Accordingly, Black digital practice has become hypervisible to mainstream white culture and the world through positive, negative, and political performances of Black cultural aesthetics and, more recently, social media activism. This is in marked contrast to historical media portrayals of Blackness, where the white racial frame positioned Blacks as bestial, deviant spectacles or as culturally and mentally impoverished wights. It also differs from popular and academic accounts of the Information Age, which either elided Black participation in digital design and use or rendered Blacks as unable to surmount the digital divide due to their essential lack of material, technical, or cultural resources.
In the aggregate, Black websites are labeled as niche online spaces in part because of the technocultural belief that Black folk lack the capacity for “appropriate” internet practices. Historically, these sites were difficult to conceptualize as fully formed Black cybercultures for a number of other reasons—namely, their ephemerality, the still vast numbers of Black folk who hadn’t gotten online, and the unnoticed growth of Black online reflexivity and interiority. This is true even for my Black Twitter research. I researched Black Twitter before the murder of Trayvon Martin and before Ferguson. At the time, I was intent on fleshing out the research into Blackness and the digital, celebrating moments of Black online culture in the process.
This focus on control and survival leads me to argue that the aesthetics at play in a political-economic analysis of digital practice draw on technocultural and capitalistic virtues: beliefs about rationality, productivity, efficiency, or commoditization. Any deviation from the realization of these beliefs is read as “play,” “leisure,” or “deviance.” Under political economy, Black digital practice is rarely understood as productive or efficient. For example, political-economic analyses of the “digital divide” tie information use and access to the “social and economic progression of nation states” or view them as opportunities to overcome social inequality. Researchers examining minority informational and digital practices deemed them deficient based on the minorities’ lack of access to institutions (education or home ownership), to the state, or to structures of production (material and information deficits). All the while, Black musical artists of the era—in hip-hop and R&B—were discussing the mediations of social, extralegal, and cultural relationships through information technology practice. I mention these artists, but I am not excluding earlier Black sonic luminaries in other genres interrogating Blackness, modernity, and sound, such as Derrick May, George Clinton, Roger Troutman, and even Sun Ra.
The blind spot of all these approaches—quantitative social science, political economy, cultural studies, and Afrofuturism—lies within the ideology of Western technoculture. Technoculture is often sutured to political economy to justify beliefs about technology as an avatar of productivity. This leads to evaluations of technological practice through progress, efficiency, or in more recent decades, ideological capture. Even when cultural studies or Afrofuturism addresses Black technology use, the previously mentioned perspectives on Black cultural production as evidence of resistance and oppression limit the possibilities for articulating a more nuanced understanding.
Lyotard notes that “it is extraordinarily difficult to recognize the desire of capital”, but I believe this difficulty can be reduced by examining the social and cultural contexts in which capitalistic endeavors take place. Wilderson is helpful in this regard, expanding the definition of libidinal economy to encompass racial ideology. He identifies antiblackness as a desire of American society and culture, writing that “Blackness overdetermines the embodiment of impossibility, incoherence, and incapacity”. The devaluation and reduction of the human body to its technical and labor potential are clearest when the body is Black. Moreover, the spectre of antiblackness allows whiteness to devalue the labor of non-Black bodies, encouraging nonelites to accept less economic capital in exchange for the cultural capital of not being Black. For example, Donald Trump, who won the presidential election in 2016 by appealing to xenophobia and nativism, has had his inchoate antiblackness codified into Republican legislative proposals to transfer wealth to white elites by defunding social welfare programs that are perceived as aiding minority families, eliminating environmental protections (disproportionately affecting minority and poor communities in the process), disenfranchising religious and ethnic minorities, and expanding military aggression in the name of xenophobia.
The blind spot of all these approaches—quantitative social science, political economy, cultural studies, and Afrofuturism—lies within the ideology of Western technoculture. Technoculture is often sutured to political economy to justify beliefs about technology as an avatar of productivity. This leads to evaluations of technological practice through progress, efficiency, or in more recent decades, ideological capture. Even when cultural studies or Afrofuturism addresses Black technology use, the previously mentioned perspectives on Black cultural production as evidence of resistance and oppression limit the possibilities for articulating a more nuanced understanding.
Wilderson, in writing on antiblackness, offers Jared Sexton’s clarification of libidinal economy: “The economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification (their condensation and displacement), and the complex relationship between sexuality and the unconscious . . . a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures” (Sexton, cited in Wilderson). Building on this, I argue that one should understand the distribution and arrangement of Black digital practice as digital labor and desire, as online politics and desire, or as digital representation and desire. Removing desire from Black digital practice reduces agency—online members become “users” or, even worse, “data.” Further, invoking the libidinal high- lights how the removal of the erotic and the banal from “appropriate” Black digital practice renders said practices—constituted as resistance or commodification—as sterile attempts to escape “the master’s house using the master’s tools” (Lorde, 1984). My argument for a libidinal economy of new media and information technologies incorporates the concept of pathos to show why digital practitioners engage in “nonproductive” and “inefficient” online activities.
Pathos is also stunningly relevant as a conceptual framework for the Black experience in the Americas. The United States was founded on the cultural logos that Blackness is not an intelligible part of society. As such, ethos was denied to African Americans based on the ideological assignation of deviance and embodiment. To counter these discourses, which were presented as “logical” and juridical, Black discursive culture cultivated a warrant of pathos to ground their identity. My definition of pathos also draws from Joan Morgan’s “Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure”. Morgan asks how desire, agency, and Black women’s engagement with pleasure can be developed into a viable theoretical paradigm. While doing so, she argues for Black female interiority as “the broad range of feelings, desires, yearning, (erotic and otherwise) that were once deemed necessarily private by the politics of silence”.
Replacing the highly circumscribed positivist and “objective” emotional character of logos with pathos allows this inquiry to incorporate analyses of Black digital practice engendered by joy, sexuality, playfulness, anger, and politics. Another benefit is the acknowledgment and theorization of Black communal identity as a meaning-making strategy. In this way, we can understand Blackness as a discourse in conversation with, but not wholly subject to, whiteness as epistemology—a refutation of the categorial nature of capitalist identity and, most important, antiblackness.
Black folk use technologies that were not designed for or about them in ways that confound traditional technology analyses, and this approach is intended to redress that shortcoming.
More specifically, the digital + virtual practices and affordances of Black Twitter map onto the ritual, formalized performance of embodied, libidinal Black identity discourses, distributing Black discursive identity across the service and into the wider information sphere. Libidinal discourses drive the joys of Black Twitter musings on and other manifestations of Black everyday life. Libidinal energies also power Black Twitter catharsis: the political engagement and righteous anger of Black Lives Matter and articulations of racial fatigue syndrome characterized by
As Black Twitter has become more widely known, many have sought to ratify the phenomenon by locating the political valences of Black Twitter within the concept of a counterpublic. Squires contends that counterpublics occupy and reclaim dominant and state-controlled public spaces while strategically using enclaved spaces. Utilizing public and private spaces in this fashion increases interpublic communication as well as interaction with the state. Moreover, counterpublics employ protest rhetoric and reveal “hidden transcripts” of Black discourse to argue against stereotypes and describe group interests. In an earlier version of this chapter, I argued for Black Twitter as an enclaved counterpublic, but upon further reflection, I am here arguing for Black Twitter as a satellite counterpublic sphere. Squires’s differentiation of Black counterpublics hinges on defining the spaces and discourses in which these publics operate. Enclaved counterpublics hide themselves from oppression in private spaces (often in plain sight, like churches, salons, or the stoop or corner) while internally producing lively debates about Black life.
Feminist media scholars have been interrogating ratchetry and ratchet behavior since the term entered the popular lexicon from 2000s- era Southern rap. Ratchet joins a long list of slang terms (e.g., thot,3 basic) linking Black bodies—often female and/or queer—with “hood” or deviant behavior. From rap’s perspective, ratchetry revolves around perceptions of crass materialism, promiscuity, rudeness, ignorance, inappropriateness, dishabille, and occasionally violence. Ratchet even has a digital practice component: the highest-rated definition of ratchet on Urban Dictionary includes the stipulation “owning a BlackBerry.” Given the BlackBerry’s one-time association with white professional culture, the Urban Dictionary’s reassigning of the smartphone to a raced, gendered, technical identity is a signifyin’ recognition of Black digital practice.
Black culture, however, has never been considered as a natural space for information technology use and design. BlackPlanet’s explicit focus on Black users led academics and the mainstream media to view it as a “niche” online destination, even hindering it from being considered as one of the first social networking sites. Indeed, Dauphin suggested that investors were reluctant to fund the site because they did not believe Black folk would be interested in creating or able to code their own home pages. These sentiments—that Black folk were not “serious” or rational internet users—also framed early commentary about Black Twitter use. I contend that the dominance of Black cultural content on Twitter has even led some to declare the “end” of Twitter as investors and tech pundits scramble to explain why Twitter cannot continue in its current iteration. These prognostications and opinion pieces are driven by libidinal energies of antiblackness rather than political economy—that is, technocrats cannot conceive of a successful techno- logical enterprise driven by Black pathos.
Racism as a frame of Black digital practice operationalizes Yancy’s assertion that “Blacks . . . possess a level of heightened sensitivity to recognizable and repeated [racist] occurrences that might very well slip beneath the radar of others”. He continues by noting that such perception might indicate that Blacks are part of an epistemological community where the very culture is an ongoing masterclass in the critical interpretation of a reality that film director Jordan Peele has evocatively described as “the Sunken Place.” These perceptions—apprehension over the implied violence heralded by racism and racists—also work as a ratchet, applying more and more tension to further complicate Black interactions with the world.
