 Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. My name is Daniel Ayoğlu. I work at the Berkman Client Center. Just a couple of brief remarks before we get underway. This presentation and the subsequent question and answer portion are being live webcasts and recorded for posterity, so there are other people joining us online. Thank you all so much for tuning in. That's one. Two. This week we have Professor of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, Ian Bogos, talking about a pessimist's guide to the future of technology. So I think that should be an interesting talk as well. And right now I'd like to pass over to Mike to Jenny Korn, Berkman Client Fellow. Talk about today's lovely talk. Hey, y'all. Hey, everybody online, too. There's a lot of webcast folk, okay? For the webcast people. We do welcome live tweeting. Please use the hashtag BKCHarvard. That's all one word, being the K and the C and the H are capitalized, BKCHarvard. And please go ahead and tweet your questions as you're listening online. And I'll follow the hashtag and make sure to ask it on your behalf. In addition, I want to thank the Berkman Client Center for focusing on the topic of race and bringing in scholars that are working on race. I'm going to read the formal introduction and then I'll have a couple of things to say. Sara Florini is an assistant professor in film and media studies in the Department of English at Arizona State University. She holds a PhD in communication and culture from Indiana University. Her research focuses on the intersection of emerging media, black cultural production, and racial politics. Her work has appeared in top journals, including New Media and Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Television in New Media. She is currently working on a monograph titled Blackness. There's an app for that. Racial Politics and Black Digital Networks. Right, okay, y'all got to like be a little more interactive and feel free to laugh, okay? Also, I should say that the fellowship application for the Berkman Client Center just opened yesterday. So again, for those of y'all who are here and those who are online, please go visit the BKC website because we'd love to have you here next year. I want to really emphasize the significance of Dr. Sara Florini's role. She is among the first scholars to study black Twitter. If you don't know what black Twitter is, she will be addressing that today as part of her talk. She's also among the first scholars to study black podcasts, which is another part of her presentation that she'll be highlighting as well. She really is a quite outstanding scholar. If you want to check the Wikipedia entry on black Twitter, she's actually there, which of course means she is a premier scholar of it. And so I really want to give a warm round of applause as we welcome Dr. Sara Florini. Thank you, Jenny, for that very kind introduction. I also want to thank Jenny for facilitating this and all of the folks at Berkman Client, Becca and Carrie, and Daniel and David, who made it possible for me to be here. And for all of you for coming out and having lunch with me, I couldn't be more excited to be here. So when I was first invited to do this, I thought, okay, I'm finishing up a book project. I'll just present a piece of that research, something that's well thought out and polished and done. And then Carrie invited me to be as exploratory and conversational as possible, as I was comfortable with. So I decided that I would do something that I don't normally do in that spirit, which is make a prediction about the future and then raise a series of questions that are starting to nag at me as I look forward to my next research project. So the prediction is in the realm of digital sociality and social media, I think we're going to see an increase in the number, robustness and importance of digital enclaves. The nagging questions have to do with how that's going to force us to reconceptualize what digital sociality and social media are, what that means for our methodology, our research ethics, our designs, our business models, law, policy, all kinds of things. So to get to those questions, first I'm just gonna give you a quick sketch of how my research got me there, including giving you a definition of digital enclaves. So if you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry, you will. And then I'll talk about the shift that I think is coming or actually I think it's already started and then I'll finish by elaborating on some of the questions that I've been mulling around and turn things over for open discussion. So as I mentioned, I'm finishing this book project. The book project focuses on a large network of black American social and digital media users and content creators. It is trans-platform and it's multimedia, but it has three anchoring elements. The first of which is the independent media company this week in blackness. The second is a very large network of independent black podcasters. This is just a sampling of their logos to give you a little flavor of what it is that they do. And the third anchoring element is the related subsections of the network that has come to be known as black Twitter. If you are not familiar with black Twitter, I'd be happy to talk more about that in the Q and A. You can also check out my article in television and new media or I would also highly recommend Andre Brock's work on black Twitter. So as I'm working on this project, I've been thinking about this network. These are the three anchoring elements of the network, but they also, these folks use Facebook, they use Instagram, they use Vine until it died. They use Snapchat, they use instant messaging, pretty much all of these platforms, even Google Plus a little bit. And so I'm really interested in, in my project, how folks are using these platforms in conjunction with one another, right? And so I investigate the ways in which they're using platforms in concert to sort of participate in this distributed discourse production that moves and flows across platforms and via different media. I'm interested in the way that folks shift from platform to platform based on the affordances that best fit the exigencies of any given moment or sometimes they're actively creating strategies to work around constraints of given platforms. So in doing this