 I want to remind folks that this event is going to be currently right now being live streamed. It's webcasted. It's also recorded for posterity's sake. So later on for during the question and answer, if you have a question, it will be recorded. So just remember that, okay? There's also an informal question and answer period later today at the Burtman Klein Center, which is the yellow building across the street at 3 p.m. that we invite all y'all to come to. The people who are listening online, you can also join that event via the phone if you'd like. My name is Jenny Corn. I'm a fellow here. And speaking of fellows, that application to join BKC as a fellow is open right now. Becca is in the room. So if you're here and would like to ask questions, please see Becca. But please look online for the application. It's due in January. Reach out to any of us and I'm sure we'll be happy to share our experiences with y'all. I am the coordinator of the race and media working group here at the Burtman Klein Center. And when I was asked to recommend a person to bring in this year for a speaker, the very first person that came to my mind is Dr. Andre Brock. The reason why, if you do work in this space, if you do research on race and the digital, you must, you must sign it, Dr. Andre Brock. He is an innovator. He is a leader. He has been the forerunner in this space of digital and race for years. And all of us owe him much gratitude for setting that space open for all of us. And so I want now to make sure that when y'all think about race and the digital, that you also think about Dr. Andre Brock for many reasons and let me read some of them to you from his bio. Oh, my God. Oh, that's right. Dr. Andre Brock is an associate professor of Black Digital Media at Georgia Tech. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with a master's in English and rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His scholarship includes published articles on racial representations in video games, black women and web blogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as innovative and groundbreaking research on black Twitter. His article from the black hand side, Twitter as a cultural conversation challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field, in his words, preserved, quote, a colorblind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing whiteness and othering everyone else, end quote. And sparked the conversation that continues as Twitter in particular continues to evolve as a communication platform. The author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, Dr. Brock's writings have appeared in prominent journals like Media, Culture, and Society, New Media and Society, Journal of Broadcasts and Electronic Media, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Information Communication and Society. Dr. Brock is a charter member of the NYU Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. His forthcoming book titled Distributed Blackness, African American Cyber Cultures, will be published with NYU Press next year. Give it up for Dr. Andre Brock. Apparently that gets you in trouble. Can you hear me? No. Can you hear me now? No? We'll just keep raising this until it gets to an appropriate space. How about now? I feel amplified. All right. Greetings and salutations, because I am a member of a particular discourse culture. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Now let's try this again. This is called call and response. Good afternoon. One more time, because I hear some people with food in their mouth. Good afternoon. That's what's up. How y'all doing? Good. All right. So thank you to the Berkman Klein Center for inviting me out, but a special thanks to Jenny Korn, who just so happens to be one of my favorite advisers for orchestrating this and to Carrie Anderson for logistical support. I'd also like to thank the folk down the street with the social media collective at Microsoft New England, hey Chris, where this project flowered under their tender care. This hopefully brief presentation, because I know I have a time limit, is drawn from my forthcoming book, Distributed Blackness. And in the book, I use a qualitative method I've named Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, or CTDA, to analyze black digital practice, racialized digital artifacts, and beliefs about black folk in the digital. Today I'd like to introduce you to some of the theoretical insights that I've gleaned from my research stream over the years. And in keeping with my use of black cult figures to illustrate information studies, I'd like to offer this obscure artist's vernacular creativity to introduce my topic. I love that particular line, my constellation in space, because in part, it speaks to the invention and style that black folk use to navigate cultural spaces in the Americas. So that's how it ended up being the title for my presentation. So thank you Robin Rihanna Fenty, hopefully your career will take off soon. My work on racing the digital is grounded by Arnold Pasey's tripartite formulation of technology, that technologies must be understood as a three-part construct of materials, organization, and culture, which I've altered in my own work to artifact, practice, and belief, as you may see on this slide. For normative, analytic, and even critical digital and new media research, tech is often analyzed according to the first two aspects, leaving uninterrogated Western beliefs about whiteness and technology or Western techno culture. My research reintegrates culture into technology analyses using libidinal economy and critical race theory to highlight how race shapes tech. For this presentation, I'm going to ask you to consider two conjoined concepts. First, that blackness needs its own formulation of techno culture. And then second, to understand as Wendy Chun says, race is slash as technology or for me, where black identity is an artifact with practices, for example, black Twitter signifying or signifying discourse, and beliefs or double consciousness. Du Bois, through his formulation of double consciousness, 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 was the intersection between black communal solidarity and a national white supremacist ideology. This formulation acknowledges the hegemony of whiteness without privilege over the agency and spiritual energy found within the black community. So it's worth repeating. Double consciousness as a formulation of black identity has to do with differences in the experience of being an individual in two separate discourse communities, as opposed to occupying a marginalized role within a society. By applying this approach to race in the digital, my intent is to highlight the protean nature of black identity mediated through multiple digital artifacts, services, and practices. The digital provides an indexical location from which experiences and perceptions occur, promoted through acts of individuals and groups, but also