Nakamura explains the centrality of racism to digital practice, arguing that racism online is not a “glitch” but a feature. Instead of being engendered by internet practices such as anonymity and a lack of physical feedback, racism is as old as the network itself. Nakamura adds that online “content that includes people of color often becomes part of a technosocial assemblage that produces racism and sexism”. This aligns with the infrastructural nature of everyday digital practice, where implicit racism is encountered in the mainstreaming of the white racial frame through appropriation and representation in online media. Simultaneously, explicit online racism toward Black culture has found its most pungent, mediated expressions in comment sections and social media feeds. Social media provides evidence for Black epistemologies of racist ideology through the continual reproduction of racist practices, representations, and discourses, which are in turn driven by algorithmbased digital media, social sharing, and individual affronts. This evidence, taken together with Yancy’s contention that the world systemically and systematically destroys Black dignity while reducing Black folk to a state of nonbeing, supports my argument for pathos as an epistemological standpoint.
Masculinity, meanwhile, must be identified as heterosexuality and as sexual energy, especially given recent revelations about sexual harassment in the tech industry (e.g., the movement). Dyer is especially helpful in this regard, writing, “White men are seen as divided, with more powerful sex drives but also a greater will power. The sexual dramas of white men have to do with not being able to resist the drives or with struggling to master them. . . . Dark desires are part of the story of whiteness, but as what the whiteness of whiteness has to struggle against. Thus it is that the whiteness of white men resides in the tragic quality of their giving way to darkness and the heroism of their channeling or resisting it”. As gender, as sexuality, and as a battle for control over sexual energies, masculinity affords technoculture a rationalist, imperialist, and spiritual asceticism that whiteness deploys to justify its control over others who are perceived to possess none of those qualities.
In the 2010s Black Twitter become a cultural force to be reckoned with. It promoted Black Lives Matter and raised awareness around the tragic deaths of Sandra Bland and Eric Garner through hashtags such as and . Its anger over Kevin Hart’s homophobic tweets pressured him to drop out as a host for the 2018 Oscars ceremony. It pressured Pepsi to retract and apologize for a Kendall Jenner-fronted commercial accused of co-opting the Black Lives Matter movement. It created hundreds of delightfully viral moments such as “eyebrows on fleek”. And it helped a wild 180-tweet thread – in which a stripper recounts an adventure-filled road trip to Florida – become an A24-produced, feature-length film.
Thanks to the dictates of capitalism, even the lauded capacity to personalize and individualize one’s browser experience has been exploited through the browser’s susceptibility to invasive digital advertisements. Advertising tactics—ranging from pop-under windows to click-jacking to following users away from commerce sites—are often framed as part of the debate on how to monetize the internet, both to rescue legacy industries such as newspapers and also to support the immense amount of technological investment necessary for start-ups to reach scale. I argue, however, that this is as an inevitable consequence of the browser’s commitment to interstitial whiteness. That is, the browser’s designed enactment of a “color-blind” technological, implicitly white reputation allows for the imposition of a class-based, implicitly white identity ripe for the exploits of advertisers looking to market to this lucrative group of consumers. These enactments do not transfer to my Black online experiences; I can certainly tell you that advertisements for Black cultural products never follow me around during my online travels.
The hashtag was created in 2013 by activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. They felt that African Americans received unequal treatment from law enforcement. Alicia Garza describes the hashtag as follows: "Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.” The hashtag was originally created in 2015 in response to the 87th Academy Awards' lack of diversity amongst the nominees in major categories. The hashtag was used again when the nominations were announced for the 88th Academy Awards the following year. April Reign, activist and former attorney, who is credited with starting the hashtag, tweeted, "It's actually worse than last year. Best Documentary and Best Original Screenplay. That's it. ." In addition, she mentions that none of the African-American cast of Straight Outta Compton were recognized, while the Caucasian screenwriter received nominations.
It’s no surprise that Black Twitter is such a stronghold for activism within the community. For Black people, finding a universal way of communicating is a way of surviving. What used to take place in barbershops, neighbours’ porches, cafes and restaurants has now spread into online spaces. Twitter is a way for Black people to control the narrative of their stories away from the prejudices of the mainstream media and to call attention to the issues that matter to them. Through viral hashtags, such as , , , , Black Twitter has consistently birthed massive social and political movements, while memes like and brought wider attention to the everyday struggles of . Black Twitter has become a news source in and of itself, funneling into mainstream news channels and shaping narratives around politics and culture.
Nike sales increased by 31% after the brand bet on Black with its Colin Kaepernick campaign off the back of the movement. The power of Black Twitter made ‘Black Panther’ the most tweeted about film of 2018, and managed to turn (arguably) mediocre events like Netflix’s ‘Bird Box’ into huge cultural phenomena.‘Game of Thrones’ Season 8 was the worst received season in terms of reviews, but it was also the most-watched in the show’s history, thanks, in part, to Black Twitter’s incessantly entertaining conversations around the show.
Equally, Black Twitter can, and has, contributed to failures for brands. Papa John’s share values took a sharp decline after founder John Schnatter criticised the NFL leadership over Kaepernick, leading to his departure as CEO. Starbucks took a hit when started trending in the spring of 2018 due to staff baselessly calling the police on two Black men in a Philadelphia franchise, leading to their arrest.
As a social construct, Black Twitter is using its collective identity to gain leverage in conversations both within and outside of social media. Black Twitter is successfully harnessing the power of its collective identity in order to express the views and beliefs of a group that is sometimes marginalized by dominant ideas in the mainstream media. As researchers, understanding Black Twitter is important for analyzing the social dynamics of the impact media messages and events. This group sits at the center of new media and broadcast media, giving us a glimpse of new forms of collective action in the digital age.
Calling out cultural appropriation was a chief focus of the space in the early 2010s. Celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Kendall Jenner and Miley Cyrus were critiqued (and roasted) for adopting traditionally black hairstyles and/or dances. Its ability to prevent major business deals would also be flexed. In 2013, Black Twitter’s outrage was largely responsible for corporations ending their affiliations with chef Paula Deen after she admitted to using the N-word. Later, a juror from the 2013 George Zimmerman trial lost out on a major book deal when Black Twitter voiced disapproval. Users were able to directly put pressure on the juror’s literary agent, Sharlene Martin. “You know that the stains from blood money don’t wash off, right?” one user wrote at the time.
This was the network largely responsible for focusing the nation’s attention to the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last August. Witnesses to Brown’s killing broke the news via social media. Within moments, their accounts of what happened spread through the Twittersphere with the hashtags and .
And then there are the hashtag campaigns. raises awareness for street harassment, calls for solidarity for victims of sexual assault, forces attention to the abduction of nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls, and gives voice to the ongoing movement to reform police practices. Black Twitter has also used its power to launch campaigns that criticize the incidents of racial tone deafness that are all too common across media. skewered Marie Claire's bizarre praise for Kendall Jenner’s cornrows. illustrated the pejorative selection of images used in news stories about black victims of police shootings. Don Lemon, one of cable news’ most controversial broadcasters, has also been called out by Black Twitter for his routinely offensive .
Reflexive digital practice often works hand in hand with ratchet digital practice to read, shade, or celebrate Black everyday life through sensuality, humor, or anger. Racism implicitly and explicitly compels reflexive digital practice; while the explicit is egregious and shocking, the implicit is more damaging across time. To illustrate this, historian Kevin Kruse posted a Twitter thread discussing lynchings in the American South in the early 1900s. Throughout the thread, Kruse reiterates in nearly every tweet that only twenty-eight lynchings occurred in the 1930s—but each served as a signifier to Black folk that their lives were forfeit to a white supremacist regime. The threat of lynching was nearly as debilitating as the lynching itself, serving as a coercive, disciplinary measure to keep Blacks “in their place.”
Focusing on racism as a frame for Black identity, however, seems deterministic. After all, not every Black activity is subject to—or determined by—the racism Black folk experience through daily or systemic macro- or microaggressions. Nevertheless, given the structural inequalities that have been levied on Black folk and that are endemic to American culture, any research into Black online culture must address how technocultural racism has shaped Black digital practice. In the previous section, I referred to Du Bois’s “veil”—and its articulation of the effects of internalized racism—as Black interiority. From a libidinal perspective, Black interiority is powered by the libidinal tensions of reflexivity as a response to the multilayered elision and hypervisibility of Blackness online; this may come in the form of catharsis or concerns about online representation or digital visibility.
George Yancy argues that racism’s power lies in its enforcement of a logic foreclosing the possibility of Black bodies body from being anything “other than what was befitting [their] lowly station”. This imprisoning, epidermal logic is required to support the invisibility of the negative relation—the elision of Blackness—through which whiteness is constituted. This imprisonment is reproduced in digital environs as well. Consider the archetype of the “default internet user” who is white, male, middle class, and heterosexual. Based on this default, interfaces were designed, content was created, and net- works were structured, leading to the seemingly inevitable conclusion that minorities are on the “wrong” side of the digital divide. However, this reasoning ignores the deliberate environmental, geographic, educational, and economic discrimination underlying the deployment, decisions, and designs of internetworks and digital media. Thus the carceral libidinal economy of Western technoculture deliberately obscures the Black digital practitioner. Black internet use is obscured by whiteness; as such, it is difficult to apprehend, much less credit with anything more than unproductive, “playful” engagement with information technologies.
Racism-as-frame is steeped in Black historical narratives, awareness, and responses to egregious acts of racism, like the burning of Tulsa or the New York City draft riots. It is also indebted to early online social justice activist moments, such as support for the Jena Six or Shaquanda Cotton. Here, however, my focus is on the smaller, distributed, more insidious effects of structural racism on Black online life. Racism as a libidinal frame references Black online discourses engendered by micro- and macroaggressions—from the algorithmically driven social media sharing of Black death at the hands of the state, to the constant reality of being surveilled and judged, to the reflexive pleasure and pathos involved in eating fried chicken in public spaces.