analysis, I've been drawing on Catherine Squire's work on Publix, particularly Publix and Counterpublix. So Counterpublix is a word that gets used in a lot of different ways. Like I said, I'm using this in Squire's terminology, defining a counterpublic as a group that engages in debate with wider Publix, testing ideas, challenging dominant ideas, often using traditional social movement tactics. So Twitter is a great example of a counterpublic in part because of its affordances, right? It's publicly available, except for the folks like me who have their accounts private. And it's very easily searchable. The search functionality is very good. It allows you to interact with users that you aren't otherwise connected to. You don't have to have a formal relationship. It has adressivity that will let you just talk to anyone. And it has also, because it is public, it makes a platform for many to many discussion. And there's a lot of rich research that's happening right now about Twitter as a counterpublic space, particularly thinking about the way that hashtags function in this counterpublic role. In addition to Counterpublix, and I do write about that in the book, I argue that, excuse me, I argue that there is also a whole series of digital enclaves that exist connected to and in dialogue with these counterpublics. And so by enclave, again, speaking to Captain Squire's work, enclaves exist as sort of a separate sequestered space where groups avoid interaction with other outside groups, largely to avoid sanctions from dominant culture. Karma Chavez has expanded on this and he talked about the way in which enclaves often serve an important function for groups to interpret discourse about themselves and create counter discourses. So it's the place where people step away, have in-group conversation apart from a broader audience. And so some platforms lend themselves to being digital enclaves. The most obvious are closed and secret groups on Facebook that you can't get access to unless you remember or maybe don't even know about unless you know about them, unless you're supposed to know about them. Also, podcasts in the way that this particular network uses them, I'm gonna gloss over this. If you have questions, I'm happy to talk about it more in the Q&A, but I've written about the way this particular network of black podcasters use the intimacy of radio style audio, sort of a conversational, informal style and imbricate their podcasts with social media and multiple channels for listener feedback to really create an enclaves space for themselves and their audiences. And also Snapchat. Snapchat has a fair amount of enclaved functionality, right? It's hard to connect to people that you don't know on Snapchat. It's hard to share. It's hard to circulate things, right? It's a much more closed digital environment. And so I argue that these digital enclaves are both attached to and intertwined with more visible digital counterpublics, but they're often obscured or even completely invisible if you are not part of them. And my prediction for the future is that these kinds of digital spaces are going to be growing in importance. Why do I make this prediction? Well, and Jenny's very, very kind introduction of me. She mentioned that I have been one of the first people to publish on various emerging phenomenon in black digital culture. And I would love to attribute this to my inherent brilliance, but really I attribute it to the fact that the network of folks that I'm writing about have consistently been at the forefront of new digital media behaviors. They've been pioneers. They've really been at the vanguard. And I say specifically of digital media behaviors, emerging digital media practices, not just emerging black digital media practices, because I think that black users, and I'm speaking specifically to black American users because that's the context that I know. People who have more familiarity with diaspora could probably expand this out and talk about the African diaspora more generally. But black users have consistently been at the vanguard of creating digital behaviors and practices that we now just think of as stuff everyone does on the internet. So, examples. Black Twitter pioneered live tweeting of television. And I want to be clear that I'm separating this out, live tweeting of television from live tweeting events in the citizen journalism type of function. It's a slightly different thing. But going back to 2008, 2009, you can find black users hanging out on Twitter in the evenings, live tweeting the BET awards and to catch a predator in the boondocks and this practice that we just think of as a way that people use Twitter now actually was very much pioneered by this network. And I'm working on a piece that excavates this history. In addition, black users anticipated the podcast boom by a year or two. Podcasts are now people who are talking about the golden age of podcasting, right? And podcasts really started having renewed popularity starting with serial in 2014. But by 2014, there was already a large and very robust network of black American podcasters. I don't think that this has happened stance, that this network and black users in general tend to be on the avant-garde. I would argue that this has to do with the fact that longstanding conceptual frameworks, communicative traditions and aesthetics that are common in black American communities map seamlessly onto digital environments. So in terms of conceptual frameworks, basically black folks were postmodern before postmodernity was a thing. If you're familiar with African diaspora studies literature, those scholars have been arguing that the theoretical frameworks and orientations that we associate with postmodernism developed in the African diaspora literally centuries before similar thinking developed in Europe. Callie Tall has argued that black critical theorists began grappling with problems of multiple identities, fractured subjectivity, luminality. They basically anticipated all of these major questions about the digital age by over a century. In addition to that, you have communicative practices that work very well in digital environments. So Catherine Knight-Steel, who I believe was here a couple of weeks ago, and I can't say enough nice things about her work, she's an amazing scholar, but she's demonstrated the way