significantly through algorithmic network and multimedia enactments. This move also sheds the need for analyses of black online identity to rely solely upon visual identification of phenotype or a visual or oral signifiers. It also avoids the epistemic closure of how digital textual practice is often conceptualized. By this, I mean, and I'm citing Robert Gooding-Williams here, where he notes that becoming black requires one to make choices to formulate plans, to express concerns in light of one's identification of oneself as black. So then articulating blackness in digital media, and this goes back to the epistemic closure, is the beginning of the analysis rather than the end. The black body has long been a feature and shibboleth to articulations and theorizations of black culture. The materiality of the black body is easily understood as a benighted canvas for the iniquities and oppressions levied upon it. But its materiality has also led to elaborate, strained rationales about the legitimacy of race as a social construct by touting scientific explanations, so Elizabeth Warren and her DNA testing, or IQ tests. When scholars turn to understanding information technology used by black folk, the black body really was only legible through its perceived absence. Absence from material, technical, and institutional aspects of computers in society or the digital divide. So I talk a lot about techno culture, and let me define it briefly here. It can be understood as the beliefs, relations between and politics of culture and technology. And on the slide in front of you, you'll see Dienerstein, Joel Dienerstein's excellent western techno-cultural matrix. But I ask you, within this framework presented here, within these six qualities, progress, religion, modernity, masculinity, whiteness, and the future, how to articulate a black presence. Reorienting techno culture to incorporate blackness invites an inquiry into the possibilities of blackness as technology, not black bodies, because we've been there and done that, but blackness as technology in the same way that blackness often stands in for the best of American entertainment and culture. And I'm not arguing for minstrelsy and blackface here, even though those representations of blackness are as American as apple pie. To illustrate my point, I'm going to turn to a seminal black print artifact. The Negro Motorist Green Book, which was edited by Victor Green over nearly two decades. Three, actually. The NGB is just a book, a directory of black businesses published by blacks for blacks long before the internet. Michael Rashawn Hall argues for the NGB as a tool to resist post-bellum legacies of white racial violence and hegemony. And I agree. But I insist, or suggest, that the NGB should also be viewed as one of the first culturally oriented network browsers. The network in this instance is the United States Highway System, an infrastructure tailored for the use and leisure of automobile owners. As early as the 1910s, black drivers saw automobile ownership as a pathway to personal mobility, technological expertise, and a modern technical sign of middle-class identity. Similar to, say, the use of the blackberry in the middle of the 90s and 2000s, right? Arguing for the NGB as distributive blackness, then an informational artifact linking black information seekers to black cultural resources across a network seems like a no-brainer after all that. The NGB was the Google, or more appropriately, the Yahoo Open Directory project. Y'all remember Open Directory? I figured this audience would, right? Of black information because a directory is human-reviewed rather than algorithmically determined. It's a search engine for those seeking culturally vital information. These resources, catering to the needs and wants of a technologically enabled mobile black community, were distributed unequally across the network, obscured often by racist laws and proponents. The NGB imagines the United States highway system as a black technological network, not as an Afro-future, but as a present-day marvel containing possibilities for joy and for violence, one that performed resistance alongside blackness as the capacity to enjoy leisure, even as urban renewal projects constructed interstate highways through the destruction of vibrant black urban communities. While the internet didn't destroy blackness, it has not yet destroyed black neighborhoods. There's still time. It offers discursive and algorithmic discrimination and racism against black folks. So accordingly, there's still a pressing need for the curation of informational, digital, and online resources for black folk, seeking information and even safe spaces. In short, networked information, or as my book is titled, Distributed Blackness, is essential to black identity in the form of resources for identification, community, self-defense, joy, resistance, aesthetics, and more. Let me go off on a tangent, as is my want. So I want to introduce my theorization of techno-cultural belief. Francois Lyotard's libidinal economy offers a powerful counter to rationalistic, modernist, and postmodernist theories used to understand both black agency and information technology uses. These theories, while addressing information technology, are themselves beholden to pejorative beliefs about non-white users, leading either to deficit models of technology use, again, digital divide research, or conversely, to glorifying non-white capacities for resistance. The libidinal economy makes clear the effect of tensions undergirding modernity and western techno-culture, but also provides a path towards conceptualizing black technology use as a space for mundanity, banality, and the celebration of making it through another day. The libidinal is not precognition, nor is it pre-intention. Instead, it can be understood as the combustion powering the engine, a visceral, powerful, and necessary component in any figuration. It is infrastructure, invisible until a rupture occurs. For my project, I'm arguing for the libidinal as pathos. Pathos serves two purposes for distributed blackness. The first is the para-ontological ground of logos and ethos, where pathos is the shared epistemology and axiology for reason. Here I'm drawing from Fred Moten in his article, Blackness and Nothingness, where he talks about Afro-optimism, where he says that blackness is para-ontological. It exists before the middle passage, before the ways in which oh, I said the word. I promise I would never say the ways in which in a presentation again, and here I've already failed. It prefigures the ways that, good one, that the modernism and colonialism and imperialism restructure blackness to serve as a chattel component of their expanding capitalist and imperialist domains. For me, the second purpose for employing blackness is the identification, remember I said this is a pathway, employing pathos, sorry, is the identification of black pathos as the epistemological standpoint, and here