- News
- Reviews
- Bikes
- Accessories
- Accessories - misc
- Computer mounts
- Bags
- Bar ends
- Bike bags & cases
- Bottle cages
- Bottles
- Cameras
- Car racks
- Child seats
- Computers
- Glasses
- GPS units
- Helmets
- Lights - front
- Lights - rear
- Lights - sets
- Locks
- Mirrors
- Mudguards
- Racks
- Pumps & CO2 inflators
- Puncture kits
- Reflectives
- Smart watches
- Stands and racks
- Trailers
- Clothing
- Components
- Bar tape & grips
- Bottom brackets
- Brake & gear cables
- Brake & STI levers
- Brake pads & spares
- Brakes
- Cassettes & freewheels
- Chains
- Chainsets & chainrings
- Derailleurs - front
- Derailleurs - rear
- Forks
- Gear levers & shifters
- Groupsets
- Handlebars & extensions
- Headsets
- Hubs
- Inner tubes
- Pedals
- Quick releases & skewers
- Saddles
- Seatposts
- Stems
- Wheels
- Tyres
- Health, fitness and nutrition
- Tools and workshop
- Miscellaneous
- Cross country mountain bikes
- Tubeless valves
- Buyers Guides
- Features
- Forum
- Recommends
- Podcast
forum
Road.cc and the Power of Words
Tribalism is a serious problem in our society, and the media often make it worse.
In the world of cycling, and on road.cc particularly, we hear about "cyclists" and "drivers" on a daily basis.
The use of these words not only assumes the existence of such categories of people, but it also plays a significant role in constructing them.
This, in turn, reinforces the "drivers vs cyclists" narrative, one of the many variants of tribalism corrupting our thinking.
Words are powerful.
With the exception, perhaps, of those for whom cycling is a profession, the word "cyclist" does not apply to anybody else. The sole act of driving a car does not make one a "driver". When I make dinner I'm not a "cook", when I write an email I'm not a "writer", when I paint a wall in my house I'm not a "decorator" and so on. To put it another way, riding a bike does not define who I am. Nor does driving a car. These are actions, not categories of people.
The urge to categorise people according to what they happen to be doing at any given moment is not healthy.
A recent road.cc article reporting on a crime where somebody shot somebody else in the US was presented as if it was somehow about cycling since the killer was described as a "cyclist", as he happened to be riding a bicycle when the incident took place.
The original article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel described the killer as a "bicyclist", and the Associated Press, from which news outlets picked up the story, ran the headline "Cyclist gets 25 years in deadly road rage shooting".
All of this gives more ammunition to the relentless anti-cycling campaign that much of the media are engaged in.
But I think road.cc should have the moral obligation to counter the normalisation of the "cyclists vs [insert other category of people]" narrative.
I wonder, for example, if alongside the "Near Miss of the Day" feature, there could be one like the "Bad Headline of the Day", pointing out instances where the word "cyclists" is obviously misused and serves to misrepresent a story as being about an imaginary category of (bad!) people rather than what it is really about.
If you're new please join in and if you have questions pop them below and the forum regulars will answer as best we can.
Latest Forum Topics
Latest Comments
- A V Lowe 6 hours 49 min ago
Oh dear even your staff & copy checkers can't even use the right terminology...
- ktache 6 hours 58 min ago
Nokons on two of mine, longitudinal XTR on the other.
- wtjs 7 hours 27 min ago
Excellent, Lancashire Road Police! I and many others are pleased that some Police Services are stressing this point. Language is important:...
- mctrials23 8 hours 49 min ago
This is exactly the sort of thing AI enables them to do. Previously it was thought impossible to do something like "if user is travelling for 3...
- archieboy 9 hours 11 min ago
No, just to expensive, I went Jonas and Demi as the expensive picks....
- Oldfatgit 14 hours 57 min ago
[Snip]...
- chrisonabike 16 hours 16 min ago
Well, Edinburgh certainly has hills, there's quite a bit of pavé and Arthur's seat is regularly motor-traffic-free anyway, so that would work. ...
- AJ101 16 hours 53 min ago
It was never the same after David Duffield left. With no more "Turn your granny to the wall" it felt too professional. And in the era of big...