that because of the continued importance of the oral tradition in black American communities, that black communicative practices map really, really nicely into the secondary orality that is common in digital environments. In my work, I build on their assertions, and I argue that black Americans have long cultivated complex processes of expression that are grounded in principles that have the hallmarks of digital cultures. So thinking about Mark Duse's piece where he talks about participation, remediation, and brickolage as sort of the hallmarks of digital culture, well those are also long men hallmarks of black expressive traditions. So, and here I think black musical traditions are a really illustrative example. In black American communities, music has always functioned as a participatory activity. There has been a much more fluid boundary between performer and audience, a breakdown between producer and consumer, if you will, where the audience was definitely expected to be part of the creative process to participate and to engage. In addition, in terms of aesthetics, repetition, remediation, revision, recontextualization, remix, all of these have long been hallmarks of black American musical traditions, hip hop, jazz, going all the way back to the music making of enslaved Africans. And so I argue that black expressive cultures have long been characterized by the participatory impulses that are attributed to contemporary converges culture and the recombent meaning making processes central to digital vernaculars like memes. And so all of this makes black American users particularly adept in digital environments. And that's why you so frequently see them as innovators at the avant-garde. Unfortunately, another way that black users were at the forefront was as targets of harassment and abuse. Many people have spoken about how what is now being called the alt-right was sort of, Gamergate was the precursor to that, Gamergate in 2014, but even a year or two before that, some of the folks who coalesced into Gamergate were harassing black users on social media, particularly black feminists on Twitter. So black users, these sort of harassment, abuse, bot-automated harassing that many of us are thinking about now that the average user is thinking about now. Well, black folks were dealing with bots trying to drive them off of platforms and make those counter-public spaces unusable for at least three years now. An unfortunate way in which they were at the avant-garde. In response to this harassment, the network that I am writing my book about has intensified their use of enclaves over the last couple of years. A couple of examples, they've created closed Facebook groups and they did this, this started happening in 2015, this week in Blackness, and another very popular podcast called The Black Eye Who Tips. They created closed Facebook groups. The year is important because this comes on the heels of a full year of unrest from Ferguson to the uprising in Baltimore, right? So there was a lot of unrest and there were a lot of people on Twitter harassing these folks around issues of race. At the same time, the summer of 2015 was when during the presidential democratic primaries, black activists were disrupting Bernie Sanders events and rallies. So folks in this network were sort of getting harassed from both ends of the political spectrum and started seeking out places where they could interact with one another. Both have closed Facebook groups. This week in Blackness has, I'm sorry, The Black Eye Who Tips has since made their, excuse me, made their group secret and they've stopped adding members. It has gotten so big that it was hard to moderate and they are aggressively moderated. You will get kicked out if you are a problem. So they've just stopped adding members unless that's changed in the last couple of weeks. In addition, since the 2016 election, folks in this network I've been seeing increasingly are making their Twitter accounts private. As I scroll through my timeline, I'm seeing more and more of those little padlocks if you're a Twitter user. That means that people's accounts are private. And effectively what this does is it takes a platform that functions as a counter public and it shifts their personal use of that platform to an enclave because now the only people they can interact with are the people who follow them. Podcasting is continuing to be important and growing in popularity. And also Snapchat, folks are increasingly using Snapchat which again has a lot of enclave functionality. It's much more closed. It's not as easy to share and circulate and to connect with people who you're not connected to. So one of the things I say to my students is you hear about people who have Twitter beef or Facebook beef or YouTube beef. You never hear about people who have Snapchat beef. Because it's just really hard to find and harass random people on Snapchat. And so I think now as we've been seeing that general internet users, people more broadly are encountering the same kinds of hostility that African American users have been encountering for several years. I'm anticipating that those folks are also going to start increasingly turning to enclaves. And I think actually we've been seeing this with younger folks already when I talk to my undergrads. They use a lot of direct messaging apps, a lot of Snapchat. They are much more invested in these sort of closed spaces. But the folks that I'm writing about are not young. They're late 20s to early 40s. So they're older millennials, younger gen X. And I think we're gonna continue to see more and more of this. Which leads me to sort of my question. Which is, what are the implications for how we conceptualize the internet and how we think of what digital sociality looks like? Because often when we think about digital sociality, we think in terms of social media, we think in terms of networking, we think in terms of connecting to people, sharing, circulating information, viral media and memetic media. So if users start increasingly seeking out closed spaces, insulated spaces that discourage these kinds of interactions, what does digital sociality now look like? And I think that this is going to force us to address a few questions. For me, as a researcher, my first one is methodological. How do you study this? It's easy to study