Guest post by Graham Hough-Cornwell

The World Cup is all of six days old and already the controversy rages. Not over the best team, the most skillful player, the biggest disappointment, or the prettiest goal, but over the vuvuzela, a thin plastic horn popular at South African soccer matches and blaring by the thousands at every World Cup game so far.

The French national team, following a disappointing scoreless tie against Uruguay, blamed the instrument for their poor play. After a lackluster showing in a narrow 1-0 win over Nigeria, Argentinian star and 2010 World Player of the Year Lionel Messi claimed, “It is impossible to communicate, it’s like being deaf.”

Twitter provides the main outlet for people around the world to express their hatred (or, less often, their love) for the vuvuzela. A simple search on Twitter for “#vuvuzela” reveals thousands of tweets posted daily around the globe. Most tweets are humorous:

JonahFisher: Girl in front of me is blowing #vuvuzela and has earplugs in. Strikes me as rather unfair. #wc2010

lee_Kern: The kazoo has more grace than the Vuvuzela, and the kazoo is a f***ing stupid instrument… http://youtu.be/gjQ0MzWH4Ss #vuvuzela

The complaints came as no surprise. Following public outcry over the vuvuzela during last summer’s World Cup warmup tournament in South Africa FIFA (soccer’s world governing body) President Sepp Blatter decided not to ban the horn because he did not want to “Europeanize the first African World Cup.”

Continue reading “Tweetography: FIFA, can we blow our horns?” →