Week 7: Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis
It’s hard to believe but we have already made it to mid-term! After reading last week’s discussion posts where many of the students reinforced the idea of a strict binary between the performance of self online and the performance of self offline, I came into this week’s class with an update and announcement to the students about the importance of Anthropology, Sociology, and Performance Studies in our understanding of the self and others. There was surprise and laughter when I mentioned that most of what was discussed in last week’s posts on the performance of identity online was being discussed in the 1950’s by scholars such as Erving Goffman. The strict adherence to offline/online dichotomies only seek to uphold false binaries between the two, and I made sure to mention that moving into the second half of the course we must delve deeper into what performance means with the self and within the community.
While the first half of the course was focused on the history and theories relevant to Black Digital Studies, the second half of the course is all about my favorite topic of Digital Research Methods. For the following workshops for the course, we explore the methods that are utilized in the readings for each week, specifically focusing on how the students can make academic research feasible in the context of a semester-long course. This week also begins the third quarter of the class titled “Media & Methods of Technocultural Analysis” and in this week the students are introduced to Andre Brock’s research on Black Twitter and Catherine Knight Steele’s work on blogs as examples of how to utilize Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA).
CTDA is especially important to this class as the final paper for this course is titled the “Technocultural Discourse Analysis Paper”, which is based on Brock’s article of the same name. Therefore, the framework of Critical Technoculture Discourse Analysis (CTDA) serves as the guideline for students to select and analyze a technology or platform to write about through the lens of critical theory and Black digital praxis. Conceptualized by Brock in response to digital divide discourse around the technology use of underrepresented groups, CTDA offers a concise set of instructions to uncover that “artifacts have politics” and that how and why we use technology is never neutral. For this week’s lecture we walked through the initial essay on CTDA as well as an overview of Brock’s “Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures” to introduce the concept of how one might apply CTDA using various theories and digital research methods. This overview also gave the students a preview of the methods I would cover in the weekly workshops in order to start thinking about what they might want to write about in their final paper assignment.
This course is also not the first, but the second time that I have had the opportunity to teach CTDA, with the first time being in Fall of 2019 when I co-taught “Critical Data Studies”. In both classes I utilized the method of creating a discursive game to teach the students how to apply CTDA. This game builds on the analysis of “artifacts, practices, and beliefs” that are so important to many researchers within the field of Black Digital Studies. I previewed the game by breaking down how to identify the artifact, practices, and beliefs in Catherine Knight Steele’s article on Black blogs. From then the students were given three columns with multiple artifacts, practices, and ideological beliefs to choose from in order to construct their own critical discourse analysis of a platform and the content of their choice. The questions to begin the game were as follows: What is the artifact/platform I am analyzing? What practices are undertaken using that artifact/platform? And, what would a discourse analysis of this technology and its politics look like i.e. what ideology/discourse is embedded in this artifact and why?
Teaching Brock’s work through discussing CTDA and the final paper builds on last week’s discussion on Cyberfeminism as I set the intention to bring more joy and affirmation into our study of digital spaces. The discussion questions for this week ask: What is the relationship between artifacts, practices, and beliefs? In what ways do technologies re-create or reinforce ideology and oppression? But also, In what ways does technology make space for joy and pleasure? Most of the students chose to focus on the question addressing joy and pleasure, giving all of the many reasons that they enjoy going online, from podcasts on Black mental health to apps for listening to music and social media platforms where they can find like minded community. The students were also cognizant of the fact that we create our own experiences online, regardless of the environment and the hidden logics which lurk beneath the technology. Even after all of the ills of Big Tech, algorithms, and artificial intelligence a simple change in focus has created a space where we can choose joy in both the discussion and engagement of digital media, tools, and technology.
Readings
