Distributed Blackness

African American Cybercultures

André Brock, Jr.

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781479847228
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études afro-américaines

An explanation of the digital practices of the black Internet

From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture. André Brock Jr. claims issues of race and ethnicity as inextricable from and formative of contemporary digital culture in the United States. Distributed Blackness analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how "blackness" gets worked out in various technological domains.

As Brock demonstrates, there's nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation. Drawing on critical race theory, linguistics, rhetoric, information studies, and science and technology studies, Brock tabs between black-dominated technologies, websites, and social media to build a set of black beliefs about technology. In explaining black relationships with and alongside technology, Brock centers the unique joy and sense of community in being black online now.

1

Distributing Blackness

Ayo Technology! Texts, Identities, and Blackness

This text situates Black culture within a Western—specifically American—ideological context, where Blackness operates as a cultural and social nadir in the white racial frame (Feagin, 2013). Black information technology use highlights Black technical and cultural capital while disrupting the white, male, middle-class norms of Western technoculture. Black digital practice challenges these norms through displacement, performativity, pathos, and the explicit use of Black cultural commonplaces. These practices are optimized for communicative efficiency on their respective media, drawing from a pleasure in creative linguistic expression and the historical, discursive practices and experiences of evading white racial surveillance in plain sight. An externality of Black digital practice—thanks to the codifying, broadcast, and textual qualities of networked digital media—is the uptake of Black digital content by out-group audiences. Accordingly, Black digital practice has become hypervisible to mainstream white culture and the world through positive, negative, and political performances of Black cultural aesthetics and, more recently, social media activism. This is in marked contrast to historical media portrayals of Blackness, where the white racial frame positioned Blacks as bestial, deviant spectacles or as culturally and mentally impoverished wights. It also differs from popular and academic accounts of the Information Age, which either elided Black participation in digital design and use or rendered Blacks as unable to surmount the digital divide due to their essential lack of material, technical, or cultural resources.

For the few of us researching Black folk online during the first decade of the new millennium, there were only brief, isolated examples of how Blackness could operate in online spaces.1 BlackPlanet (est. 1999) was one of the first Black online meccas to receive sustained scholarly attention (Byrne, 2007; Banks, 2006), but by the time much of that research was published (and read!), BlackPlanet had been pushed aside—first by Myspace, then Facebook. Banks (private communication, May 13, 2017) notes that pioneering websites like NetNoir (est. 1995) and BlackVoices (est. 1997) sustained Black online communities for only a few short years before faltering. The realities of media consolidation, site maintenance, and server costs led to many of these early Black online destinations either being bought out or withering on the vine. In their place, Black entertainment and political blogs did enormous work to grow Black online communities between 2005 and 2010 (e.g., Jack and Jill Politics, Prometheus6, WhatAboutOurDaughters, AfroBella, and Racialicious), but blogs were overtaken (and subsumed by social media platforms) by the surge of attention to social networking services. In today’s milieu, Black digitality is often referenced by platform or service (e.g., Black Twitter and the “Gram” [Black Instagram]).

In the aggregate, Black websites are labeled as niche online spaces in part because of the technocultural belief that Black folk lack the capacity for “appropriate” internet practices. Historically, these sites were difficult to conceptualize as fully formed Black cybercultures for a number of other reasons—namely, their ephemerality, the still vast numbers of Black folk who hadn’t gotten online, and the unnoticed growth of Black online reflexivity and interiority. This is true even for my Black Twitter research. I researched Black Twitter before the murder of Trayvon Martin and before Ferguson. At the time, I was intent on fleshing out the research into Blackness and the digital, celebrating moments of Black online culture in the process. It felt imperative to examine Black culture’s mediation by a service that seemed ephemeral and niche even with respect to its then burgeoning user-generated practices of second-screen shared media viewing and political activism. In that long-ago moment of the first dot-com hype, too many social networking services and other Silicon Valley darlings had crashed and burned—Path, Dodgeball, and so on—for me to think of Black Twitter as anything but a momentous yet momentary marvel.