I'm starting Sandra Harding, of a libidinal economy of black techno culture. Doing so allows for the incorporation of race and technology studies, in this case, for me, black culture and black bodies, without allowing Americans anti-blackness or the West anti-blackness to over-determine blackness itself. This approach offers multiple beneficial outcomes. One such is the disinvestment of techno-culture substrate of logic and rationality. Replacing the highly technologized, Lewis Mumford, we said Mumford, yes, calls it techno-rationalism. So the highly circumscribed, an objective emotional character of logos with pathos allows this inquiry to incorporate analyses of black digital practice engendered by joy, playfulness, and anger. Another is the acknowledgement and theorization of black communal identity as a meaning-making strategy. Making this move allows for understanding blackness as a discourse in conversation with, but not wholly subject to whiteness. A refutation of the categorical nation of capitalist identity and, most important, a refutation of anti-blackness. As KRS-1 said, I just wanted to say that at Harvard, as KRS-1 said, rap is what you do, hip hop is how you live. This distinction also exposes a critical perspective on racial ideology by interrogating and speaking to the contradictions of practice and belief. A libidinal economic perspective on black techno-culture allows for the teasing apart of the multi-layer reasons behind the practice's distribution, performance, and aggregation across digital and material social structures. Black folk use technologies not designed for them or about them in ways that confound traditional technology analyses, and this approach is intended to redress that shortcoming. Back to where we started. So what are the challenges of arguing for black techno-culture? As an accumulated and fungible object rather than as an exploited and alienated subject, it's openly vulnerable to the whims of the world and so is his or her cultural production. And here I'm citing Frank Wilderson. I don't know if any of you read Teen Vogue, but they had an article a few months ago about the use of black people gifts by white people to express. So this is what Wilderson is talking about. We have no rights to that production, that performance. It's been captured by the network and used for aims that we did not necessarily determine. And he's arguing this because black folk in the West is political agents. Therefore, they have no inalienable rights to black cultural production. Therefore, blackness in online spaces and elsewhere is immediately captured by Western culture leaving little possibility from emancipation from that framework. I agree. I can't really fight that one. Instead of arguing for emancipation through appropriate digital practice, which includes black capitalism and we can argue about that later. My pressing concern for black techno-culture is to express the vitality and joy of black uses of information and communication technologies. While these libidinal impulses may become commodified or surveilled, they are para-ontological in that the embodied cognition they express pre-exists the platforms upon which they are published, visible and deemed appropriate for consumption. So black cyber culture, which is my extension of black techno-culture because I'm a digital scholar and I'm not going to read that slide. My extension of black cyber-culture or black technology use as a relationship between blackness, American ideology, and digital technologies. Here I'm citing Ray Fouchet, who I love, who's awesome. Here I'm drawing from his work on blackness as a vernacular aesthetic. Fouchet and I share an interest in the vernacular as a generative source of black cultural production. My interest in the version of the black vernacular aesthetic is in its performance and discourse, particularly as it expresses an engagement with the everyday and virtual spaces through digital practice. While the black banal and the everyday may occasionally rise to the level of art or politics, its value lies in the unalloyed libidinal expressions of catharsis and joy arising from interactions with others, with technologies, and with institutions. Let me give a brief example. This first example features yet another character here, and I'm citing Christian Warner here, and character actor who has become notorious. I don't know if the slides made it, we'll see in a second. For its expression of amusement, disdain, sarcasm, and cruelty. The second example, which I clicked on too fast because I was afraid the first one wouldn't work, is a part of a moment when Twitter made a tectonic shift in how it presented information to the world, the move from 140 to 280 characters. This move met with mixed reactions. That part of Twitter's ritual cathartic power is the sharply enforced limitation of the 140 character limit, like the haiku. This tweet, however, proves me wrong. So I said earlier that black cyber culture is not an Afro future, so let me explain that briefly. Where Afro futurism is concerned with the future, obviously, black cyber culture is better argued for as the post-present, particularly as constructed and contested through black cultural digital spaces in practice. And by post-present, I mean that black folk cultural spaces are constantly engaged with the moment, or Kairos. I'm tricking off of theories of post-modernity, post-racialism, and information technophilia here. Not to interrogate the increasing precarity of labor, or the ever encroaching spread of surveillance and commoditization in part because black people have been dealing with that. But instead to argue for ways that black digital practice invests energies into being, a celebration of the now that incorporates past iniquities of their imaginings. Black Kairos is simultaneously racial performance, discursive invention, and appropriate timely engagement within communicative and cultural context. One way, for many the only way, to understand black Kairos in the American context is through the frame of respectability. But another possibility is through a political economic lens where black digital activity can only be understood through its commodification, surveillance capacity, political activism, or economic potential. Returning to black Kairos, timeliness, or lack thereof, is a significant aspect of black discursive identity. For example, the concept of colored people time. Some people know what I'm going to say. I say that colored people time describes a joyous disregard for modernity and labor capitalism. E.g., for example, the aphorism, I might be late, but I'm always on time. Kairos is deployed here refers to the immediacy afforded by black discourse by network protocols, communal structures, and the instantaneity and archival capacity of information networks. A second example would be showing the receipts. It's one black discursive digital practice that situates past transgressive behavior, often in the form of