The Use of Profanities as Communication

A Netnography Examining its Symbolic Power among Young People

Abstract

This article aims bring to light the drastic change that has taken place over the years, especially among the younger generation, towards profanities in Italy. This practice, traditionally offensive and arcane, and therefore before not very polite, is now common among very young age groups, between 12 and 17 years old, thus before “adulthood” as defined in Europe as 18 years and over. Yet statistics, which point out that 78 per cent of people between the ages of 12 and 17 declare themselves to be believers, appear contradictory to the prevalence of blasphemy. The analysis proposed here connects two concepts: on the one hand the legal protection of those who feel offended by these practices, describing previously collected first-hand statistics and secondary data from authoritative sources such as ISTAT and Eurostat; and on the other hand, however, the problem of the lack of protection for those who want to blaspheme, receiving bans when this practice is applied. In order to generate informative data, a qualitative-quantitative netnography was carried out on two platforms, Twitch and Instagram. The reason for the choice is that these two social networks, as much as they ban certain behaviours and the use of certain words, have profanity-rich content. In fact, ways have been found to conceal the banning of profiles through the use of asterisks in captions on videos, or self-censoring while uttering a profanity, by beeping or pausing, during video live streams. In conclusion, then, profanities in the younger generation are more often used as a trendy item, rather than its real offensive significance being understood.