Identity as the Tension between the Self and the Social

This warrant (and the next) emerged out of my need to explain racial and cultural identity without relying on an essential quality of Blackness or on the materiality of Black phenotypical qualities. As I began formulating arguments for this book, I realized I also needed to argue for an internet identity that was not dependent on materiality—neither the ownership of an internet-enabled device nor the virtual manifestation of the web page. I have argued across my research stream that written text is the preeminent mode of identity creation and maintenance across online and digital spaces—even with the rise of image-oriented social network services (SNS) such as Instagram and Snapchat—so I needed to develop warrants for precisely how discourse and semiosis work to fix identities in physical, political, and virtual spaces.

The internet’s interactivity and archival capacities provide interesting spaces within which to articulate identity. In these areas, digital text and multimedia—information—become the meaning-making substrates from which we understand individuals and groups. Goffman’s (1959) formulation of identity as conveyed through “expressions given” and “expressions given off” (p. 4) is manifest in digital practice and online media, where profiles, likes, and status posts are equated to representations of the self. Where once people relied on memory and anecdotal experience to fix individual identity in time and space, the internet provides an endless archive of identity performance—or as Black online culture calls it, “the receipts.”

Cultural online identity is trickier (for me) to argue for, however. While websites and social media services construct individual identities for internet and computer users through affiliation and practice, group identity is constrained by the technological environment in which it occurs. Thus we easily group Twitter users or LinkedIn users—or alternatively, email users or short-message service (SMS) users—but these are communities of practice, which may offer a social collectivity but only a weak cultural one. This is not the place for a history of the concept of community in internet studies, but suffice it to say that Ferdinand Tonnies’s ([1887] 1999) concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, along with Benedict Anderson’s (2006) “imagined communities,” have had an oversized effect on the way internet communities are argued for. Both concepts have some place in my research stream—how could they not?—but my warrant for group and cultural identity instead draws on sociological and philosophical perspectives on race and identity.

As I began collecting my thoughts about Black cultural online identity for this text, I was reminded that all identities are racial identities; the digital is a mediator of embodiment and identity, not an escape from it. For example, how exactly does one identify white online identity? Whiteness is often conflated with computer use. It’s easier (and tricky) to argue for Black internet identity based on its differences from white digital practice, but as USC2 found out, Black people are very concerned to not be conceptualized as a “low class, undifferentiated mass” (Du Bois, 1940) of computer users (Newitz, 2014; Callahan, 2014). As Tate (2011) writes, there is much that needs to be said about “how it is that racial objects become raced, gendered and sexualized subjects through . . . racialized imaginaries, and everyday race performativity” (p. 94).

The warrant “identity as tension between self and social” supports a cultural formulation of networked online identity. Networks, bandwidth, interfaces, hardware, and environment mediate social performances of online identity, but how racial identity affects those social performances is understudied. The effects are bidirectional; an examination of cultural online performance must incorporate both the intended and unintended audience’s technologically and culturally mediated reception of that performance. This has not always been the case in internet and new media research.

This final point deserves elaboration. Internet and new media studies have historically proceeded with the presumption that disembodiment and distance render potential digital interlocutors as an imaginary audience. The Black community, as understood through Du Bois’s double consciousness, has never had the luxury of pretending that their interlocutors were imaginary. The in-group interlocutor was necessary as a warrant for a communitarian human identity. Meanwhile, the community’s interactions with the out-group interlocutor—if heard or seen—could and often did result in deadly consequences. Networked online identity distributes internal Black community discussions, rendering them visible to an audience who is primed to receive and respond to those struggles. Networked Black online identity also makes Black community discourses visible as a textual and multimedia archive to out-group audiences; these audiences are not always directly addressed in internal Black discourses but are always present as signifiers.