digitized documents, but occasionally visual or multimedia testimony. In the now, usually via social media, to be commented upon and read as evidence in the moment. If you're familiar with the idea of cancel culture, this is cancel culture as well. I had a western techno-cultural matrix. Here's my black techno-cultural matrix, and I have an asterisk by this, in part because Natalie, whose name I cannot remember, on Twitter asked a really great question how to conceptualize diasporic black identity. Part of my matrix has America in there, but it's America with the asterisk, because I argue that this matrix should be able to work for any colonial or imperialist enterprise where blackness has been dispersed. Does that make sense? Okay, so let me go back. I'm only going to dismiss, even though you can read the qualities, blackness intersectionality, invention, American modernity in the future. But I'll only talk about blackness. And blackness for this matrix stands for the embodied and critical valences of black cultural identity revolving in subjectivity and cultural production. One of the reasons why I felt a theory of black techno-cultural was necessary is that information and communication technology affords blackness space within which it can 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 existential here, 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 matrix category of blackness then is the communitarian enactment of intentionality across cultural aspects of black culture, or citing Fred Moten, blackness is irreducibly social. He adds that blackness is lived in political death, and we don't really have time for that conversation here, but I just want to put that out there. Along the way, blackness highlights how the libidinal, or pathos, as a vital component of logos structures understanding of the world that black Americans find themselves in. Pathos begins with the celebration of black thought, not solely as joy, but in its 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 also like to fuck. Here I am citing Joan Morgan, where whiteness gains power from excuring its internal differences, blackness is a recognition of that which makes black folk different. I suck at conclusions. My publishers really give me a hard time, so this is kind of my conclusion. This is the central claim of my research stream and of my book, and let me tell you how the reviewers hated this, because they felt that I was arguing that digital is an essential quality of blackness, which I'm not at all, as I will explain. I passionately firmly believe that black folk have a natural affinity for the internet and digital media, and here I'm following in the footsteps of Miller and Slater who argued similarly for Trinidadians who took to the internet like fish to water and managed to reshape it in the image of their perceived cultural identity even though they are a diasporic culture with millions of Trinidadians in Canada and the U.S. and not necessarily on the island of Mexico. So by natural, I'm by no means arguing that internet use is an essential quality of blackness. Essentialism for non-whites has a long pejorative history within western culture. Only non-white bodies suffer reduction to a perceived intrinsic characteristic while whiteness gets to retain interpretive flexibility. Therefore, we can see millions of sites for diapers and nannies and the like, but I still have trouble finding a black barber shop using Google search. My claim is pragmatic. Black expressivity is rightfully lauded in literature and in art. The black linguistic expression is denigrated in modern, i.e., technical and professional society. Indeed, black identity is associated with many things but the internet and more specifically the expertise and information and communication technology practice is not one of them. My claim is ecological that black folk have made the internet a black space whose contours have become visible through their sociality and distributed digital practice and in the process decentering whiteness as a default internet identity. Moreover, I'm arguing that black folk's natural affinity, natural internet affinity is as much about how black folk understand and employ digital artifacts and practices as it is about how blackness is constituted within the material and virtual world of the internet itself. I hope this presentation has gone some way towards explaining how I can see even these black digital practices in online spaces, racial performances and cultural phenomena online as black technical culture. Thank you. Twenty two minutes. And now we have time for questions. Again, just a reminder in case you arrived after this announcement that this event is being live webcasted so folk can hear you and see you and also it's been recorded for posterity so your questions will be recorded. Yes? Hello, my name is Tyreen Jones. I really appreciated your talk. My question is about you may have heard of it black fishing so for people who may not have heard of it it's the idea of well it came from an experience that has happened online with women in particular who are demonstrating themselves as women of color or black women so instead of cat fishing the idea is that they're black fishing but they're using images of themselves because of the internet's ability to democratize capitalism in some ways they're using that to gain opportunities and different gigs and posts so how does this relate to black techno culture but also how can people who are marginalized regain their agency in situations like this what does that look like is there a digital green book for navigating situations like that Let me see if I can break this into two parts so the first part is through technological means and technology broadly construed so the use of concealers, highlights, glitter body sprays, wigs and other things, white women and some white men have been able to transform themselves into looking like light skinned black people so I originally was calling this gold fishing but nobody wanted to ride with that one the kicker for this and I cited Robert Gooding Williams because I really love his definition of intentionality as a core characteristic of blackness but there's a second part that I really don't dig into that is also as important it is that you have to be accepted in your intentionality by the community and what you've seen with this black fishing is that the community having discovered that there's sham, fraud, mercury going on has done their work to try to debunk this and so I would argue that much like any other subculture blackness is very intent on policing its boundaries and they don't want and this is the Paul Monique quote everybody wants to be a nigger but nobody wants to be a nigger I said nigger at Harvard this is awesome and so there is a significant measure of digital practice that's also involved in unmasking people who don't belong to the community there are similar issues going on with Sean King and D. Ray