Weak-tie racism is an extension of Granovetter’s explanation of the generative sociality of weak tie relationships, arguing that the “emphasis on weak ties lends itself to discussion of relations between groups”. In my formulation, the machine, network, and/or algorithm is the distancing catalyst and the bond between entities, demanding its own interaction and reciprocity to sustain the relationship between user and network. Granovetter states, “The strength of the tie is a combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy, and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie”. Many researchers have equated intimacy and emotional intensity with friendship, which allows them to distinguish a (presumed) positive comity for strong and for weak ties. I argue instead that racism, as a marker of relationships between Blacks and whites, similarly includes qualities of intimacy and emotional intensity.
Weak-tie online racism, then, is racism that is indirectly experienced through digital representation and the distribution, interactivity, or algorithmic repetition of antiblackness directed toward a specific Black body or bodies but abstracted through social media participation. It has no author; instead, racism is enacted through digital networks of social interaction. Weak-tie online racism is not individually performative; it operates as a signifier of racist ideology that is structurally manifested through digital means. Weak-tie racist activities are often minimally interactive; they are likes, shares, reposts, and retweets—especially if the account sharing the content has a wide network of followers. This does not mean the account holder is racist, although that occasionally is the case. Rather, the account’s reach and visibility allow for the imposition of indirect racism through dissemination on social media.
Finally, weak-tie racism is a computational manifestation of microaggressions; the differentiator is the indefinite, amorphous originator or interlocutor. When one sees a racist tweet receive thousands of likes, is the platform the antagonist? Sue cogently notes that microaggressions can be environmental, a characterization that explains to some extent the virtual spaces in which weak-tie racism is encountered. Weak-tie racism also harms through accretion—that is, the “text is only experienced in an activity of production”. Nixon describes this as “slow violence,” or “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”. The act of liking a video can be influenced by the already-present signifiers of virality (e.g., number of comments, likes, or reposts) but is (correctly) not assumed to be in and of itself a racist act; yet its contribution to virality can often be understood in the aggregate as weak-tie racism.
Weak-tie racism is the means rather than the ends; perhaps the best way to describe it is as a hate-speech act as opposed to hate speech itself. Likes and reposts alone are not microaggressive acts even though they may denote affiliation or recognition in a social space that is counter to one’s own beliefs or affiliations (pace hate-watching). When the aggregation of likes causes one’s feed to be populated by racist content, however, this demonstrates that weak-tie racism occurs through the reproduction of banal social signals that are deemed important through minute traces of social interaction promoted by algorithmic means.
Through the aggregation of and interaction with hateful content, white and machinic articulations of racism present intimate, intense libidinal tensions bonding the out-group and the in-group. When presenting this work as it developed, my canonical example of weak-tie racism was whiteness as antiblackness—for example, the social media impressions of police shooting videos broadcast by mainstream news outlets, where the institutional imprimatur of the “fourth estate” authenticated the content shared as content over unaffiliated sites, such as Facebook and YouTube. However, the best example I could never have asked for occurred during revisions: weak-tie racism vis-à-vis the libidinal intensities of Donald Trump’s social media activity while campaigning for president and since his inauguration. While it was immediately clear that racism (and xenophobia) were the elements driving his social media popularity, I was bemused to see that media outlets and the academy constantly misconstrued the libidinal element of Trump’s social media content as “economic anxiety” to explain white folks’ allegiance to the Republican candidate. I find vindication in the recent findings about the roles Facebook and Twitter played in disseminating and promoting racist misinformation using likes and retweets (rather than actual comments) posted by Russian content farms, such as the @Blacktivist account mentioned earlier.
Black folk (the in-group) can and do similarly bond over their awareness of racism, their positionality to racism, and their responses to racism regardless of intensity. Libidinal Black digital clapbacks to weak-tie online racism create affective and intimate in-group bonds that are responsive to racist ideology but not solely constituted by racism. These acknowledgments are characterized by interiority, riposting to (weak-tie) racism as a “hail,” or the catalyst for a cathartic or emotional rejoinder.
This section has repositioned weak-tie theory to emphasize the emotional intensity and intimacy of racism. The resultant application to algorithmically driven social media feeds predicated on libidinal tensions reveals that computational technologies can serve as both conduits and agents in the formulation of relationships. Where weak-tie theory has been used to examine the utility of weak ties in allowing individuals access to information from disparate networks, this perspective offers a way to understand how a negative informational interaction can create loose relationships between ostensibly oppositional entities. Weak-tie racism, then, can be understood as machinic racism—absent individual contribution—promoting an atmosphere of social death to be experienced thirdhand by Black internet users.
The longer answer: Black Twitter is an online gathering (not quite a community) of Twitter users who identify as Black and employ Twitter features to perform Black discourses, share Black cultural commonplaces, and build social affinities. While there are a number of non-Black and people of color Twitter users who have been “invited to the cookout,” so to speak, participating in Black Twitter requires a deep knowledge of Black culture, commonplaces, and digital practices. As I briefly noted in the introduction, being Black in the American racial context requires intentionality; representation and recognition are only part of the equation. Thus Black Twitter users intentionally signal their cultural affiliations to a like-minded audience in a space where, until recently, racial identity was considered a niche endeavor. While their use of Twitter accrues to them a technological identity that intersects with their racial and gendered selves, Black Twitter users are as heterogeneous as the community they hail from. The combination of social affinities, network participation, and content enables Black Twitter hashtags to “trend,” or gain visibility through Twitter’s trending topic algorithm.
Cultural studies of media shares political economy’s interest in media industries; new media and internet research from this perspective examines texts, identity, and audience reception and limits its critical take on communication and media to commodification, oppression, or resistance. When directed toward representation in digital spaces, cultural studies often glosses over race as a salient category to instead argue for internet culture as a freestanding aesthetic that is separate from offline identity politics.
Blackness—in the guise of Black digital practice—opens the “Black box” of the digital to show that all along, culture has warranted information and communication technology use. I argue that Black facility with digital artifacts and practices displays a technical-cultural identity defying technocultural beliefs of Black primitiveness. Indeed, Blackness brings a particularized coherence to digital practice that affords my claim for Blackness as a normal digital identity. My claim for Black cyberculture builds a compelling vision of Blackness as an informational identity that avoids the essentialization of Black cultural identity despite the hegemonic influence of Western racial and technocultural ideology.
As I began collecting my thoughts about Black cultural online identity for this text, I was reminded that all identities are racial identities; the digital is a mediator of embodiment and identity, not an escape from it. For example, how exactly does one identify white online identity? Whiteness is often conflated with computer use. It’s easier (and tricky) to argue for Black internet identity based on its differences from white digital practice, but as USC2 found out, Black people are very concerned to not be conceptualized as a “low class, undifferentiated mass” of computer users. As Tate writes, there is much that needs to be said about “how it is that racial objects become raced, gendered and sexualized subjects through . . . racialized imaginaries, and everyday race performativity”.
Identity emerges in discourse through the shared communication of concepts, which are encoded and decoded through cultural and social signifiers. Even coherent displays of identity—such as those performed and visible on-screen when examining virtual spaces—rely on interaction and ideological constraints. From this perspective, I argue that whiteness’s interpretive flexibility and hegemonic positioning render it as a technical identity even across the technical incoherence of multiple platforms and services.
I now see double consciousness slightly differently: double consciousness expresses Blackness as a discursive, informational identity, flitting back and forth in the virtual space between a Black communal context and a white supremacist categorial context. The virtuality of race offline extends my argument that Blackness “double voices” in virtual online spaces, adding a technical-technological-digital dimension to Black identity.
Following Robert Gooding-Williams’s admonition that there is a difference between the Black body and Blackness, this second warrant is my definition of Black culture: Blackness as a dynamic core of narrative gravity (pace Yancy) sustained through intentional, libidinal, historical, and imaginative Black agency in the context of navigating American racial ideology. My approach to digital identity takes on additional salience when studying Black bodies and Black culture. Previously, I mentioned whiteness’s interpretive flexibility, which is premised on a pejorative fixity imposed by the materiality of Black bodies onto Black culture. Blackness anchors whiteness in the West and in American culture by serving as the nadir of white racial epistemology and ontology.
In the early days of cyberculture research, online identity was assumed to be fluid and playful, leading to charges that racial identity couldn’t credibly be assumed to be authentic. As I presented research on Blackness and online, I would invariably be asked how did I know whether the communities I studied were actually populated by Black people without personally interviewing each and every one of them. Then as now, I argue that online practice—specifically (but not limited to) information exchanged between users and services can be understood as performing racial identity. There is no human identity performed online that is not articulated by a racialized body. The key for online researchers interested in race is identifying the signifiers that mark ethnic or racial identity in digital practice; these signs and signifiers can be found through analysis of the written textual discourses that are the backbone of online practice.
Finally, in the same way that Pacey cautions technology researchers not to limit their inquiries to just the material artifact or even the practices surrounding that artifact, Hughes warns that it is an error to consider that individual cultural traits are the measure of belonging to an ethnic group—or even a measure of the solidarity of the group itself. An ethnic group is not a synthesis of its cultural traits; instead, traits are attributes of the group. This warning is significant for digital and new media researchers excavating racial identity online. While the signs-given-off (e.g., profile pictures), or the signs (e.g., the number of self-identified Black users in a given online space), offer clues to help determine racial affiliation, it is important to not solely depend on these visual signs to ascertain race.
Through his formulation of “double consciousness,” Du Bois sets the stage for an argument that Blackness should be understood as a conflicted identity shaped by the need to participate in parallel yet discontinuous discourses. For Du Bois, personal (not individual) Black identity is the intersection between Black communal solidarity and a national white supremacist ideology. His formulation acknowledges the hegemony of whiteness without privileging it over the agency and spiritual energy found within the Black community. It is worth repeating: double consciousness, as a formulation of identity, has to do with differences in the experience of being an individual in the two communities and not with the marginalized social roles within a single community. This approach highlights the protean nature of Black identity mediated through different digital artifacts, services, and practices. The digital provides an indexical location where experiences and perceptions, promoted through the acts of individuals, occur. From this position, Pacey’s triadic formulation for technology can be repurposed to illustrate Alcoff ’s contention—that is, Black identity as an “artifact” with “practices” (here argued for as Twitter practice and signifyin’) and “beliefs” (double consciousness).