- chrisonabike 18 hours 35 min ago
I think there could be a whole other thread there... per your post on the funnies of the US vs. Switzerland. (Or possibly a report to government...
- LookAhead 19 hours 26 min ago
Now where's the fun in being logical?...
Add new comment
46 comments
I disagree that one has to be a professional at something for the word to apply - someone driving a car IS a driver and someone riding a bike IS a cyclist.
In the article you quote, I think the fact that he was riding a bike is pertinent - as far as I can tell, the incident escalated from some kind of road collision or altercation between the cyclist and the driver.
That's not to say headlines are always well worded - I remember seeing this article reported on (although I can't find the Road.cc article on it?) and in that case the "triathlete" in headline is entirely unwarranted (the tenuous link being that the perpetrator had been training to participate in a charity triathlon as part of their rehabilitating, before relapsing onto drink/drugs).
I'm pretty sure we didn't cover that story, because why would we? That Drummond had been training to do a triathlon was entirely irrelevant to the incident which happened in a pub. No roads or bikes involved.
I think lobbing in 'triathlete' to the headline is just about trying to add some colour to the story and having 'charity triathlete' in the standfirst seems to be an attempt to lighten the image of someone who was clearly in drunken psycho mode at the time.
This isn't especially unusual. A man who attacked a burglar in his home with a hammer was described as a kickboxer. A fella who had a mental health crisis and claimed there was a bomb on a plane was characterised as a British soldier. A man who attached three women as they left a concert was described as an ex-soldier. This is reporters using anything they can find out about the person to avoid just putting 'man' and to make the story more interesting.
I'm fairly confident I came across that story via road.cc - although it's quite possible it was posted in the comments/forum section rather than having an actual article written about it.
I remember seeing it here - maybe a mention on the Live Blog?
I've done site-restricted Google searches for 'triathlete', 'Drummond' and 'Dundee' limited to the period since Jan 1 this year and found nothing.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aroad.cc+drummond&newwindow=1&biw=...
etc — replacing drummond with the other strings is left as an exercise for the reader.
This search also fails to turn it up:
https://road.cc/search-results?search_api_views_fulltext=drummond
And this is a bust too:
https://road.cc/search-results?search_api_views_fulltext=dundee
None of those tools are infallible (site-specific search is very much an insufficiently advanced technology) but I also can't find any reference to this story except on the Courier's website.
Okay, I've tracked it down to the "Car crashes into building" forum thread which is unfortunate as it's currently over 900 comments long. It was from David9694 about a month ago - I don't know how to share a link to a specific comment.
Anyhow, that's not something that road.cc can be blamed for.
(I found it by using site-specific searches in DuckDuckGo which showed up as a snapshot of the recent comments, but DuckDuckGo wouldn't show me a cached version, so I had to use BING (I think I threw up in my mouth a little) which could show me a cached version and thus identify which thread the comment was on.)
Thanks for tracking this down and proving I'm not completely senile just yet! I guess the contents of comments aren't captured by Google?
And apologies for insinuating that road.cc had perpetuated that particular headline - as is evidently the case, where there is no genuine connection to cycling the story isn't picked up by the staff writers.
Yep, good sleuthing there, especially the web-searching equivalent of jumping naked through a burning hoop of flame.
Oh I'm sure we occasionally cover stories where the cycling link is a touch tenuous, just not that tenuous.
On a website for cyclists written by cyclists that is devoted to cycling the fact that we hear about cyclists is not entirely surprising. How do you suggest road.cc reframes the dialogue without these signifiers, "One group of people is disagreeing with another group of people over road space"? "A person using one mode of transport that doesn't define them was injured in a collision with a person using another mode of transport that also doesn't define them"?
Love this - it would improve titles too:
The person identifying as a woman in a relationship with someone who performs duties on behalf of a military group of France.
The person who may cook amongst many of their other professional responsiblities, the person who has been accused of criminal misdemeanors by a state but shouldn't be defined by that, his person linked with him through a now-outdated religio-political relationship construct identifying as a woman and her lover.
or, as we like to call it: "cycling".
It most certainly does
No true driver would say that.
Just because you've commented doesn't make you a commentator
If someone's riding a bike, they're a cyclist — or is there a particularly virtuous tribe of bike riders you'd prefer to be associated with?
road.cc readers.
Pages