Mackison where they're being unmasked as people who are opportunistic in using their blackness and political activism to gain social influence and a little change and so it's one of the highlights I think of many subcultures where they want to police their boundaries. How's that? Hi my name is Sabela my fellow here at the Berkman Klein Center I wanted to ask you what are your thoughts when we think of distributed blackness would you consider the black church a pioneer of distributed blackness? That's a tough one yes in the same ways that I consider well let me back up on this alright so the black church of course pre-exists digital social networks the comparison I've been making recently there have been cries that the internet has contributed to incivility in part because of its distributed algorithmic nature for far-right people and I've been saying that the far-right had a presence in networks broadcast syndication and the like long before the internet similarly the black church had an organizational activist aesthetic practice long before the internet even existed Brian Ward has an excellent book that I cite a lot where he talks about radio as the ways in which black respectability proponents tried to promote themselves and to their communities and it's interesting to me in part because of my focus on the libidinal in many cases so I don't know if any of you have heard of the Fisk Jubilee Singers they're pretty famous that was one of the ways in which black respectability sought to promote that black people also could participate in high culture at the same time these church and religious leaders were very concerned because they were worried that black people were listening not to these educational high culture broadcast but to the slick talking, jive talking libidinal visceral disc jockeys of the time who had a command of the language plus popular music and those programs were so much more popular and taken up by the black populace and the educated ones so I went in circles because I usually do that but I would say that the black church has had its moment with information technologies I talk about this in the book too with black respectability they have lost some of their moral authority because information technologies abridged that social distance that they once had now you can critique them publicly and in record in ways that dissenter the authority of the black church the moral authority that the black church once claimed does that make sense so yes the black church still has a presence it's not nearly what it was and a large part of that is due to the democratic nature of network technologies where we can participate I get there eventually Hi Nathan Freitas Berkman Center thank you and anyone with kids is probably overwhelmed with like fortnite dances in their lives right now and what's crazy about it is the kids are doing dances from the game then the game have taken dances from black culture and on the one hand that seems so wrong but I still get excited about like remix sample culture and I don't want corporations I don't know is the best outcome for a black artist to be credited in fortnite or does that somehow corporatize the culture in a way that's not it's a really good example Disney just trademarked Hakuna Matata right so obviously no cultural property is to be left uncommoditized what kind of compensation should black artists demand for their likenesses or even their dance moves and I'm not sure if photography can be copyrighted or trademarked right it can so how then can they make a claim for that when there are thousands of youtube videos demonstrating similar moves by different dancers how can one person say this is mine so that's a problem that I think perhaps we as technologists should work on solving I don't know how exactly it gets covered right the larger issue and the one that gets brought up in other spaces where I give this talk is about appropriation which you pointed out right these are now fortnite dances even though they're originally dances from black latino and asian culture and so how exactly do you get technologists and I would argue epic which is the producer of the software that makes fortnite is that right is it epic games epic has some role in recognizing where they got this from and at least give a visual credit to the choreographers or the person who they motion cap these moves from but will they ever get compensation I mean we can look at EA and college football and how that didn't work out right so I don't I usually say I bring up problematics I don't do problems right so this is another problematic we can consider how exactly do you compensate a marginalized populace for their creativity and invention when you capture it in digital form I don't know so you mentioned a quote saying blackness is irreducibly social do you think that plays a part into how the black culture has been always early adopters of social media and what do you think black culture is gravitated towards the internet whoo black folk as technology objects and subjects have always been early adopters of technology right if you look through the archives of inventors there are many black inventors of black men and women inventors of technologies that we now take for granted right so I don't know if black folk really gravitate towards it what I do understand and what I argue in the book is that we feel this need not only a need but a desire which is where I'm at with the libidinal to express ourselves enact ourselves in any medium we encounter does that make sense and so social media is a natural one because it incorporates as I talk about in my black twitter article signifying practice which is an audience centered discursive as we did call in response earlier to black identity right and so we're here we've been here right Charlton McElwain is putting out a book in a few months where he talks about early use net expressions of black identity and political agency so there are always people in those faces my work and the work for a critical race in digital studies is highlighting how we've always been here all along and that our contributions are necessary I will follow up to my own answer because I have the microphone that one of the reasons why I do this talk and I know it's overwhelming because I talk about the libidinal I talk about blackness I talk about social media I talk about science and technology studies I know it's overwhelming but what I'd like for you to take from this talk is the idea that you can do a specificity right when it comes to culture and the internet many cases and this is something that Jenny said when she introduced me whiteness is left uninterrogated as a default identity for whatever technologies are being designed and or used what would happen and this is not my question I'm gleefully stealing it what would happen if we marked whiteness from the beginning does it make a difference that Mark Zuckerberg went to what school was it and was white as he created