues to build her
credibility in the subject area but her language is significantly altered to establish her affiliation with
the discourse of the community:
Thread Post 42: Souer (second section excerpt by stanza)
l what dayne is saying is that doing shit the right way going forward
m has a greater effect on the score than working backward.

Souer still occupies the discursive space of expertise and authority in this part of the text but now
has clearly broadened her authorial voice, abandoning the specialist language of the first paragraph
and using profanity in this section to establish herself as speaking within the oppositional social
language of hip hop. Her use of profanity escalates through the final paragraph of her post:
Thread Post 42: Souer (second section excerpt by stanza)
n so if you start paying shit on time every time now
o itll increase each month.
p again, the increase will depend on the amount, type of credit it is, length of the debt, etc.
q to be honest no one can give a clear cut answer
r bc alot of shit comes into play including your debt to open credit ratio.
s just follow daynes advice
t and get some secured cards to start putting some positive things on your report.

In substance, Souer is making substantive and nuanced points about the strategy that