Robert Gooding-Williams offers an alternative take on Black racial identity as a consequence of white American racial classification schema rather than solely “the beliefs and practices which are shared by or distinctive to the people whom that practice designates as black”.
One way to understand conversational coherence on Twitter is by analyzing follower and followed networks. Bollen et al. find that Twitter users either prefer the company of users with similar values or converge on their friends’ values. They speculate, “This may confirm the notion that distinct socio-cultural factors affect the expression of emotion and mood on Twitter, and cause users to cluster according to their degree of expressiveness”. In a Pew Internet Research survey of Black social media users, nearly two-thirds said that most of the posts they see on social media are about race or race relations, while nearly a third said that most of what they post online is about race or race relations. For white social media users, two-thirds said that none of their social media posts or shares pertained to race. In discursive identity construction, such as that found on Twitter, homophilic user affiliations gain coherence and become reinforced by the use of cultural commonplaces. For Black Twitter users, posts about racial identity are the valence around which their digital practice is constructed; for many, signifyin’ is the style in which their discourse is expressed.
My first matrix category conceives of Blackness—rather than the Black body—as an element of Black technoculture. In this unfiltered, patriotic expression, Chappelle exemplifies one of the defining characteristics of Black existence in the United States: dark, humorous critique. It evokes Black interiority, references antiblack racism, and even suggests political engagement—all from a libidinal perspective. Blackness, for this matrix, stands for the metaphysical and critical valences of Black cultural identity, revolving around subjectivity and cultural production. My phrasing does not ignore the political and ideological aspects of Black identity but instead highlights the libidinal elements that drive those aspects of Blackness’s relationship with technology. I phrase it thusly to incorporate the ratchet and the banal, qualities that are often disregarded in analyses of technology and studies of Black culture.
To return to the digital: a theory of Black cyberculture is necessary to examine how information and communication technologies afford Blackness a differently circumscribed space to luxuriate and grow—never free from white racial ideology but no longer materially coerced by it. This possibility exists because of the disembodiment enabled by virtuality—that is, when participating in an online space, Blackness lives as an existential “here” that is largely unrestricted by the fixity and pejorative reduction of the Black body that occurs offline. Online, “I am not only a point of view, but I am also a point that is viewed”. The possibilities for communicating, performing, and apprehending Blackness in digital practice and spaces diminish the theoretical power of antiblackness. Correspondingly, arguments that Blackness is a point of noncommunicability, or social death, lose power when they are confronted with the technical and cultural visibility of Black Twitter practice and hashtags. This formulation responds but is not beholden to whiteness as the default identity of technoculture, or whiteness’s ontological and axiological (e.g., the nature of existence and the philosophy of ethics and values) formulation. For example, whiteness draws on the separation of mind and body; dominance over each is the hallmark of white superiority. In return, Dinerstein argues that whiteness’s control over the Black body has led to the colonization of Euro-American bodies by Black music, dance, kinesthetics, and speech.
In my reformulation, Blackness reintegrates the mind and body, returning authorial control and intent over those aspects of Blackness to Black culture. The matrix quality of Blackness, then, is the communitarian enactment of intentionality across cultural aspects of Black culture. As Moten says, “Blackness is . . . irreducibly social”. Thus Blackness in this matrix highlights how pathos—in addition to logos, or rationality—structures the Black American understanding of the world that they find themselves in. Pathos begins with the joy of embodied Black existence; it is at once a response to the effects of modernity and white supremacy on the Black psyche and a politics of the erotic engaging with “honest bodies that like to also fuck”. Whereas whiteness gains power from obscuring its internal differences, Blackness recognizes what makes Black folk different.
I am aware that this definition does not directly acknowledge the Middle Passage, white supremacy, or slavery as overwhelming influences on Black identity. While racism is an inexhaustible fountain of energy for whiteness, it is only part of how Blackness navigates the world. I do not deny these events’ and ideologies’ effects on Blackness, but their omission is meant to direct the focus to a celebration of Black life.
If one accepts the synecdoche that a browser is the internet, then the browser as a social structure represents and maintains Western culture through the dissemination of content while embodying Western racial ideology through its information practices. The browser indiscernibly frames the racial ideologies that users, content providers, and designers deploy to encode and decode their internet experiences. But, you may exclaim, so does the graphical user interface (GUI) or the computer monitor—the browser is just a window through which we observe the goings-on online! In response, I must reiterate that all technologies—and to an even greater extent, all information technologies—are socially and culturally shaped. Information technologies are more complicit because of their capacity (though limited) to re-create entire institutions, practices, and worlds. The application known as the web browser is the result of countless semiotic decisions about practice, visual interface elements, and display. These stipulations, which are normative and seemingly implacable, become clearer when race is brought to the forefront as a design imperative.
American identity (in particular, whiteness) is bounded and extended by negative stereotypes of Black identity. Giroux adds that “whiteness represents itself as a universal marker for being civilized and in doing so posits the Other within the language of pathology, fear, madness, and degeneration”. Civilization here should be understood as the technologies for managing and controlling natural, social, and cultural resources; from there, it’s not a huge leap to include communicative technologies as markers of civilization. Harris, while arguing that whiteness is an ideological proposition imposed through subordination, also contends that “whiteness serves as reputation in the interstices between internal and external identity and as property in the extrinsic, public, and legal realms”. This latter assertion leads to my own claim that “unmarked” digital content, services, and artifacts are commonly understood as white, as belonging to whiteness, and as “civilized” until a nonwhite actor or group is seen utilizing them. Thus whiteness is infrastructural; this can be understood through the realization that science-fiction stories populate entire universes with fantastic aliens and white folk.
I find that the blog-based expositions of criticism, reflection, and analysis of everyday objects (like internet browsers) reveal how technology users employ tech to help process their internal identity formations. Their articulations of identity in a public networked space make apparent the importance of exteriority to the formation of the self and to conceptions of race. The internal formation takes place in the blog’s intimate reveal of the author’s feelings about a particular worldview. The external formation—that is, the role of the “not-I” in defining identity—becomes visible through the social interactions between the blog’s author and commenters and the electronic interactions embodied in hyperlinks to social networks, externally hosted media, and other content.
While Black American Twitter has a huge influence over the diaspora, Black British Twitter doesn’t exist separately. For Black people, supporting each other and their issues online goes beyond geographical spaces.
Black culture has always driven popular culture, from music to street language to style, and much more in between. Now, it’s the propeller of internet culture, too. When talking about words such as “on fleek”, or “fam”, or “sis”, or “squad” (to name a few), most of the slang populating the internet originated in Black culture and Ebonics. It might be “internet slang” now, but if brands want to use the language of the internet, they have to know where that language comes from, then ascertain if and how it’s appropriate for their consumer base and their brand identity.
There is no single identity or set of characteristics that define Black Twitter. Like all cultural groups, Black Twitter is dynamic, containing a variety of viewpoints and identities. We think of Black Twitter as a social construct created by a self-selecting community of users to describe aspects of black American society through their use of the Twitter platform. Not everyone on Black Twitter is black, and not everyone who is black is represented by Black Twitter. Furthermore, one need not use the hashtag in order to participate in Black Twitter. Empirically, we know that African Americans use Twitter in higher proportions than other racial groups—Pew’s 2012 social media report found that one in four users is African American.
Our culture is appropriated all the time, in every industry, in a myriad of ways, and that is also true within Black Twitter. I wasn’t as aware of how it was going to become a bastion of cultural appropriation. I think of Peaches Monroee, who created “on fleek” with that viral Vine. There’s so many examples of how Black Twitter has been undermonetized for years, and yet others have been able to make entire careers off of our brilliance. It really changed the way in which Black culture gets discovered by white folks—and then quickly incorporated into ads and TV shows with white people making money off of it. It is the first time in history that we have digital proof that y’all copy us. Every single thing that we do. There are issues with respect to various brands taking our ideas and running with them. There are issues with social media accounts that are clearly not run by Black people attempting to use African American Vernacular English and getting it way wrong. All of that is an issue. Especially when you get any modicum of visibility as a Black woman, your Twitter experience falls apart. Things change not always for the better when you have more followers.
This is a running joke—more followers, more problems. From the beginning of Twitter, it was absolutely fucked up to be a Black feminist on there. There’s a target on your head. Twitter gave a microphone to people who might not otherwise have had it, but it didn’t come with instructions on how you cope with strangers gossiping about the details of your personal life, or how you deal with death threats. When we come into a space, everyone is trying to figure out how to measure up next to us. And that is a lot of what causes resentment for our presence. That causes people to be mad that we are present.
What is the mythos of Black technoculture? It clearly cannot just be limited to antiracism. As I have said throughout this text, racism is not the sole defining characteristic of Black identity. Neither can Black technoculture be confined to middle-class aspirations of achieving the franchise. I also hold tightly to the belief that social justice activism should not be the epitome of Black digital practice; online activism is simply the most visible and “appropriate” manifestation of online Blackness to the mainstream.
My first matrix category conceives of Blackness—rather than the Black body—as an element of Black technoculture. In this unfiltered, patriotic expression, Chappelle exemplifies one of the defining characteristics of Black existence in the United States: dark, humorous critique. It evokes Black interiority, references antiblack racism, and even suggests political engagement—all from a libidinal perspective. Blackness, for this matrix, stands for the metaphysical and critical valences of Black cultural identity, revolving around subjectivity and cultural production. My phrasing does not ignore the political and ideological aspects of Black identity but instead highlights the libidinal elements that drive those aspects of Blackness’s relationship with technology. I phrase it thusly to incorporate the ratchet and the banal, qualities that are often disregarded in analyses of technology and studies of Black culture.