this surveillance software for dating does that make a difference I've had the chance to talk with Gary Dufan and Omar Wasau who are the founders of black planet and one of the things they talked about was when they were pitching to VCs the VCs didn't believe that black people would be able to code I don't know if you know black planet black planet is one of the original it's a proto-social network according to some but I think of it as one of the first right and you had like MySpace which came along years later you had the ability to HTML code your own places so yes all the sparkling cursors and scrolling images and auto-playing music players that you hate black planet was an early innovator and they took it right from GeoCities and put it right in a social networking site and they didn't think that black people would be able to do this but black planet for many years had the highest concentration of black users anywhere I think it peaked at 16 million which if you think about it some of those accounts are dummies and bots or whatever or multiples I shouldn't have said dummies but there are only 37 million black people in the United States so to have 16 million of them supposedly using this one website is a pretty significant accomplishment and many of the graphic designers and web creators that are popular now got their start with black planet right so it's something to consider does cultural origin and cultural outlooks shape the types of technologies that we have and use on a daily basis and what are the libidinal influences right and so this is why when I talk to my students they're like facebook is just for your grandparents and I'm like no as I said earlier facebook is a surveillance tool right it was built for a guy who wanted to meet girls without leaving his room right and early reports talk about the ways in which it was used to rate women not rate I have a slight impairment rate okay let me be clear I don't want that to go on the live stream right right so if you have this tool that does the surveillance in the service of one person's desire to meet people at scale what does that mean for democracy and civility right and I think we could ask that of many of the tools that we're looking at and using on a daily basis now what is the purpose of instagram don't answer that I know you don't use it you all are mostly old so I know you are not really instagram users in the way you think you are right but we could also talk about snapchat right we could talk about whatsapp and whatsapp is a fascinating case to me but also where specificity gets reintroduced what is cacao talk what is baidu how are those culturally different even though they're using the same internet protocols a lot of the same design cues how are they different and what is it about their cultural specificity that makes them intriguing to their users but different from American versions of those same things so I'll stop there hi you know me but for the record I'm Sarah Jackson I'm a fellow over in the shornstein center in the kennedy school right now can you talk a little bit about because I've heard you talk about it before and I would love to talk about it here you talk a little bit about it now how research that sort of depends on frameworks around deficit models of thinking about race and the digital are different from the work you're doing I'm thinking in particular about what happened the year like two or three years ago when everyone discovered black twitter and there were all these you know think pieces and newspaper articles and studies and about how you know black people turns out black people are using twitter to do this and black people blog and black and like the undercurrent of all of it was like surprise and folks that were part of those communities were like yeah right so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about kind of some of the framing of some of not just the other scholarship but also the public discourse in general around the way black folks use digital technologies and kind of how your work challenges those frameworks so that allows me to start with a personal anecdote because what is a good talk without a personal anecdote how I've been using technology since I was a wee lad I had a TRS 80 and a Commodore 64 right so people are nodding like that's how long I've been in this game but when I decided to start studying technology use I was really taken aback by the ways by the ways that technology studies and that's why I keep calling out digital divide research because that was some of the earliest research into how black people were possibly using these new network technologies these digital divide studies operate on this deficit model and here I'm pulling liberally from Neil Selwyn's work on internet haves and have nots and so I was struck by the idea that black people didn't want to, didn't have the capacity to or were unable to afford these technologies when at the time I just moved from New York City to Pittsburgh and all I saw were black kids with alphanumeric pagers and black men and women with blackberries and people with, I had a Windows 3.1 laptop that was black and white and about this thick but we had our tech right so I was like how then can you start to conceptualize black technology used differently from the framework Hoffman and Novak they're out of Vambert built I argue it's a canonical digital divide study one of their throwaway conclusions was that maybe black people don't use the internet because there's no content there for them nobody ever really followed up on that right and it's really weird that and perhaps they didn't know that at the time we were using black voices and black planet and everything black dot com and MS BET do you know that Microsoft and BET had a joint venture together right it was really weird they tried to make it like a virtual amusement park and really bad Java chat rooms but it was there right all these sites existed for black people but they went under the notice because they weren't interesting to people who were doing that type of technology research at the time so this is for me it's been a development right I looked at Anna Everett's early work Byron Burke Halter's early work and they were some of the few and then Lisa Nakamura to start looking at the specificity of what it means to have a race or to declare a race and participate in online stuff I would argue especially given the Ferguson moment right that Twitter was one of the first spaces and I argue this in my article as well which came out before Ferguson which let me tell you it's been a bitch to revise for the post-Ferguson moment right so can you imagine writing about Twitter in 2011 and then Ferguson happens right it's a totally different environment well a very different environment that's not exaggerate too much right but one of the things I said was the hashtag in particular allow people to see black digital practice in ways that was obviously unavailable. You no