public Twitter. Everything's public. How do you study enclaves, closed spaces? Closed spaces that are often deliberately designed to be less visible or completely invisible if you're not part of them. How do you even know they're there? And if you do know that they're there, how do you study them? Which immediately raises ethical questions. Should we study them? If people are sequestering themselves, then should we try to get access to these spaces? Is that ethical? If we do try to study them, how do we do it in a way that is respectful and does not exploit those populations? Luckily, anthropologists and particularly digital ethnographers and clean BKCs on Mary Gray have been working on these questions for a long time. So we have a really robust literature to turn to for these ethical questions. But I want to assert that these sorts of ethical questions and that that literature is going to become even more important, even to folks who don't think of their work as having an ethnographic element. For practitioners, this has questions for design. How do you design for people who want enclave functionality? If you are thinking about designing spaces for people to connect and share, what does it look like now? How do you design for people who want to sequester? It's a different set of design questions, which leads to a different set of business model questions. How do you monetize enclaving? Of the social media platforms, right now, Snapchat is the one that has the most enclaving functionality. Snapchat also has very high profile business issues. They posted a $500 million loss last year. So the question becomes if the monetizing strategies isn't getting people to interact, getting people to share so that you can sell ads and that you can data mine, how does that work in enclaves? And then I'm also sure that there is a series of legal and policy questions. That is just so far out of my area of expertise. I'm not even going to pretend to know what they are. But that's why I'm very, very grateful to have this forum. So on that note, I'm going to turn things back over to Jenny, who I believe is going to facilitate our conversation. Okay. This is on, right? It's okay. Yay! Love your talk. Thank you for coming and sharing it. And now the time for question and answers. So y'all provide the questions, okay? Oh, I have a run to you. I'm going to get my steps today. Okay. And just say your name and your affiliation. Hi, my name is Diane Williamson. I'm a MIT Harvard alum, computer scientist. I really love this. I have, in the last couple of years, rushed to Black Twitter, rushed to Black podcasts because they were discussing issues and the concerns that I had that were not discussed in the dominant culture. But one of the things I'm really concerned about, even though I never used Vine, I never downloaded it on my phone, I was heart sick that it was just taken away. Yeah. And I heard, that's when I found a lot of black people on it because I had no idea because it was not my thing. And I'm just really concerned in terms of sort of the business side of me is saying, okay, it's on Twitter. So Twitter has its own issues with its bots and it's, you know, what do you call it, viability as a business versus Facebook and Google, which are obviously, so suddenly I love Twitter and I just deactivated my Facebook account like years ago. So, and I don't miss it, but that's another issue. My concern is about the business side, about looking at the future of enclaves, possibly the use of open source of people having to build their own standards or because all of this could be taken away. The second concern I have as an American citizen who's constantly treated like a second-class citizen, like my favorite, one of my favorite podcasts is a podcast, Save the People by Dorae McKesson. I've been following, and my favorite, one that he had was a long time ago. He was talking with Edward Snowden, like how to save your life. I mean, when you have the FBI starting to say, not that I've ever gone out and, you know, what do you call, marched for, not that it's not a concern, but being increasingly like the FBI or people are trying to saying, oh, you're a militant or you're against the people or, you know, I'm really concerned like, is somebody keeping track of the fact that I listened to Dorae McKesson is going to be used against me because I'm concerned about the safety of American citizens and its human rights, you know, do you see what I mean? Does the FBI think you're a black identity extremist? Yes, I have. Because of your podcast? Thank you. I have self-censored myself on Twitter. I don't talk about the gun violence. I wanted to go totally off with Las Vegas. I wanna go totally off with this sick, mentally ill culture that we live in, especially with my international friends. They think we're crazy, you know, but I left it. There are a lot of issues about how I've been treated in Cambridge and campus with the police. I didn't put it online. I just ran to my friends because I knew somebody someday, I might run for president, just joking, but suddenly somebody's gonna, what's the name? Just lost his job, the 2000, Sam Cedar. Thank you, Sam Cedar. The internet forever. He's one of my majority. I listen to him and he gets, well, not that he still has the average part, but he loses his career. So I'm concerned about what I say because I live in my society and I know I'm not welcome and I honestly have to fight for my first class citizenship and God forbid I say something that will kill my career when I'm just saying sarcastically or snarkily. Do you understand what I'm saying? That I made my Twitter account private after the election because I'm a professor and I don't, I like to talk trash. Like I'm on Twitter, I'm sort of on Twitter professionally, but I was on Twitter to be on Twitter and I have folks that I've connected to and talked to for years and I like to be able to talk about the things I wanna talk about. But yeah, I think we need to parse out a little bit because there are two issues when it comes to protecting these digital spaces, right? There's surveillance in terms of government surveillance that you're talking about, but then there's also other users, right? And so enclaves are really effective at, there has been increasingly over the years, concerted efforts to use trolling, to use