To return to the digital: a theory of Black cyberculture is necessary to examine how information and communication technologies afford Blackness a differently circumscribed space to luxuriate and grow—never free from white racial ideology but no longer materially coerced by it. This possibility exists because of the disembodiment enabled by virtuality—that is, when participating in an online space, Blackness lives as an existential “here” that is largely unrestricted by the fixity and pejorative reduction of the Black body that occurs offline. Online, “I am not only a point of view, but I am also a point that is viewed”. The possibilities for communicating, performing, and apprehending Blackness in digital practice and spaces diminish the theoretical power of antiblackness. Correspondingly, arguments that Blackness is a point of noncommunicability, or social death, lose power when they are confronted with the technical and cultural visibility of Black Twitter practice and hashtags. This formulation responds but is not beholden to whiteness as the default identity of technoculture, or whiteness’s ontological and axiological (e.g., the nature of existence and the philosophy of ethics and values) formulation. For example, whiteness draws on the separation of mind and body; dominance over each is the hallmark of white superiority. In return, Dinerstein argues that whiteness’s control over the Black body has led to the colonization of Euro-American bodies by Black music, dance, kinesthetics, and speech.
In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy also inveighs against utopian conceptions of Blackness and modernity, arguing instead that Blackness is a counterculture for modernity. For Gilroy, the inescapability of slavery calls the entire project of modernity into question—that is, Black progress from slaves to citizens reproduces the unity of ethics and politics (which I contend for as the reassertion of pathos over logos and as intersectionality) as folk knowledge. This position refutes modernity’s insistence that ontology, axiology, and aesthetics belong to distinct knowledge domains—a position privileging whiteness’s Cartesian/ Christian insistence on the separation of mind and body. For example, where modernity and capitalism insist that work is emancipatory and agentive, Black folk have long understood that work only signifies servitude, misery, and subordination. Instead, Gilroy argues, Black modernity should be understood as a “vernacular variety of unhappy consciousness”; this fits neatly into my reasoning for Black pathos as the epistemological standpoint of a libidinal economic perspective on technology. Gilroy’s grounds for Blackness and modernity gain additional salience when they are read against Giddens and Pierson’s contention that late modernity has transformed our world into a space where emotional communication is crucial to sustaining relationships inside and outside of marriage.
I agree with Gilroy’s assertion, however, that analyses of Black modernity “require attention to formal attributes of expressive culture and distinctive moral basis”. This claim presages Fouché’s argument for vernacular technological creativity while adding a political and civic valence. In addition, Gilroy’s description of Black modernity as non-European syncopation rings true for the evaluations of Black technoculture in this text. Associating Black modernity with expressive culture, Gilroy adds,
The particular aesthetic which the continuity of expressive culture preserves derives not from dispassionate and rational evaluation of the artistic object but from an inescapably subjective contemplation of the mimetic functions of artistic performance in the processes of struggles towards emancipation, citizenship, and eventually autonomy [emphasis mine]. Subjectivity . . . may be grounded in communication, but this form of interaction is not an equivalent and idealized exchange between equal citizens who reciprocate their regard for each other in grammatically unified speech . . . there is no grammatical unity of speech to mediate communicative reason on the plantation.
My arguments for the libidinal economy of Black technoculture lead me to supplement Gilroy’s claims—first, by pointing out that the same expressive creativeness and subjectivity he identifies in Black music can be located in the performance and textuality of Black digital and social media practice. Second, while political motives may drive expressive culture, libidinal energies power those political moments. That is, Gilroy’s “mimetic functions of artistic performance” are libidinal moments that are expressed as relations and mediated by technology.
The matrix element invention/style comes directly from my Black Twitter research, but I firmly believe that invention is as essential to Black technoculture as it is to Black culture’s influence in the Americas overall. Black aesthetics are intensely libidinal and performative, drawing as they do on Black sociality and the communitarian ethos of Blackness in America. These qualities also distinguish Black technological practice from Western technological practice—that is, for Black technoculture, utility and efficiency are not the ultimate aims. While there are indeed Black inventors, such as Sarah Goode, Granville Woods, and Mildred Kenner, who developed countless practical inventions, there are also Black artists and technologists, such as Madame CJ Walker, Grandmaster Flash, and Grand Wizard Theodore, who developed aesthetic innovations.
There is a close analog between libidinal Black technoculture and Black music genres. In describing the blues, Walcott explains that the genre is “a struggle to order that space into a distinctive and comprehensive style, a style all the more distinctive for its unstinting generosity of spirit and unfailing faithfulness to the complexities of human experience; and comprehensive because it is the product of a vision that accommodates a tragicomic sensibility”. If this sounds nothing like the rationalistic and imperialist aims of Western and American racial ideology, that is no accident. The blues are in dialogue with Western aims not as resistance or accommodation but as relation.
Walcott continues by arguing for the blues as an insistence of the formal possibilities that are inherent in style itself. I make a similar argument for Black rapprochement with technology—that is, the expression of style in Black digital practice “embodies, abstracts, expresses and symbolizes a sense of life”. I return to Walcott’s words because he defines style so much better than I could: style is “to inhabit so completely the space one does have, and to inhabit it so individually, that one does not need to go outward toward the corridor of time to discover possibility. For one has found it, in one’s own depths”. This perspective is deeply akin to that evoked in discussions about Black identity held earlier in this text. That is, the fixed perception of self that has been inflicted on Black folk by Western technoculture, or the “hail,” is a record of what one should be and has been under that regime. Identity, however, is what one does after the hail. My argument is that style and invention are crucial components of Black identity; they are how Black folk negotiate the informational and institutional regimes of antiblackness.
Playing the dozens is a uniquely and explicitly African American tradition . . . it seems to me like the playfulness of the language and the absurdity of the medium may have masked something timely and fitting. This obviously and intrinsically Black tradition has been adopted by a community like Twitter that is, frankly, disproportionately not black. You could see it as the deracination of the tradition, or even worse as a deliberate omission of cultural context in its appropriation. But I actually see it as something positive.
Peters published this tweet to buttress his argument that one should avoid engaging with Black Twitter, which is an odd statement to issue from a sports website catering to sports fans—but not strange at all when viewed through the lens of Black respectability.
Shifman describes internet memes as “units of popular culture that are circulated, imitated, and transformed by individual internet users, creating a shared cultural experience in the process”, but this definition lacks cultural specificity. When it comes to Black memetic culture, I propose that Black memetic digital practice invents, transforms, and signifies upon units of Black and mainstream culture to create a shared social and cultural experience.
This definition draws on Blackness as informational identity, sharing a number of commonalities with signifyin’ discourse. Signifyin’ practitioners have always taken great pride in using language for invention, transformation, and sharing of cultural phenomena and objects, a practice that predates internet culture. More specifically, signifyin’, like Black life, is exquisitely social and requires a participatory audience; these qualities transfer easily to social media sharing. While an astonishing number of internet memes originate from the anonymous inventive chaos that is 4chan, Black memetic culture is often nearly as popular (e.g., the “Kermit sipping tea” image macro). In addition to being hilarious or pointed, it can be purposive, reflexive, and coercive, which reads differently from the “just for the lulz” of 4chan.
Many scholars have highlighted how Black Twitter offers a platform for users to share humorous, yet insightful messages. In their book titled, From Blackface to Black Twitter: Reflections on Black Humor, Race, Politics, & Gender, Jannette Dates and Mia Moody-Ramirez suggest that alternative spaces, such as Twitter, offer a platform for ideas and concerns from a black perspective about social inequalities, politics, and social justice, that were historically prohibited from taking root in other communication venues. Dates and Moody-Ramirez (2018) noted Black Twitter became the amplifier for a "clap back" culture that was particularly prominent during an era of social unrest. Comedians and ordinary citizens used the platform to share both humorous and serious messages on topics such as “Stay Mad Abby,” which highlighted Abigail Fisher, whose case against affirmative action was argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court after Fisher was rejected from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. She claimed that it was because she was white. In another example, Black Twitter responded with questions, which quizzed readers on their true blackness. The questions centered on the idea Rachel Dolezal knew a lot about black culture; however, she was still white. Black Twitter also knows how to make sad situations into something humorous.
More recently, Black Twitter spotlighted the "BBQing While Black", incident during which a white woman called police officers on a black family barbecuing in the park. Oakland police arrived; no one was arrested. The 25-minute episode was captured on video, then posted on YouTube where it was viewed more than 2 million times. The incident was memed hundreds of times with images featuring a white woman in sunglasses showing up to various locations and events, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s monumental speech, a Soul Train taping, and President Barack Obama’s presidency.
Memes have become a universal way of communicating online, with references seeping into our collective consciousness in much the same way as quoting Friends. The most prominent viral memes almost always come from Black Twitter, and while it might seem odd that the ‘waves and airpods’ meme made its way into the mainstream when it’s such a specifically Black reference, it’s clear that the desire to be involved with Black Twitter and its repartee surpasses race and the experiences that come with it. However, this too needs to be caveated. If advertisers don’t understand where a meme has come from they run the risk of using it out of context and at best seeming inauthentic and cringe-worthy, at worst, offensive.
Memes have become a universal way of communicating online, with references seeping into our collective consciousness in much the same way as quoting Friends. The most prominent viral memes almost always come from Black Twitter, and while it might seem odd that the ‘waves and airpods’ meme made its way into the mainstream when it’s such a specifically Black reference, it’s clear that the desire to be involved with Black Twitter and its repartee surpasses race and the experiences that come with it. However, this too needs to be caveated. If advertisers don’t understand where a meme has come from they run the risk of using it out of context and at best seeming inauthentic and cringe-worthy, at worst, offensive.