longer had to know the address of a black website in order to see black people participating because black creativity and invention was right up front on your Twitter trending topics and being reported by news networks so you no longer had to look for it it was right there in front of you and that was this part of the sea change the trouble with that though is that Ferguson and the Michael Brown I was gonna say if you see something say something but that's me as a New Yorker right when they if they got me down right these moments became part of a respectability movement right and so it political activism became the appropriate way to use Twitter and all the libidinal stuff that got us there right the ways in which we were talking about the BET awards which Sarah Florini is working on now or back in 2009 right or the stuff that I was talking about with one of my favorite anecdotes I did job talks talking about black Twitter and the job talk the hashtag I used was hoe shit only some people know it's not actually the garden tool I just leave it at that right in part because I've been libidinal all my life and why not share that with everybody and so there's still this it's kind of sort of dying down but it's also mutated in really weird ways that Twitter is no longer an appropriate space a respectable space it is an uncivil mob mentality place and in many ways that's shaped by the activities of black people. There's a lot of things that are going on in this with call out culture right the me too movement the people pushing back against gamergators because the gamergators never seen I'm sorry I'm not supposed to say gamergators on live stream I didn't say that guys because they will follow you and dox you right but the ways in which they people responded to the threats and doxing and violence that those gamergators offered right and so Twitter has now reacquired this and the tension dies down black people will still be having fun on Twitter right and to bear that out because I'm going to continue being gross and libidinal here one of my favorite hashtags of the last couple years was the one hashtag nigger navy you all familiar with this jason is right so yahoo business right after Trump took office I'm sorry right after 45 took office was talking about the ways in which he would do his military appropriation budget I saw a picture on Twitter of a large seafaring vessel and they said Trump's gonna need a bigger navy unfortunately somebody's auto correct is really acting out that day and it said Trump's gonna need a nigger navy now what why do I love this so much because instead of being offended and mass calls for protest against yahoo black people took this and made the hugest amount of jokes the funniest jokes I've ever heard right sinning or parenting or black celebrity and everything else if you take a moment go look it up like you'll see some you may not necessarily know all the cultural references but it's still pretty funny to think that they took a moment that could have been offensive and then made it their own right so this is why I think black people will continue using that was the longest answer ever I'm sorry sorry sorry I got it first my name is Maria Garcia thank you for making our minds rush at lunchtime to the core of your conclusion that black folk have a natural affinity for digital media and I want to understand like if we could take more time to understand the motivation for jumping from the not jumping for argument in your way from epistemic categories to ontological because you recognize that there is opening the door to essentialism is something that advocacy has resisted for a long time and so what what do you see to be gained for making that move in in terms of political or is it just like not just but is it a theory argument with no political motivations behind oh no they're definitely motivation so let me put it in this perspective Howard University Medical School of Medicine and my Harry are two of the largest producers of black doctors in this country I think it is not Alabama A&M one of the engineering schools the black Jackson State one of the largest producers of black engineers in this country so if you give black folk the opportunity to be part of techno cultural spaces where they are valued and cherished as contributors or practitioners in this movement they're just as good if not better than anyone else matter of fact strangely it turns out black doctors are better with black patients than white doctors are who knew right of this is an implicit argument that perhaps the tech world should consider that black people are just as good at doing this as anyone else especially if they're given the right environment circumstances in which to flourish and I'm not necessarily arguing that but code academies are the way to do it but I understand why there are certainly capitalistic and political problems with code academies as they were with teach for America as they were with community technology centers as well as how old I am and community informatics but it's still a space where black people and minorities overall get to experience the technology they get to fail with it and there's not the high stakes of wondering whether or not they'll be able to make a living afterwards sometimes it is but not as much they had the chance to play with it so that's the overall argument if you begin to start from the assumption that black people are natural then you no longer have to worry about niche sites and this is the same argument that the foundation has been making for years women are just as good if not better because we know affirmative action has been tailored to let men get into college at the same rate that women do women are just as good at tech as men are at math as men are but it's not that they don't want to it's that the environments that they come into at Georgia Tech where I am or Carnegie Mellon where I was are really hostile in both implicit and explicit ways and I'm not a specificity argument but I'm arguing that minority subcultures minority cultures are just as naturally able to use information technologies as anybody else yes oh wait, Jasmine so you've been talking a bit about space and the title of the presentation is about space so I wanted to ask you about space or the creation of space or the elboying at least the creation of space using culture so you talked about culture I would also say like black tumblr pre-sale tumblr and other spaces and at the same time when black people and other people of color and other marginalized groups get into spaces that weren't created with them in mind in the beginning then there's both the appropriation of culture but then also people who will say we need to leave because then the reputation comes and we talk a bit about the creation of space by black people and other marginalized people and then what that means for shaping a technology both like a social media technology but other technologies as well let me go back so