bots, to harass people off of platforms so that they can't use them effectively. And enclaves will offer some kind of protection about that from that, but it's not gonna offer any protection from the government surveillance. Like the Facebook enclaves, those Facebook groups and even Facebook Messenger. I mean, you think Facebook's not data mining from that, right? That's not, so while they may be able to police people who would harass and who would troll and who would disrupt the questions that you're raising about sort of governmental and corporate surveillance, I've got no answers for you, but I absolutely share your concerns. Now I feel like I have to live up to Jenny's excited, yes. My name's Kendra Albert, I'm a clinical instructional fellow here at the Cyrela Clinic at Harvard. I was curious if you could talk more about what makes the podcasting space more like enclaves and less like sort of, like less, more enclave and less like Twitter, because I think that that's maybe, at least was a sort of surprising outcome to me, so I'd be curious more about that. Sure, and I think that this is something that's particular to this network. I mean, it might be true of other podcasters and other podcast communities that I'm not familiar with, but in general, people think of podcasting as sort of mass media, right? One to many, and yes, there's some fan interaction, but really it's not a social platform in that way. The podcasters that I write about use podcasting in a very different way. Some of them do use sort of radio style formats, but mostly they're all under comedy on podcatchers like iTunes and Stitcher, mostly because there's not a sitting around talking shit with your friend's category on iTunes. That folks just, like some of the podcasts that I listen, like where's my 40 acres is a podcast that I listen to a lot. Their podcast might be three hours long. It starts and they talk about stuff and they're done when they're done. They might talk for 30, 45 minutes before they remember that they need to introduce the name of the show and who they are. They just talk in this very conversational, informal way, I have a piece about this called the podcast Chitland Circuit, because that's the name that some of these podcasters use to refer to their network. And it's a very, very different approach to podcasting. It's conversational. A lot of use vernacular, very free-form, very conversational, and if you're looking for, I have my students listen sometimes and they'll be like, I don't like this. I hate this podcast. They're not saying anything. They're just rambling. And I'm like, oh, I love it. If you look at the fans, they often say, oh, it's like being in the barber shop. It's like being in the beauty shop. It's like having your favorite auntie and uncle over for dinner. So there's already a way in which it's sort of a sonic recreation of these iconic spaces of black sociality. And then these podcasts all really prioritize participation and audience interaction. So a lot of them have chat rooms that accompany their live stream and are interacting. So they're watching the people in the chat and responding to them instead of bringing them into the conversation. They have open phone lines that people will comment on. They have a lot of social media activity. And they're also very deeply networked. So the fans overlap. The podcasters go on each other's shows. They promote each other. So when I write about this, I argue that it's sort of, it's a network in terms of a broadcast style network, one to many, but it's also a social network in a way that really gets blurry. In a way that I think that like this American life or radio lab doesn't. And so I've seen that those relationships be used for enclaving. One of the examples of this is when George Zimmerman was found not guilty. And folks were in the network that I'm writing about predominantly black folks went on social media and were upset and were hurt and were grieving and they were getting absolutely harassed. One of the co-hosts of this Week in Blackness's flagship show at the time, Aaron Rand Freeman, he said, social media is like a war zone right now. And so what they did, this Week in Blackness did live streams. They did live stream podcasts. And literally, Elon James White, who is their founder and CEO put out a call on Twitter where everybody was having these conversations and getting harassed and was like, live stream, here's the link, here's the phone number, here's the chat room and literally just shifted everybody to this other space. And it's a lot harder to troll a podcast. You gotta find it, you gotta listen to it, you can't search it, you gotta put in the time, right? You can't just go to like Twitter, you go, you type in a couple of words, you find somebody talking about that thing and you call them a name and harassment done, right? If you're talking about somebody who's like a three hour podcast to harass them like that's, you gotta really wanna troll them. So the affordances sort of also make a barrier that, so answer your question, that was a lot. That was basically the entire article, so you don't even have to read it. It's a really interesting talk. I'm Jill Walker-Rettberg, University of Bergen. So an obvious question would be, if you've got more enclaves, you're probably getting more polarization, right? Are there ways of allowing people to peace to speak without being harassed and yet sharing ideas so that we're not just stuck in our separate enclaves and have a knowing about each other? Yeah, and that is a concern. I think it's complicated. We need to, I always think about this in terms of power structures, right? Because folks who are using and are still using, I think we'll continue to use spaces like Twitter as a counter public. It is a great place where the folks that I'm writing about have been able to intervene in dominant narratives, push things into the mainstream media cycle, particularly it has the trending topics, which make things visible in a way that aren't in other spaces. So I think there will continue to be platforms like that where people will go to deliberately have those interactions. But I think increasingly we're seeing people want digital versions of sort of the offline, interpersonal social spaces that they've had for a long time. And I don't know about polarization