"What is it that drives us to define everyday realities in such wildly clever but hugely offensive terms?"
Peckham commenced writing the first Urban Dictionary book around the start of 2004, and continued for a year and-a-half before it was complete. Urban Dictionary: Fularious Street Slang Defined was published in November 2005, when the author was 24 years old, and the book's 343 pages consists of a compilation of 2,000 entries from the site.[5]
By 2005, 300,000 entries and 2 million definitions (multiple meanings can be assigned to individual entries) had been submitted, including slang language such as "adorkable" and "top up music".[7] Additionally, Peckham informed journalist Kevin Amorim in December 2005 that 40,000 volunteer editors contributed to the site, which was receiving 140,000 uniques visitors per day, and "emo" was the entry with the most definitions (697).[5]
Around the time that the first Urban Dictionary book was published, Peckham was employed by Google Inc., and he continued to monitor the site during his tenure.[2] In October 2006, Peckham submitted a "friend of the court" brief for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) freedom-of-speech lawsuit "ACLU versus [former Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales", in which the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was successfully challenged.[8] Peckham wrote:
Free speech and the Internet go hand in hand, because online, anyone with a computer can be heard. The Internet equalizes people like that—no matter how much money you have, or how old you are, you can connect with a huge number of people ... Urban Dictionary evolved to what it is today because people used it for their own purpose -- self-expression. My job is to support that use, and that's why I'm participating in this lawsuit.[7]During Peckham's time at Google, the second Urban Dictionary book, 2007's 'Mo Urban Dictionary: Ridonkulous Street Slang Defined, was published.[9] Peckham remained at Google for two years, before deciding to manage Urban Dictionary on a full-time basis. Peckham explained in 2014: "I just wanted to work on one project that represents me."[2]
By 2009, the site listed around 4 million entries and received about 2,000 new submissions per day.[10] In April 2009, the site registered 15 million unique visitors, while 80 percent of its monthly users were younger than 25. In July 2009, Peckham explained to the New York Times that Urban Dictionary is the "anti-Wikipedia",[11] and its goal of neutrality, as "Every single word on here [Urban Dictionary] is written by someone with a point of view, with a personal experience of the word in the entry."[12] Writing for the Pasadena Weekly about the Urban Dictionary phenomenon, Kevin Uhrich asked later that month: "What is it that drives us to define everyday realities in such wildly clever but hugely offensive terms?"[8]
No comments:
Post a Comment