Reflexive digital practice is not always cathartic or political; it is sometimes irreverent and decidedly not respectable. Even under the smothering blanket of racism, Black folk find pleasure and seek leisure opportunities. Consider a tweet issued in error—and subsequently deleted in less than twenty minutes—by Yahoo! Finance in January 2017, which promoted an article on the Navy’s financial budget wish list for the incoming Trump administration.
Deleted tweets are inaccessible, but unfortunately for Yahoo Finance, Archive.is captured the tweet, “/r/BlackPeopleTwitter” moderator Dawood pinned a screenshot of the tweet to his subreddit, and smart Twitter users took screenshots of the offending item. BuzzFeed News, in an article describing responses to the tweet, credits the resultant hashtag to Twitter user JeSuisDawn, who caught the mistake at 11:09 p.m. Soon after, Black Twitter awakened, stretched its muscles, and began to signify. Many of the first responses by Black Twitter users were image macros and GIFs expressing disbelief or outrage, but then things got funny. Their responses evoked Black cult humor to darkly critique labor practices, social protocol and etiquette, Black parenting strategies, and much more. Although not depicted here, many tweets contextualized the hashtag with photos of Black celebrities and Black media culture, all mediated by the call-and-response functions of Black Twitter hashtag practice. Notice the pungent yet affectionate tone of these tweets. I argue that they should not be understood as ratchet digital practice even though they expose elements of Black culture that are unfit for respectability paradigms to the mainstream gaze. Instead, these tweets are an exercise in Black interiority—a celebration of Black everyday life that is rarely captured on the screen or stage.
This image macro originated from the “BlackPeopleTwitter” subreddit, but it was soon joined by Black Twitter reflections on the intersection between white and Black social media propriety. This is also Black interiority as reflexive digital practice—where the reclamation of a disparaged word, nigger, becomes discursive agency through digital practice, inventiveness, and humor. As a moment of Black digital practice, is a demonstrative moment about the complexity and joy of Black culture in response to a machinic generation of racist ideology. Black online practitioners refused to be rendered invisible by weak-tie racism or the white racial frame. They did so using absurdity and empathy, which supports my claim that reflexivity powers resistance.
As I wrote earlier, pathos can be sensual, joyful, or erotic. Reflexive digital practice allows for the addition of another characteristic: communitarian. A final example of communitarian pathos can be found within one of the gentler instances of reflexive digital practice. In November 2018, the hashtag became a widely discussed topic across my section of Black online culture. The hashtag evoked humor about kinship, holidays, and food culture. It was contextualized by photos of Black celebrities and Black media culture, mediated by the call-and-response functions of Black Twitter. Although much of this activity took place on Twitter, the hashtag was picked up by other Black online media outlets who curated “best of ” moments. In doing so, they facilitated additional social media sharing (e.g., on Facebook), opening up the conversation for their commenters and allowing their readers to participate at their leisure.
But you may ask, How is the reflexivity articulated in related to racism? Returning again to the concept of weak-tie racism, I ask you to consider the online (and offline) media barrage about the “values” of Thanksgiving in America. Depending on one’s online media habits (and habitats), visual representations of Thanksgiving center on portrayals of white families in middle-class contexts gathered around a large table preparing to dine on clichéd food items. Multiply these media representations times the advertiser-sponsored content, and these portrayals are easily understood as the default cultural vision of a problematic American holiday. Prior to digital media, representations of Black folk celebrating the holidays were primarily relegated to Black print and televisual media. These depictions drew heavily on respectability politics, showing “ideal” Black families as a way to counter mainstream narratives about Black deviance.
serves as a riposte to these early representations across multiple dimensions. It is simultaneously
1. a response to erasure (the implicit racism inherent in representing Thanksgiving as a white holiday),
2. a response to the effects of racism without having to go full ratchet,
3. an empathetic representation of an event from a Black cultural perspective without actually displaying the typical iconography of the event as offered by the mainstream media, and
4. a response that was only possible through digital media’s affordances of media display and distribution plus social media’s affordances for sharing.
As a moment of Black digital practice, is an example of the complexity and joy of Black culture amid the reductiveness of American racial ideology. Its practitioners recast the mainstream representation of Thanksgiving as a nuanced libidinal enactment of extended family relationships, Black food culture, and the clash of class status endemic to limited opportunities for economic success. As opposed to the participants, these practitioners rebuff the mainstreaming of Black culture through the respectable depictions endogenous to Black media outlets. Both efforts are accomplished through humor and empathy, leading to my claim for reflexivity powering resistance.
In the process of analyzing Curry’s tweets, Fox also criticizes Black digital practice indirectly by embedding an additional set of tweets calling out Black Twitter memetic subgroups. Internet memes have been an object of academic study for some time, but there is surprisingly little research on race and internet memes. Fox calls out hashtag memes that are heavily employed by Black Twitter, such as Man Crush Monday () and Woman Crush Wednesday (), among others, to critique the Black cultural impulses behind them. Fox’s critique of this aspect of Black digital practice is of interest because of its deployment within a respectability—cultural and digital—context.
As digital practices, and can be understood as gendered displays of unrequited attraction and affection that are often but not always sexualized. Florini notes that these hashtags “mark a space of play where heteronormative rules don’t apply,” arguing that the practice allows many users to express same-sex affection without being seen as queer. The meme consists of an image paired with either a hashtag or a descriptive caption; posting the acronym provides practitioners an opportunity to share or reveal a person, personality, or celebrity that they find attractive. These memes are part of a larger digital cultural practice: Twitter users developed alliterative day references (e.g., and ) to share something of interest with their followers and to the public. These references are not exclusive to Black Twitter or indeed to Twitter itself; they have also found purchase on Instagram and Pinterest.
Squires defines satellite publics as occupying independent—not private—spaces that are open to group members. While these spaces are not completely detached from other publics or the state, their separation reflects the lack of a need to regularly engage with nonmembers rather than the result of oppression. Squires defines these satellite spheres as publics that seek “separation from other publics for reasons other than oppressive relations but [are] involved in wider public discourses from time to time”. Think of, for example, the Bechdel test, an informal assessment of gender equality in televisual media that measures whether at least two women talk to each other about something other than a man. Similarly, Black Twitter often engages in conversations about Blackness that have nothing to do with whiteness or white folk. Most importantly for this chapter, members of satellite publics do not feel compelled to hide or change their cultural particularities. Black Twitter, whose everyday interactions between members only occasionally rise to a level of visibility for mainstream Twitter users, fits this definition perfectly.
Twitter—the service—has messily, exuberantly become the public sphere we deserve even as it does not neatly fulfill technocultural expectations of productive, rational informational exchange. Similarly, Black Twitter was (and in many cases still is) often framed as “immature” and “ineffective” because its creative and discursive practices, in their viscerality and sensuality, do not directly lead to Black political or economic empowerment. This technocultural framing of Black digital practice is in line with long-standing Euro-American material conceptions of the Black body as labor/chattel, where Black energies must be directed toward the enrichment of their owner/institution. Moreover, Black Twitter fails under the disapproving scrutiny of Black respectability politics, where Black activities are “mature” if they are seen as leading to the political enrichment or advancement of the Black community.
From this perspective, I’m sure you are nodding and saying, “Yes, that’s exactly Black Twitter,” and with respect to specific moments and instances, I would agree. However, protests and demands for state recognition of Black humanity are not the only, or even the primary, discourses of Black Twitter. Insisting that they are the only ways in which Twitter can be understood as a legible artifact of Black culture diminishes the ingenuity and pathos displayed every moment on the service by Black Twitter users.
While Black Twitter can be understood as a public sphere, Squires cautions that we need to distinguish the discursive actions of a public sphere from the political actions of a public sphere. Thus this chapter argues for Black Twitter as a heterogeneous Black discourse collective, bound by certain cultural and digital commonplaces in pursuit of similar and sometimes competing goals, which may include political action. This argument respects the banal contributions of everyday Black Twitter users, who use hashtags like to celebrate and reflect on Black culture. It also allows for the possibility of international or even non-Black Twitter users—whose cultural competence aids in decoding Black Twitter’s cultural commonplaces or political concerns—to be considered part of Black Twitter discourse.
Arguably, Black Twitter would have remained undiscovered by outsiders—or curious academics—without the hashtag and trending topic feature. Trending topics “found” Black Twitter in large part thanks to the 2009 Black Entertainment Television (BET) Awards. This event, which recognizes Black achievements in the arts, culture, and sport, can be understood as the catalyzing event bringing Black Twitter to mainstream recognition. The telecast, which aired soon after the untimely death of Michael Jackson, featured tributes to the iconic performer and received the largest audience share ever for the network at the time. During the program, Black folk on Twitter immediately cheered or jeered their favorite entertainers, which in turn powered tweets and hashtags mentioning the BET Awards, Ne-Yo, and Jamie Foxx to reach national trending topic status. The appearance of these Black cultural topics as informational trends was met with confusion—if not outright revulsion—by non-Black Twitter users. From these Twitter reactions, it is possible to see the hitherto unexplored role of antiblackness in Twitter practice, Western technoculture, and cyberculture.
You should not be surprised, then, by my suggestion that Black culture is often the subject of online explainer articles, especially when the practices, politics, and aesthetics of Black culture become noticed or appropriated by the mainstream. Unfortunately, mainstream explainers tend to obfuscate Black cultural origins by attributing the phenomenon to white folk. They would get away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids—that is, Black Twitter’s heterogeneous and wide-ranging net of media sources that are on alert for any mention of American Black culture.