and I don't know. I mean, really that's a directional thing based on power, right? Because it's about marginalized voices being heard because marginalized folks know exactly what dominant folks think, right? So all of these enclaves where black folks are, and I'm sure you can say the same thing about other people of color and LGBTQ folks and any marginalized group, they're not really unclear about what dominant white American culture thinks, like they know. Right, and what is happening now is the price of going into those counter public spaces to make their voices heard. That psychological toll, and even sometimes in terms of physical threats and danger is being ratcheted up to the point where people are just not ready to sign up for that, right? People really just want to have their space that they can go to. Although I think that it's sometimes a retreat of a place to sort of have your community, but it's also a place where ideas get percolated, where counterpublic, sorry, counter discourses get percolated and then get pushed out into the dominant public via platforms like Twitter. So I don't have a good answer. I think it is a concern, but I'm not sure barring a radical cultural shift in the way that social media platforms are used. I'm not sure what we can do about it. Question more about the methodology you used. I assume you sort of had to embed yourself into the black online community as somebody who is definitely not a black person. So what was that like? Do you say a little bit about that? Yes, yeah, in case anyone's wondering, I am not of African descent. I know it's pretty surprising, but yes. So I've been working on this project. I use, I've been, well, so here's it. These networks are my networks. They were networks that I was a part of prior to doing the project. The project actually grew out of my participation. So I was on Twitter in 2010. I was live tweeting the Boondocks. I was live tweeting these shows. I was just, if any of you were on Twitter in 2010, that was a very different Twitter. That was the Twitter of just talking to random people, and it was a much more sort of open place. And I was just following people and talking to people. And then all of these blogs started coming out about black Twitter. And they were citing people that I talked to and interacted with, and I was like, oh, I think I'm on black Twitter, right? Oh, okay, I just thought these were cool people. And then through that network, I found this week in Blackness, they had a podcast at the time. It was called Blacking It Up, and which was a pun on the ways in which they had always had their sort of black authenticity challenged, and so they're like, we're just gonna have a podcast, and we're gonna be super black. We're gonna black it up for like an hour a day. And I listened to it while I was writing my dissertation. I would write my dissertation on a different project, take an hour, listen to the podcast, participate in the chat room, and then go back to writing. And so I started building all of these relationships and then other people at the chat room started their projects, I started following their projects. And the next thing I knew, there was this whole network of amazing people who were doing amazing things that most digital media scholars were completely unaware of. And so I thought, well, I'm gonna write about them. So I've been participating and connected with this network from about 2010. So we're going on seven years now. If I weren't writing about them, I would still be participating. The thing that I have found is that there are politics to being a white researcher writing about people of color. So I've tried to be very collaborative, I've tried to, I ask permission, I talk to people, I share drafts, I try to be transparent. And, but as far as participating in that space in general, it's not that people who aren't black aren't welcome. It's sort of, this is a very specifically explicitly black space, right? And so as long as I understand that my voice, my priorities, my concern, like my worldviews are not the central ones, then I'm totally welcome there. And everybody's like, everybody's fine. As soon as I start demanding that that space be something else to suit my sensibilities, that's when the real problem is. But I found that, because a lot of folks also kind of knew me from being around before I started the research and that helps. So it definitely has been something that I've had to negotiate. But I think the folks that I write about are some of them the most wonderful, creative, interesting people that I know. And I know you all, so that's saying, that's literally saying something. So I'm really, it's been a great experience actually. Hey Sarah, I'm Mary Gray, Brooklyn Climb Fellow. Thank you for your talk. Thank you. So I'm struck at one point in your talk you noted how much to our surprise users, their top priority used to be sharing a network and now they're moving to enclaves. And I'm wondering, as you're responding to questions, if maybe another way to turn this is to say, perhaps because businesses and particularly researchers who also write about these communities might be the ones who asserted the idea that it was a top priority to share a network versus just hanging out. So I wonder if you could kind of speak to perhaps what's been there all along, which is that we're ignoring what most people do most of the time because it's not as measurable, maybe it's mundane or we might need, we might have to do a lot of work to be privy to it. And I know you're being really modest in terms of your respectfulness and graciousness with making sure that your research is low on the list of priorities when you're working with folks who have other needs. So if you could just speak to that. It's so funny because literally last night I was looking at my talk and I thought, I bet Mary's gonna ask me exactly that question. Because really at the end of the day, this is something that I've been thinking about is this really a shift back to something or is this just something that has always been happening that we weren't privy to, that we didn't do a lot of research on that now is showing up in places where that it didn't. And I think the fact that it's showing up on these platforms that were geared towards more counter-public sharing those kinds of things I think