one of the answers to your question is that when we are allowed in spaces we tend to inhabit them with our own special sense of style and invention I think his name is Ronald Walcott who talks about blues as an expression an invention of style where a person occupies it on an individualistic basis yet performs it for an appreciative audience and this is part of the reason why it was drawn to the libidinal that's not a rationalistic movement we are not trying to be the most efficient in this space in part because we see our bodies have seen what efficiency does in the name of capitalism and modernity instead we bring our own style to it it's matching from head to toe as I've seen in Detroit and Atlanta or if it's being able to swagger into a space with as much style pomp and circumstance as necessary so this actually ends up going towards the decolonization conversation which I'm not equipped very well to handle but which I will say that I'm not necessarily in favor of decolonization because blackness was created in the matrix that is white supremacy so I don't demand that the world order be revamped or wiped out entirely what I do argue is precisely what you're asking what can we do to make these spaces hospitable to people who are not the original creators Twitter is a happy accident Tumblr is a happy accident there are so many other communities queer communities, trans communities and the like that have inhabited Tumblr in part because I think it was Casey Feasler was talking about this on Twitter it was a space where the community drives the interactions rather than the content of the blog post and so in spaces where you can have a communitarian discourse where there's a leveling of the playing field and here I'm also referring to Ray Oldenburg's third place the great good place we have a leveling of the playing field where discourse is part of the ways in which you establish identity and overall the mood is playful it's not your house it's not your job, it's someplace where you go to relax those spaces are spaces where I argue minorities can flourish I could also bring up other spaces live journal to a lesser extent lipstick alley although I've heard lipstick alley has gone down the tubes but many other spaces that were women centered that also allowed for communitarian spaces that would be the key if you move away from rationality efficiency and productivity then those spaces allow the more full human experience to flourish in ways that allow minority cultures to have their time how's that? Hi, my name is Debra thank you for all this wisdom I'm very grateful and I have a pretty well formulated question and an unformulated question the second one I guess you can choose obviously so the first one I should explain, I come from the world of non-profit technology which is spiritually right next door to the community technology center movement so I really want to be educated about what you see as problematic about the community technology center movement please enlighten me and then the more unformulated thing is I'm thinking about how especially libraries especially public libraries have been so instrumental in the community technology space and the whole access to technology thing and I know that you have come from you know a community program that was both library science and information science, do you identify at all as a librarian and do you have, oh okay I see, I see librarians as tremendous unsung allies to the non-profit sector so I'm just interested in any meditations you have on library sciences role in community technology as well okay so community technology centers in many cases they both thrived and suffered under the regime that they would provide minorities with the space to gain the skills in order to participate in the information economy right, the problem was many of the skills were not the coding academies that we have today, they were training them to use Microsoft Word or giving them Cisco certs certifications which then they couldn't get hired with because they didn't have the experience that Cisco networking engineers need to augment the formal education that they had so in some cases they were a failed venture but they were a popular venture for non-profits, libraries, and churches which can sometimes be the same thing because they offered a pathway into capitalism that they felt their constituents needed and it kind of served a missionary impulse which is why I'm not a librarian of uplifting these poor people who don't know how to work or don't have jobs and uplifting them to become modern citizens right, so I talk about this in the respectability part of my book, this idea that giving people hygiene which is my technical term, but also modernity in order to participate in the economy that everybody else is already sad and alienated about right, and on that basis also some of my experience I worked with the E. St. Louis Action Research Project when I was at Illinois and they went down to E. St. which is on the Illinois side of the river whatever it is next to St. Louis it used to be one of the largest populated black towns in the country most affluent too until white flight Duke Ellington, no not Duke Ellington Miles Davis is from there, Catherine Dunham is from there and they went down there because E. St. has been terribly left behind since all the white flight and they thought the E. St. Louis Action Research Project thought if we put old computers and use mesh networking technology we would give these old computers away to these churches these people will be able to have incomes in living for some strange reason it didn't work in part because they were giving them old computers at this point and this is 2004-2005 the National Telecommunication Institute of America NTIA had already shown that many black parents had already purchased modern computers for their kids to use at home so why if you have a Pentium 5 at home would you come to a church and use a Pentium 2, not going to happen so they misread the population but also many of these institutions and these were churches that they were primarily putting in they only succeeded if they had a person that was interested in both the people and the technology if they just wanted the technology their philosophy was kind of socially and morally bankrupt and so they took the technology but never really promoted it in ways that allowed their parishioners to function and if they just were interested in the people the people quickly realized I got a better computer at home so it didn't work and so I'm really down I think of CTCs in the same way I think of Digital Divide it works because the United States the West likes to believe that black people are deficit but in many cases we already had our own and we're already our expertise was in realms that we're not necessarily recognized or of interest to the rationalistic capitalistic modernistic I think that was both questions thank you very much for having me I really had fun