Black Twitter - The Use Case for Twitter

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Ike: The book is more interested in understanding what black people do to and for themselves than it is in trying to explain blackness to the white world. Ike: Can you imagine a blog that would allow so many black people to participate at one time? Not much. A black pen at the social networking service is buckled multiple times under the weight of people trying to jump, like when solonge introduced her album a few years back - too many black people came an a time. We don't see the whale as often any more," says Ike.

Paris Marx is joined by André Brock to discuss the history of Black people’s online activity, the internet’s association with whiteness, and what Black Twitter can tell us about the centrality of Black people to digital culture.

André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, Black technoculture, and digital media. His award-winning book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures, theorizes Black everyday lives mediated by networked digital technologies. You can get if from NYU Press, and it’s available through open access. Follow André on Twitter at @DocDre.

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Also mentioned in this episode:

Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald did portraits of the Obamas, while Kara Walker made “A Subtlety” at the Domino Sugar Refinery.
Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosopher and social theorist.
Janelle Monáe, Sun Ra, and John Jennings are notable people engaging with Afrofuturism.
Books mentioned: Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter by Charlton D. McIlwain and Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich.

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