is significant. And I still think that that shift is happening. But I agree with you. I remember, so full disclosure, Mary was on my dissertation committee. So said dissertation that I was writing around listening to podcasts. Yeah, she read that. Oh, you're very kind. But I remember you saying to me, like nobody studies email. Email is so important. It's so fundamentally important to how we interact with one another, but it's hard to study in its mundane and people don't think about it. So I definitely do think that, yes, to basically I do think that there has been a way in which researchers neglect because they're not visible or because we have certain pressures of having to produce and move quickly in our research. So I think there are probably a lot of ways in which enclaves have existed and have been part of our lives. But I do think that on social media that there is a shift happening where the pressures are of being public on the internet or forcing people to take platforms that were social in terms of like self mass communication and making them like more closed. We have a digital question unless Carla is here physically. Okay, so Carla Reyes asks, can digital enclaves encounter publics like Twitter be created or encouraged by the algorithms that feed you messages dot, dot, dot, as opposed to creating closed spaces like a Facebook secret group? Yes. So well, this is one of the things that I also talk about in my book project is that platforms that lend themselves to one thing or another. Is that the camera that's live streaming up there? All right, hello Carla. Platforms that lend themselves to one thing or another to counter publics or enclaving. Those aren't static rigid states, right? Users are very clever and they figure out how to make platforms do things that they need them to do and so they work around. So I've talked about how people will use Twitter, make it a makeshift enclave, not only making their accounts private but also live tweeting. There's a whole series of hashtags that Black Twitter uses to live tweet television shows that are completely invisible to people who don't know about them and it basically makes sort of a parallel fandom that is separate from the mainstream fandom which often is coded as white and masculine and can be hostile to people of color, particularly women of color. So there are ways in which people work around. Your question about algorithms is a good one and I haven't really thought through that. I'm sure that the ways that algorithms are feeding things to you, highlighting some folks posts and not others contributes to that. Twitter though is particularly interesting because you can turn off the algorithm, you still can, right? I haven't changed that in the last 10 minutes, is that correct? Besides update and I say things and then somebody's like, no, that's not true anymore. But you can turn off the algorithm so you can make it chronological and then the search ability. You don't even have to be connected to somebody to interact with them. So it, but for example, Facebook, I still think Facebook, Facebook wants you to continue interacting so the algorithm encourages you to talk to people so you've got the friends of friends connectivity. So like if you post somebody posts something and you comment on that friend's article, then like some friend of their friend that you don't know is suddenly yelling at you in the comment section of the, so the algorithms I think are probably pushing us more towards the counter public model than the enclave model because the more that they can get you to interact and I feel like platforms don't really care if it's good interaction or bad interaction, they just want you on the site interacting. The more they can get you to interact with a wider range of people, I think the more it fits their goals as a platform. I have a question. I'll stand up. Thank you. I just heard a voice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. I've totally enjoyed this talk. I guess enclaving has been a thing, right? Yeah. Humans, we do it naturally. We get into our groups where we feel most comfortable or safe. Black culture has pushed American culture forever. It turns into the arts, music, sports, politics, protests, marches, et cetera, et cetera. And before I felt my sense is that enclaves, things could be brewing in the black community that aren't necessarily seen amongst the dominant population, white folk, whoever else. And now with how fast technology goes, I'm curious of how the folks in those spaces where you are, how are they, it's really easy for something to be happening and then it just let out and then you may not have, no longer have control of it. It's in the dominant spaces, it's online, and then you get their trolls or memes or the Fox News picks it up, CNN, whoever. So I was just wondering what are, you've mentioned a couple of mechanisms and things, but how do they think about the speed and ownership of thoughts and ideas in themselves in that regard? So just a really simple, if not complex question at all, right? Yeah, that's an excellent question. I mean, I think in part you're pointing to something that Mary was pointing to is that this enclaving tendency that I'm talking about is not a new thing, it's a return to something. That's why I specifically talk about in terms of spaces of black sociality, church functions, barbershops, beauty shops, family gatherings. So in a lot of ways it is a return to sort of those spaces. What is different, and Andre Brock has written about this, is that digital media now has made it possible for people outside of the community to, those discourses have become visible in a way that they couldn't before, right? So before, if you wanted to be privy to the kinds of conversations that were happening in a barbershop, you had to physically go to the barbershop. And so if I, little Miss White Lady, just show up at the barbershop like, hey guys, what's going on? That's gonna be weird. So that didn't happen very often. If I, as a little White Lady, follow somebody on Twitter, that's less weird. And suddenly I have access to discourses that I didn't before. And I think what you're pointing to is that the way things travel can be really productive or they can be really counterproductive, right? It can be, going back to what Jill was talking about, people