Race has always already been an informational group identity, designating class and cultural capital (or the deliberate denial thereof). In the case of Blackness, the group identity is applied indiscriminately to denigrate individual bodies, whereas whiteness operates as an individual identity and as a designation for “people” and humanity. One sees this happen in the context of internet and computer use: the default internet identity is anecdotally white, male, and middle class, but there is surprisingly little research on how internet practice enacts these normative identity markers. Jessie Daniels’s (2009, 2013) groundbreaking research on white supremacist websites affixes an extreme racial and racist identity to white digital practice, but the vast majority of new media and internet research references white bodies without remarking on their whiteness as a constituent factor for their internet practice. Identity emerges in discourse through the shared communication of concepts, which are encoded and decoded through cultural and social signifiers. Even coherent displays of identity—such as those performed and visible on-screen when examining virtual spaces—rely on interaction and ideological constraints. From this perspective, I argue that whiteness’s interpretive flexibility and hegemonic positioning render it as a technical identity even across the technical incoherence of multiple platforms and services.

By postulating that identity is the tension between the self and the social, I can examine the tensions between the digital as an avatar of white technical expertise and Black sociality, performativity, and agency. Because I’m arguing for Blackness in the context of American culture, arguing for identity as socially constituted allows me to contextualize the ideological apparatus through which Black identity came to be.

Black Bodies, Blackness, and Black Culture

Racial online identity, for this text, gets dematerialized and reconstituted both as a discursive-social relationship and as a code-content-hardware relationship—all while enacted by Black embodied existence. This is Blackness as an “informational identity,” a doubly conscious figuration of Black discursive identity and digital practice. As mentioned, my definition of Blackness qua racial identity stems from Du Bois’s “double consciousness.” Tal (1996) cogently observes that double consciousness offers a conceptually rich approach for cyberculture researchers examining identity in virtual spaces; Du Bois’s concept addresses community and alienation experienced by the same body/person. While Tal does not specifically reference cyberculture scholars of color writing about online people of color, my research incorporates her admonition.

To flesh out Tal’s claim about cyberculture, double consciousness, and Blackness, I incorporated Hughes’s ([1971] 1993) contention that ethnic identity is to be studied by examining the relations between groups coexisting within the society rather than assuming that a group can be studied without reference to others. That is, it “it takes more than one ethnic group to make ethnic relations” (p. 155). This observation repositions double consciousness away from observable differences between Blacks and whites, instead focusing on how individuals learn the realities and the fictions of their position as a member of an ethnic group (p. 156). It also allows for the incorporation of the digital as the relation, which has been essential to my critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) of race and digital practice. That is, while internet users bring offline ideologies to bear upon their digital discourses, the digital is the mediator, the enactment, and the performance of the relationship between Blackness and whiteness. Finally, this move allows conceptions of Blackness to be freed from essentialized notions of Black identity tied to physiognomy, as markers of human deviance, or as political entities based on their resistance to white racial ideology and neoliberal capitalism. It does not, however, leave Black bodies behind.

Following Robert Gooding-Williams’s (1998) admonition that there is a difference between the Black body and Blackness, this second warrant is my definition of Black culture: Blackness as a dynamic core of narrative gravity (pace Yancy) sustained through intentional, libidinal, historical, and imaginative Black agency in the context of navigating American racial ideology. My approach to digital identity takes on additional salience when studying Black bodies and Black culture. Previously, I mentioned whiteness’s interpretive flexibility, which is premised on a pejorative fixity imposed by the materiality of Black bodies onto Black culture. Blackness anchors whiteness in the West and in American culture by serving as the nadir of white racial epistemology and ontology. Morrison (1993), in writing about the American literary imagination, argues similarly in her claim for American Africanism, where Africanism stands for “the denotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning” (p. 7).