Again, my arguments here closely follow Banks’s argument for the linguistic and rhetorical capacities of Black online discourse. Banks writes that Black online spaces “mean three things: first . . . a repudiation of much early cyberspace theory that insisted race is and should be irrelevant online, that it would be made irrelevant by online subjectivities. Second, it would confirm the importance of discursive and rhetorical features that Smitherman links to African oral traditions for the written discourse of African Americans. . . . Third, it would show Black people taking ownership of digital spaces and technologies and point to the importance of taking Black users into account in technology user studies”. My operationalization of racial identity draws on Everett Hughes’s argument for ethnic identity: “An ethnic group is not one because of the degree of measurable or observable difference from other groups. It is an ethnic group, on the contrary, because the people in it and the people out of it know that it is one; because both the ins and outs talk, feel and act as if it were a separate group.”
This definition maps precisely onto the ways in which online identity is constructed, contested, and deconstructed through online discourses—mainly, but not limited to, text and other user-generated content. More important, this dialogic formulation of the discursive, affective, and performative aspects of ethnic identity is also a powerful conceptualization of racial identity. It is powerful precisely because Hughes has identified and operationalized the pervasiveness of racial ideology’s effect on both in-group and out-group members. Thus this definition accounts for beliefs that are evoked in everyday life in ways that are occasionally outrageous (but always problematic) for both in-group and out-group members. Finally, Hughes’s explanation of how both in- and out-group members “talk, feel, and act” complements the triadic formulation of technology as artifact (talk), practice (act), and belief (feel) used across this manuscript to conceptualize information, communication, and new media technologies.
As mentioned earlier, whiteness is premised on its delineation against and disavowal of “the Other.” Dyer contends that white identity is founded on a paradox: whiteness entails being a “sort of ” race and the human race as well as an individual subject and a representation of the universal subject. This gives whiteness interpretive flexibility even as it depends on the specificity of embodiment and practice. Giroux adds that “whiteness represents itself as a universal marker for being civilized and in doing so posits the Other within the language of pathology, fear, madness, and degeneration”. From a discursive perspective, the white American takes the role of the white “other” toward the self without any fundamental contradiction—essentially without being aware of doing so unless prompted.
To recap, racial and technocultural ideologies play a part in understanding how online discourse “works.” White participation in online activities is rarely understood as constitutive of white identity; instead, we are trained to understand white online activity as “stuff people do.” Black Twitter confounded this ingrained understanding while using the same functions and apparatus by making it more apparent through external observation and internal interaction how culture shapes online discourses. Given these warrants, let us turn to Twitter and its interface to see how culture shapes code, interface design, and ultimately, information practices.
That Black Twitter is often portrayed as representative of the entire Black community despite the heterogeneity of Black culture speaks to the power of American racial ideology’s framing of Black identity as monoculture. I deliberately omitted mention of the more egregious racist responses to Black Twitter, intent on presenting Black Twitter as the technological mediation of a specific cultural discourse rather than as the product of fevered online fantasies of degenerative Black online behavior. Although these fantasies are much more vivid and easily disparaged, focusing on them moves the gaze away from Black Twitter’s creativity and tech literacy to white framings of Black activity. Examining egregious online racism while ignoring more subtle, structural forms of online discrimination is problematic; equally problematic is social science and communication research that attempts to preserve a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing whiteness and othering everyone else. It is my hope that this chapter sparks a conversation about both practices.
I have argued for Black online spaces as third places before, but it’s worth reconsidering the differences between an online third place and one anchored by the materiality of the smartphone. According to Oldenburg, third places offer
1. a home away from home, where
2. conversation is the main activity and
3. playfulness is the prevailing mood.
Digital and social media exacerbate respectability’s libidinal tendencies toward ideological control of information about Black aesthetics and culture while diminishing control over the culture itself. Dogmatic digital practice can be understood as coercive online discourses and practices (posting, publishing, etc.) that draw on concerns about inappropriate bodies. These discourses are occasionally also imbricated with concerns about inappropriate digital practices. From this perspective, one can argue that online respectability may be informationally fruitful and sometimes provocative in its exhortations for moral improvement and technocultural assimilation. However, its carceral and abnegationist perspectives are undermined by digital and social media, precipitating a loss of engagement with many of the people for whom respectability proponents ostensibly speak.
Similarly, dogmatic digital practitioners do not have control of modern “technologies of power” (i.e., twenty-four-hour cable news networks, telecom providers, and technology companies). As digital practitioners, they use the subversive technologies at hand—social networks, memetic content—to enact and perform modernity. By comparison, Black Lives Matter’s online activism draws energy from Black Twitter’s reflexive and ratchet digital practices. Even (or perhaps because) while doing so, these activists are accused of not practicing embodied politics—Gladwell’s critique of them “not having boots on the ground” comes to mind—at the same time garnering accusations of slacktivism. Still, Black Lives Matter is more evocative of political resistance than dogmatic digital practice simply based on online metrics of participation. Dogmatic digital practice will never be understood as liberatory online activism; its antiblack exhortations and patriarchal misogyny reduce its libidinal power over those who are already empowered by the medium.
That Black Twitter is often portrayed as representative of the entire Black community despite the heterogeneity of Black culture speaks to the power of American racial ideology’s framing of Black identity as monoculture. I deliberately omitted mention of the more egregious racist responses to Black Twitter, intent on presenting Black Twitter as the technological mediation of a specific cultural discourse rather than as the product of fevered online fantasies of degenerative Black online behavior. Although these fantasies are much more vivid and easily disparaged, focusing on them moves the gaze away from Black Twitter’s creativity and tech literacy to white framings of Black activity. Examining egregious online racism while ignoring more subtle, structural forms of online discrimination is problematic; equally problematic is social science and communication research that attempts to preserve a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing whiteness and othering everyone else. It is my hope that this chapter sparks a conversation about both practices.
To its credit, Black respectability politics is ethically and politically subversive in its discursive reclamation of Black bodies from the violence of the white racial frame, using social-scientific discourses to chivvy Black folk along. Unfortunately, dogmatic digital practice lacks the subversive nature and stature of historical respectability politics due to the digital’s means of media production and dissemination. Instead of relying on historically significant Black institutions (e.g., the church and education) and their means of coercing moral behavior, dogmatic digital practice trades on social network visibility, affinity networks, performance, and memes. Whereas historical respectability depended on the ethos of Black excellence (for good or for ill) as a warrant for cultural change, dogmatic digital practice is handicapped by Black folks’ expanded access to and individualization of social media.
While social media can augment and amplify the pillars of Black respectability—celebrity and professional accomplishment (e.g., the Beyhive and Ta-Nehisi Coates)—its two-way performative nature abridges the moral private space that Black respectability once laid claim to. Where peccadilloes and misdeeds of Black icons were once only whispered about or discussed in local third places, social media and entertainment blogs encourage Black folk to comment openly about the behaviors of the Black elite using the same affordances, memes, and affinity networks used by dogmatic digital practitioners. Moreover, through this two-way performative discourse, dogmatic digital practice becomes nearly indistinguishable from colorblind and racist technocultural rhetorics in its embrace of embodied propriety and neoliberal notions of digital practice. This marks dogmatic digital practice—and modern respectability with it—as different from previous incarnations of respectability politics. The petit bourgeois, youth, queer folk, and other Black subcultures can speak back—publicly and vituperatively—to respectability proponents in ways that were unavailable to them even twenty years ago.
It is vital, however, to not incorporate the digital’s technocultural alienation (drawing on whiteness’s Manichaean separation of mind and body) into my formulation of online Blackness. I wrote the previous sentence long before I read Wilderson, but his words advance my claim: “As an accumulated and fungible object, rather than an exploited and alienated subject, the Black is openly vulnerable to the whims of the world and so is his or her cultural ‘production’”. Here Wilderson states that because Black folk have no legible stature in the West as political agents, they have no inalienable rights to Black cultural production. Thus Blackness (in online spaces and elsewhere) is immediately captured by Western culture, leaving little possibility for emancipation from that framework. I agree: while I recognize possibilities for emancipation through radical and decolonizing digital practices, my pressing concern for Black technoculture is to make manifest the vitality and joy of Black uses of ICTs.
While these libidinal impulses may become commodified or surveilled, they are paraontological—that is, the embodied cognition they express preexists the platforms on which they are published, visible, and deemed appropriate for consumption. The digital mediates culture—in this case Blackness, but otherwise typically white Western—in ways that allow for sociality despite commodification. The next section reviews other researchers’ takes on Black technological practice, which I then extend to specifically examine digital practice.
Thus to understand deficit narratives of Black technology use, one must consider Black exclusion from the capitalist economies of social media. However, limiting inquiry to the inequity (and iniquity) of the mainstream reception of Black creativity offers Black digital practice limited space or opportunity to flourish. Instead, it can be better appreciated through an analysis of the material and symbolic character of digital technologies. Such an analysis prioritizes an inquiry into the libidinal, virtual, and communicative aspects of everyday Black digital practice. For many scholars, Afrofuturism has been such an inquiry.
The informational capacity of modernity arguably originated before the Industrial Age with the advent of written culture, but I refer to industrial modernity here: the command of space and time through networked communication, which in the process reworks relationships between the self, commerce, institutions, and technology. For example, consider the plantation. While it is relatively simple to consider it as an agricultural institution, the plantation depended on webs of trade, the datafication of the enslaved body, imperialist state policies of conquest and communication, and renegotiations of the state’s and the individual’s relationship to Black bodies. Modernity’s contribution to the mythology of information and communication technologies, then, differs little from its contribution to technoculture overall: reflexivity.
The “vivification” of Blackness and technology in the previous paragraphs was no accident; as I mentioned, I am an adherent of Afro- optimism. This school of thought’s leading proponent, Fred Moten, explicitly engages “social death,” calling it the “burial ground of the subject,” to provide a funereal context for Black thought—funereal in the sense that funerals are for the living: they are as much celebrations of life as they are recognitions of life’s end. In this burial ground, Blackness is where political agency is sublimated, submerged, and enshrouded by the reality of having to live every day with death looming on the horizon. Moten’s counterargument, which I find utterly compelling, is that Black life is irreducibly social even as it is lived in the aforementioned cemetery. The power of Moten’s claim is libidinal: Black life is lived in the social, “which is, in any case, where and what blackness chooses to stay”. Moten calls this “the condition of the possibility of Black thought” and names it celebration. For Moten, subject references the rational, transcendental, self-possessed being who is capable of political action—in other words, white modernity—a position that is easily transferable to this discussion of whiteness and technoculture.