getting their voices heard that weren't heard before. There are a lot of things that now people are talking about that folks in the black community have been talking about forever. Like police excessive use of force. Like that's not new. That's not something that just, but now people outside of those communities are privy to those conversations and can hear about those experiences. And that can be really productive. At the same time, the more voices get heard, the more the efforts to silence those voices often step up. And so you get into the trolling and harassment I was talking about. But also you mentioned ownership of ideas, right? And so then this is a big issue on Twitter and ideas of intellectual property and plagiarism and who owns, when people create something, who owns it and who uses it and who deserves to monetize it and things like that. And when you contextualize that in the history of the way that black culture has been appropriated to enrich people who are not black, it becomes very contentious. And I think that because these sort of open social media spaces have given access to black culture and black discourse in a way that folks not connected to black communities didn't have before, I think we're also seeing an increase in intentions around those questions. So I feel like a lot of these platforms sort of drug these issues out into the light and intensified them. And I think that the move back towards enclaves is part and impulse to go like, oh, okay, we're gonna go back and move away from some of this hostility. But when I talk about shifting between platforms, I also think it's an attempt to negotiate. Like, how can we use Twitter as a counterpublic to intervene in dominant discourses and have our voices heard when we want to, but then how do we still have a space that's ours, right? Yeah. Hi, I'm Saul Tannenbaum, I'm a free agent. Thank you for this really interesting talk. Thank you. You keep talking about moving back to enclaves, which sort of begs the question, how did we move out of them in the first place? And I think this sort of goes back to an aspect of Mary's question where she was not asking about business models as opposed to researchers. I mean, you talk about the social media platforms almost as an artifact rather than human-designed systems, which sort of call it a kumbaya model of human society. If we all just got together, things would be great, except it hasn't quite worked out that way because there are bad people. I mean, have you looked at sort of, if you looked at early black Twitter and seen what that was like, whether they're even, that black Twitter, for as an example, would have seen ahead that this was not gonna be a good idea because they would have had the experience of being thrust into the dominant discourses before. Did they see this coming or were they as surprised as the rest of us when none of us should have been surprised? So that is an excellent point, right? These platforms are designed. And I think about your point about, oh, if we could all get together, it would be all kumbaya. And I think about the 90s internet research that was like, oh, we can all leave our bodies behind. And so we'll just leave racism and sexism and anti-trans sentiment, LGBT sentiment behind and their act as pure minds, right? That didn't work so well. So there is definitely a way in which these platforms are designed from certain perspectives or certain goals and certain politics. I'm thinking about the early days of black Twitter. I mean, in part, there are two things that I think are distinctive. In part, that network was obscured because of noise and lack of, people weren't really, for a long time, I'm really excited that there's so much research in the last few years about black digital culture because for a long time I was going to conferences being like, okay, so black people use the internet. For real, I promise. And the reason that black Twitter became a thing, a cultural thing in a network that we talk about is because the trending topics made it visible. And there was this moment in 2010, it was actually around live tweeting the BET Awards, where all of these black folks on Twitter were just watching the BET Awards and tweeting things. And so the trending topics was just full of names of hip hop artists and things from the award show. And then all of these white users, where all of these tweets, you can find blogs that archive them, are like, where did all of these black people come from? Like what is happening? There was absolute, people were confused and befuddled that there was such a large black presence on the platform and it was that the trending topics made it visible. Once it made it visible, the black users in the platform quickly figured out how to leverage that to make their issues and other things visible, but also quickly realized the sort of scrutiny and negative interactions that invited. And then when that negativity started happening, as you said, everybody was sort of like, oh yeah, this sounds, this seems about right, you know? But I also wanna give a nod to, again, I can't emphasize the trending topics enough because one of the things that people like to say, you'll hear this very often, is that black Americans over-index on Twitter, that they are represented more on Twitter than they are in the general population. And that is true, but you know where they over-index even more is Instagram. It's something like of internet users in general, 26% are in Instagram of black internet users, 38% are in Instagram. That's a much bigger difference than you see on Twitter, but nobody talks about black Instagram because there's no trending topics. So people who aren't part of the network can't see it and people who are part of the network, and this goes back to sort of mundane, people who are part of the network are like, it's just Instagram, right? They don't think of it as like, oh, I'm on black Instagram. There's no feature to make it visible. Okay, I wanna thank everybody who was online and gave us questions. And for those of us who are here physically, Dr. Sara Femeny will be attending the fellow's hour today. So feel free to either ask questions afterwards right now or wait until our two o'clock fellow's hour. Thank you for your wonderful talk. Thank you. And thank you all for coming. I appreciate it.