This quote animates my claim for (online) discourse’s figuration of online identity. I am, like most Black academics writing about Black identity, still enamored of Du Bois’s formulation of double consciousness. I have employed it in some form or another across my entire research stream, but not always for the same reasons. Originally, I utilized double consciousness to illustrate how Black folk, in the course of their everyday existence, were always already deeply enmeshed in the kind of virtual existence and social alienation that cyberculture theorists of the early aughts were so ready to proclaim as that new-new. I now see double consciousness slightly differently: double consciousness expresses Blackness as a discursive, informational identity, flitting back and forth in the virtual space between a Black communal context and a white supremacist categorial context. The virtuality of race offline extends my argument that Blackness “double voices” in virtual online spaces, adding a technical-technological-digital dimension to Black identity.

Thus the interpellation of Blackness in digital spaces can be understood as intentional and agentive. In contrast, Blackness in offline spaces is often hailed deliberately or inadvertently by white racial ideology to affix Black bodies at the bottom of a social and cultural order. This should be uncontroversial, but it’s a necessary step for arguing about Blackness in online and digital milieus.

Let me offer an example: In my research on Black Twitter, I argued that Black Twitter hashtags brought that digital space to mainstream attention, where it became understood as a Black social public. But even then, Black Twitter practitioners continued making Twitter “do whut it dew”—using cultural commonplaces, digital affordances, and digital sociality to build out a culturally coherent digital practice. My concern was to separate out the social from the cultural and to highlight the contributions of Blackness to digital practice. Black Twitter’s agency manifests through Twitter as a discursive digital social public. In this I am inspired by Ian Hacking’s (2002) “dynamic nominalism,” where he argues that “a kind of person comes into being at the same time as the kind itself was being invented” (p. 106). This is not a refutation of Black online existence prior to Twitter; I’d be foolish to repudiate my own research. Instead, Twitter’s status as a reputable information technology (precarious though it may be) mediates Black culture, reframing Blackness as a source of digital expertise despite Black culture’s signification as the nadir of American technoculture and racial ideology.

Black cyberculture directly refutes “context collapse” (Marwick & boyd, 2011). Marwick and boyd argue that it is impossible to differentiate self-presentation strategies on a service like Twitter (or any combination of social networking services). But if anything, context collapse is better understood as a descriptor of white racial ideology and identity. What Marwick and boyd are referencing is the collapse of categorial identity, or what Rawls (2000) references as white folks’ display of hierarchical identities designed to reveal labor status and individualism. Individualist identities are constrained by the informational scale necessary for the success of SNS; thus these identities could be understood as collapsing under the coercive instrumentality of self-presentation afforded by social media profiles. But individualism is a perk that white folk have long reserved for themselves and denied to others—that is, Marwick and boyd overlook another manner in which context collapse could be better understood: as stereotype.

As Du Bois writes in Dusk of Dawn, Blacks are considered “a low class, undifferentiated mass” by American culture, so Black folk have long had to manage cultural multiplicity (double consciousness) in a cultural context where Blackness had to manifest against the context collapse of white supremacist ideology—where overlap was criminalized or barely possible (e.g., interracial marriage, or even passing for white). Part of the pleasure of living while Black is the daily contravention of expectations and stereotypes even when we know negative expectations are levied against us anyway. In his presidential address to the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association, Isajiw (1977) argued that ethnicity has important affective dimensions. He cited Rose and Rose, who wrote that race “involves not only a recognition that because of one’s ancestry one is a member of a racial or religious group, and a recognition that the majority group defines one as belonging to that racial or religious group it also involves a positive desire to identify oneself as a member of a group and a feeling of pleasure when one does so” (p. 80). This is the jouissance that informs Blackness and, by extension, Black digital practice.

Blackness—in the guise of Black digital practice—opens the “Black box” of the digital to show that all along, culture has warranted information and communication technology use. I argue that Black facility with digital artifacts and practices displays a technical-cultural identity defying technocultural beliefs of Black primitiveness. Indeed, Blackness brings a particularized coherence to digital practice that affords my claim for Blackness as a normal digital identity. My claim for Black cyberculture builds a compelling vision of Blackness as an informational identity that avoids the essentialization of Black cul...