Week 8: #BlackTwitter
During Week 1 I asked the students why they wanted to take Black Digital Studies and what media artifact was most influential to them. The majority of responses to both of these questions referenced the importance of Black Twitter, either as the reason why they chose to take Black Digital Studies or as the technological artifact that was most influential in their lives. Therefore, I have spent a lot of this course referencing Weeks 7-8 to the students as the moment when in fact we would finally get to talk about Black Twitter. So this week ushered in the moment we had all been waiting for. Building on last week’s discussion of Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) and Andre Brock’s research on Black Twitter, this week focused on the ways that scholars discuss Black Twitter through the politics of practices and publics.
As a COMM’s person, I can’t let a class go by without a discussion of Habermas, the Public Sphere, and all of the scholarship that proposes that there are in fact multiple publics which can be defined in a variety of ways. In lecture, the students got a full overview of all of the scholarship on Publics that I have found instructive in my own research on the topic. This includes, but was not limited to, Nancy Fraser’s “subaltern counterpublics”, Catherine Squires “enclaves, counterpublics, and satellites”, Michael Warner’s work on publics and counter publics, danah boyd’s “networked publics”, and Mary Gray’s “boundary publics”. In discussing Black Twitter as a space that can be understood through the scholarship on Publics, we analyzed how Black Twitter acted as a social public constructed through specific practices and beliefs i.e. discourse, which was networked in a way that spreads content and commentary through multiple counterpublics which allow for the creative and cultural expression of the Black community.
Through the readings for the week we then discussed how this understanding of publics makes space for certain types of practices. From Apryl Williams and Vanessa Gonlin’s work, we discussed Twitter as a second screen for “viewing publics”, through “How to Get Away with Murder” and the weekly Thursday night viewing party with Shonda Rhime on Twitter, known as #TGIT (Thank God It’s Thursday) (Williams and Gonlin 985). I then built on Williams and Gonlin’s work through a discussion of Twitter’s role in #InsecureHBO on Sundays and the multi-screen viewing on Instagram Verzuz Battles. We then ended the lecture with the importance of signifyin’ practices and Sarah Florini’s research on twitter hashtags. Tying the discussion of Twitter back to our week’s on Black Queer Studies, the final question for the week asked: How does the practice of signifyin’ also reflect the Black queer digital practices of reading and throwing shade?
For the Weekly Workshop, I built upon the CTDA game to help the students work on the thesis for their final paper project on Technocultural Discourse Analysis. After receiving the responses to the paper I am happy to note that the majority of the papers for this course will be focused on Black Twitter and TikTok! Most of the course has been structured around these two platforms as I think that both are amazing representations of Black creativity online. In particular, the selections for the paper project directly reflect the topics for next week. Week 9, titled “A Space of Our Own”, focuses on Rayvon Fouche’s Black Vernacular Technological Creativity and my own work with Quare Shared Recognition through art, fashion, music, film and television consumption and production. It is definitely a week to look forward to.
Readings
