Thesis: The phenomenon of Black Twitter affords an opportunity to interrogate Blacktags as racialized digital objects in relation to the technocultural assemblages they are produced in. In this esay it will be maintained that the network structures of Twitter, its trending algorithm and hashtags as machinic replicators, play a critical role in the emergence and viral circulation of Blacktags.
...Blacktags have the capacity to interrupt the whiteness of the Twitter network... (pg. 48)
This essay contributes toward what can be identified as a digital-race method for exploring race as an emergent online relation, articulated by systemic software processes and informatic connections. It is a method which seeks to understand the multiplicities of race in digital networks. As corporate social media unrelentingly colonise online life, developing digital-race methods and interventions will become imperative for committed researchers and net-activists. (pg 64)
data visualization researchers Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, at the Personal Democracy Conference (2010). These researchers examined sets of one hundred Twitter users - categorized via their profile pictures - and identified distinct differences in what ‘Black’ and ‘White’ users were tweeting via different types of hashtags. Viegas and Wattenberg report discovering a very high ratio of Black users associated with tweeting #cookout for example, and in comparison, a high proportion of White users associated with (BP) #oil spill. While not stated, the racialized implication is that Black users of Twitter are predominantly preoccupied with trivia and banal chatter, and white users are significantly more involved in engaging with serious social issues. The presentation by Viegas and Wattenberg is exemplary for (unintentionally) propagating a reductive understanding of Black Twitter via its associated hashtags and user profiles. More generally their approach exemplifies the limitation of understanding race in identitarian and representational terms. It eschews considering the technocultural environment that materializes racialized aggregations and networked affects... (pg. 52)
deploying a computer algorithm to parse the linguistic composition of more than 400 million new messages per day (over 4630 per second) is an enormous undertaking. However, ignoring the significance of the algorithm in determining popular topics can result in naturalizing the existence of racialized hashtags, and further obfuscating the technocultural processes involved in their production as popular topics in the Twitter-sphere. (pg. 55)
2010 Twitter update - trending topic was not simply based on overall popularity (total tweets), but in terms of the velocity of a conversation over a shorter time-frame in relation to other conversations over an average day.
The identification of popular Blacktags by Viegas and Wattenberg was devoid of a discussion about the structure and formation of ad hoc hashtag communities, and the types of topics associated with these. On the other hand, [Farhod] Manjoo - notwithstanding the critical reception of his article - did usefully draw on network research, which points to the likelihood of Blacktags trending because they originate in tightly-clustered groups (with higher than average follower-followed reciprocal relationships), often a characteristic of ‘minorities’ in social networks. From a social network analysis perspective, the diffusion of Blacktags can be accounted for by a model of ‘simple contagion’.
...Wendy Chun urges, we can try to ‘make race do different things’. The challenge is to develop an alternative account which moves beyond simply attempting to evade valorising Black users, or resist ascribing racialized cultural characteristics to their online behaviour. Moreover, common strategies in the social sciences and humanities that seek to avoid essentializing racialized groups champion the intersectional recognition of other differences, such as those of class, gender or sexuality. However, valorising multiple identities does little to escape the limits of the discursive representation of race as a problem of knowledge. (pg. 53)
digital-race assemblage ...Understanding race as an ‘assemblage’ acknowledges the oppressive force of racial categorization and the violence of racism, yet seeks to activate the potential of race to become otherwise... (pg. 54)
'What kind of technocultural assemblage is put into motion when we express ourselves online?'
there are distinct mechanisms of information contagion for different kinds of hashtag - based on the variation of ‘stickiness’ (likelihood of information spreading) and ‘persistence’ (exposures from multiple sources). Stickiness refers to a piece of information (or idea) spreading from one person to another which can be attributable to the number of exposures an individual has to that piece of information. High stickiness means a greater likelihood of information diffusion. Persistence refers to ‘the relative extent to which repeated exposures to a piece of information continue to have significant marginal effects on its adoption’. High persistence points to ‘complex contagion’ which relies on multiple exposures from different sources (e.g. reinforcement from different people) via stronger and ‘wider’ ties before a topic can successfully spread across the network. This differs from the model of ‘simple contagion’ which involves single exposures via ‘weak’ or longer ties for information diffusion.
Twitter and other corporate social media (Facebook, Youtube, Flickr etc.) are circumscribing the Web. The original design of the World Wide Web utilizes a series of protocols to access the internet. However, the rise of social media (and search engines) are creating ‘walled gardens’, delimiting access and ostensibly regulating its ‘open’ architecture. The emergence of a participatory social web presents the potential of creativity and collaboration, yet the corporate colonisation of the public internet is exploiting online activity and accumulating massive identity profiling data, beyond the reach of academic researchers. (pg 64)
Critical race researchers ought to confront how online computer-based technology actually works - it cannot remain obfuscated as a ‘black box’. To come to terms with the complex technological and political operations of new online platforms, both existing social science virtual methods and race- thinking need to evolve. (pg 64)
memes Essentially, analogous to genes, memes are pattern replicators, and imitation ‘is how memes replicate’. Memes are supposedly in a neo-Darwinian competition to survive in human minds, and there are three principal characteristics of successful memes: copying-fidelity (qualities that enable reproduction, such as memorability); fecundity (relevance and speed of replication); and longevity (length of time present for reliable reproduction). Predictably, the Web is considered the prime propagator of memes because of its ease of digital reproducibility and rapid diffusion of information. (pg. 59-60)
The crowd is manifest through movement and encounter, constituted by a Deleuzian multiplicity which,
has at least two fundamental dimensions ... the dromological (composition of relative speeds and slownesses) and the affective (capacities of affecting and being affected) ... The crowd is thus a composition of relative speeds ... It is through its own dromology that the crowd becomes capable of
affecting other social entities and being affected by them.
...racial aggregations can be conceived in terms of the properties of a crowd. (pg 61)
A call to arms by Aria Dean - Poor Meme, Rich Meme
On the contemporary internet, things have been turned inside out. Exchanges that have historically taken place in the underground of black social spaces are now vulnerable to exposure, if not already exposed. The call-and-response creativity of Black Twitter is overheard and echoed by White Twitter, and viral dance phenomena like the whip are seized on by the likes of Hillary and Ellen. Together these objects — and the countless others in circulation, literally countless — create widespread visibility for blackness online. Blackness once again takes up its longstanding role as the engine of American popular culture, so that we find ourselves where we were in the 1920s with jazz, in the 1950s with rock ‘n’ roll, in the ’80s with both house and hip-hop — in a time loop wherein black people innovate only to see their forms snaked away, value siphoned off by white hands...
The meme’s success is just this: its reach and its rarity; its ability to snake through the underground only to re-emerge and mutate; its continued operations of hiding, incubating, and exposing black cultural elements. As object lesson, the meme teaches a queer body politic, an Afropessimistic, black accelerationist approach to rendering oneself and rendering and rendering and rendering and rendering and rendering. (I use the word “accelerationist” with caution.) We have long been digital, “compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed” across time and space. For blackness, the meme could be a way of further figuring an existence that spills over the bounds of the body, a homecoming into our homelessness.
Further reading: Reclaiming Our Space: How Black Feminists Are Changing the World from the Tweets to the Streets by Feminista Jones on movement building hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and #BlackGirlMagic