For Black technoculture, modernity is precisely the informational, capitalistic, and institutional regime of antiblackness. Surveillance and sousveillance, digital redlining, access to education, even voting rights are all positioned in ways that limit—if not directly injure—Black folk on the way to reifying whiteness. Respectability is a chilling example of Black aspirations to modernity in its well-intentioned paeans of hygiene, control, and assimilation. In doing so, respectability proponents extol a thinly veiled Western white argument for what Blackness should be rather than what it could be. Feagin writes, “Racial oppression and its rationalizing frame have long been central to modern Western societies, to the present day”. Unfortunately, for Blackness there is no escaping modernity, as it is the defining frame of Western society, and its transformative effects have reshaped much of the world in the West’s image. There is no return to the folkways lauded by Du Bois or to the pan-Africanism espoused by Asante, and there is no escape to postmodernity’s promises of decentering global powers and bringing the margin to prominence.
The invariant or habitual be references future, conditional, or habitual or extended phenomena that are still occurring—for example, “They be on Twitter all day.” It differs from standard English be, which only indicates that someone has done something in a particular tense. Been, in its unstressed form, is closely linked to the standard English forms has been and have been, but bin is very different. The increased emphasis marks an action or state that happened a long time ago, or in “remote time,” but is in effect up to the moment of speech. Bin cannot be used with adverbial phrases marking time. Bin also has a performative aspect; in some cases, it may be used deceptively to indicate history with a phenomenon or object. A second performative aspect, where been is performed with had, coulda, or shoulda, marks a period that remains in effect until a time earlier than the moment of speech. Finally, fixin’ to, which is often spoken as finna or finsta, references events that are about to happen in the immediate future.
These linguistic features indicate that Black technoculture has a different relationship with time than white Western technoculture. Western modernity prizes punctuality and efficiency; networked communication and computational platforms, even as they collapse space and time for their users, are still deeply reliant on timeliness as a means of synchronizing activities for institutional and commercial purposes. Black culture, on the other hand, can be understood as having a more flexible relationship with both the past and the postpresent, where time is relative to participation. Both bin and fixin’ to indicate an elasticity of time up to a certain moment, whereas the habitual be indicates a timelessness to human activity.
The Georgia Tech professor André Brock says Black Twitter allowed mainstream, white culture an unprecedented glimpse at how black people talk and joke among each other. “It was one of the first spaces that white people could see how creative black people are with our discourse, and how we used a technology that wasn’t originally designed for us.”
Clark argues the term Black Twitter often led to racial biases (ie, depictions of the group as an “angry mob”) during media coverage. “Whenever you put ‘black’ in front of anything, people think it’s deviant from what’s mainstream. I think that led to a lot of confusion for folks who were outside of Black Twitter. The term doesn’t necessarily signal the cultural richness we found within the space.”
“Blogs couldn’t talk back to media in real time the same way Twitter can,” Brock says. “That ability to talk back to corporations and media, and for the talk back to be visible is what distinguishes Black Twitter from previous incidents of black communities online.”
“It’s hard when you see someone who is having a profound discussion about a particular issue, and a media outlet will extract all these tweets and put a sentence at the end and call it an article,” she says. “That person got paid for ‘writing the story’ and the media outlet got paid through advertising dollars for someone else’s tweets. The person who wrote the tweets never sees a dime.”
Unfortunately, there is a dearth of critical research on the internet browsing beliefs—not browsing habits or digital content—of Black folk even as more Black folk are online than ever. I base this argument on the excellent data compiled by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project3 (especially that of Aaron Smith), who deserve recognition for their ongoing series of surveys on race and social media. Their research is notable in part thanks to survey methodologies that oversample minority and underserved internet users; many disciplines attempting to survey and study Black communities don’t include adequate numbers of Black respondents, fail to separate socioeconomic status from race, neglect in-group heterogeneity, or are tainted by interview bias. These problems are apparent when reviewing social science research on internet access or the digital divide, which is morbidly fascinated with promulgating “facts” about the limitations of and on Black folks’ internet use. Researchers are often concerned, for example, with the structural and cultural drawbacks associated with Black folks’ frequent social media use, which is operationalized as less “productive” than other forms of digital practice and thus less reliable for “rational” information gathering.
When Scandal premiered in 2012, viewers were excited about witnessing the first Black female lead on a primetime drama in 37 years. Kerry Washington strutted onto our screens as Olivia Pope, dressed to the nines and saying things to powerful white men that most of us would never have the position, let alone the gall to say. She was a pinnacle of Black excellence and lived a life that so few Americans — white or Black — would ever get to experience, but work towards anyway. Her mother is an international spy and terrorist. Her father is also a spy and former leader of a violent, covert government agency. Both of them, however, are unapologetically Black, delivering familiar Black colloquialisms like, “You have to be twice as good to get half of what they get,” and “Black women out here trying to save everybody.” Despite the fact the storylines on Scandal were far removed from the lives of Black people in this country, the Pope family was recognizably Black. That Olivia Pope was involved in a salacious affair with the very married, and very white President of the United States made her divisive and slightly controversial, bringing up memories of racial tropes like the jezebel and mulatto.
Needless to say, Scandal gave Black folks a lot to talk about, and Twitter was our platform on which to do it. “Black Twitter” is the collective identity of Black users on the social media platform that lets you express yourself in 280-character bursts. It has been instrumental in online activism and commerce, giving the world a direct ear to what Black people think and feel about all kinds of topics. According to a recent New York Times interview, Washington knew this when she signed on for the role, having seen how instrumental Twitter was in the Obama campaign. She and her castmates often tweeted right along with viewers, diving head first into the heated conversations. Twitter guru Luvvie Ajayi live tweeted the show each week, growing her platform in the process. Celebrities like Mariah Carey and Mary J. Blige also joined in on the fun.
All social media, by definition, allows for direct and indirect interaction between interlocutors, but Twitter in particular lends itself best to both the promotion and diminution of respectability ideals. Unlike Facebook, where respectability posts like Curry’s ferment in shared circles of subscribers, Twitter’s public broadcast model allows unaffiliated others to chime in. These users can interject themselves into conversations by directly addressing the content (quote retweet) and the original poster (reply), offering skilled practitioners (and bad actors) multiple opportunities to reauthor, divert, and reinvent topics and arguments. While Instagram’s changes to its discourse mechanisms (e.g., expanded sharing mechanics and increased commenting space) have increased discursive space, its image-centric format tends to sharply delineate possibilities for wide-ranging conversations. Moreover, hashtags and trending topics accelerate conversational expansion—as well as the derailment or distillation of dialogue—by encouraging weak-tie engagement through likes, follows, and in- and out-platform sharing.
Twitter’s attention economy exposes a much wider audience to respectability posts than other social networking services in part because of these weak-tie affordances increasing the visibility—but importantly, not the reception—of respectability content. The same weak-tie connections also increase the vulnerability of respectability ideology by exposing it to possible dispute—if not outright antagonism.
To support these claims, I turn to the only examples of Twitter discourse that were offered by the Black cultural websites I investigated, as neither of The Root’s think pieces included actual tweets. The first article examined, by Demetria Lucas D’Oyley, only summarizes Twitter users’ reactions to Curry’s tweets. Her interlocutor, Diana Ozemebhoya Eromosele, chooses a different route by embedding tweets by Twitter user felicianista to illustrate the problematics of Ayesha Curry’s tweets.
Both tweets highlight how informational Blackness deprecates respectability’s command over media representations of appropriate Blackness. Felicianista contests Curry’s moral and discursive authority to dictate “appropriate” Blackness, feminism, and sexuality. While it is entirely possible that Curry never saw her responses, the uptake by sites outside the Twittersphere indicates that felicianista’s retorts made cogent points. Her measured responses are certainly more civil than other retorts to Curry’s sentiments, which probably determined the inclusion of these tweets in Eromosele’s piece.
While writing this text, I have consciously bounded my inquiry into cultural digital practice by focusing on Black American culture without comparing it to other diaspora cultures or to whiteness. While the public’s consciousness of Black digital practice has certainly evolved since 2001, when Obadike’s auction was posted, the ethos and ideals of Black technoculture have never received enough (any) attention. At best, when agitating for social or political change, Black online resistance and activism are deemed the markers of “appropriate” digital practice, but those occasions are few. This lack of serious attention is due to cultural beliefs about Black Americans as deviant versions of white Americans—a perception that has only been slightly adjusted by the political and cultural prowess of Black digital practice on Twitter, Vine, YouTube, and other social media services. It’s far too easy to believe, after deprecating race as a factor in internet and digital practice, that Black Americans are just Americans with less “civilized” or “sophisticated” online information needs, uses, and behaviors.
This book’s concluding argument for theorizing Black technoculture, then, is meant as a corrective to deficit models of—or research into—Black digital practice. My articulation of this vision of Black technoculture is an offering to those who are interested in portraying Black digital practice from a more generous perspective as well. Black technocultural theory is a generative model one can use to ground explanations of what Black folk do in online spaces. By eschewing modernist perspectives on digital practice (e.g., brand, labor, and resistance), I offer a nuanced, comprehensive viewpoint into why Black folk use digital technologies in everyday situations. My emphasis on the everyday is intentional; I am not seeking to valorize those who are already powerful or notable in the networks that I study. While their moves are emulated or commodified, they are not definitive of the Black communities using digital media every day.