Posted on 09/06/2014 10:07:26 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
This week’s Black Twitter brouhaha was over a new University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation study of Black Twitter itself. Like the world, the Internet has self-segregated into different communities, subcultures or as USC calls them, digital “neighborhoods.” And one of the largest — and some say one of the most powerful — of the social networking subcultures is Black Twitter.
“Black Twitter is, loosely speaking, a group of thousands of Back Twitterers (though, to be accurate, not everyone within Black Twitter is Black, and not every Black person on Twitter is in Black Twitter) who a) are interested in issues of race in the news and pop culture and b) tweet A LOT,” wrote Buzzfeed’s Shani O. Hilton in a piece about Black Twitter’s impact on the Trayvon Martin Case. “Black folks on Twitter aren’t just influencing the conversation online, they’re creating it.”
The term Black Twitter was first used in 2010 by The Root. And now, USC is conducting what it calls its “Black Twitter Project” to better understand the phenomena. According to the study’s website, “DSAIL is currently exploring the cultural practices of a highly active population of Twitter users who self-identify and are identified by others as ‘Black Twitter’. During the last year, coverage in the trade press has exploded as ‘Black Twitter’ is credited with mobilizing attention around political issues and popular culture events, including attracting millions of new viewers to the network drama Scandal and drawing national news coverage to the killing of Trayvon Martin.
“USC wants to “investigate and map specific user connections, explore how information is spread and by whom, and identify the types of communication practices that are unique to Black Twitter,” reports CBC.
However, it appeared that the study was being conducted by three White men. Black Twitter reacted almost immediately, and the feedback wasn’t kind. One thing you don’t want to do is get Black Twitter upset.
“White folks’ obsession with knowing & understanding everything we do in order to simultaneously exploit & devalue it has to be pathological,” tweeted @LexiScorsese.
“so is the conflict with this black twitter study that they have no black people conducting it and it makes black folks feel like lab rats?” asked @marciMcFly.
The first concern is that three White men won’t have the cultural ties to fully explain what they find or present it in a fair way. But as it turns out, it was an African-American woman, Dayna Chatman, who says she suggested the study as part of her dissertation project. She and her colleagues ultimately took to Twitter to explain who would be leading the study (Chatman) and apologize for the way it was presented.
The second concern is how the findings will be presented and used.
The Root makes the point that there’s money to be made by many groups in harnessing the power of Black Twitter, and it would be nice if one of those groups were Black people. The ability to leverage this chatter — which also includes more serious topics about women, racial justice, politics and many other issues, it should be noted — would be useful to anyone who can monetize it. As the study points out, Scandal can credit a chunk of its success to the enthusiasm of Black Twitter.
But there’s also the need for people to understand one another and, to Chatman’s point, understand Black people. Part of what stokes irrational fear and unfairness in society is the failure to communicate. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in a recent interview, the fact that Blacks and Whites live in largely separate spheres has hampered progress on race in this country. We’re all neighbors online, as the study points out. Taking the time to get to know your neighbors benefits society.
To be fair, I think if a bunch of left wing students from Brown University or somewhere showed up here wanting to study us, we would have the same reaction.
Conservatives would be more inclined to scoff, less inclined to be uptight.
We would toy with them for entertainment.
Exactly right.
where’s white twitter?
oh yeah nevermind, that would be racist.
Yeah because, to be fair, people who discuss things based on a shared political philosophy that they can trace back hundreds of years and examine minutely in real-life situations would respond the same as people who group together because of the color of their skin.
That would be so funny, especially if it was instigated by black Freepers.
Not even because of the color of skin! Because of the weird socio-political ideas they have embraced concerning race. Far worse racists than any Anglo Saxon rednecks ever were.
There’s a “black twitter?” Oh for the heaven’s sake
A little blackbird told me?
That reminds me of when somebody asked why there weren’t any Black Munchkins? Hmmm, because munchkins, regardless of color, dont’ exist in the first place, maybe? The person then said, “I meant in Hollywood, why don’t you see any Black Munchkins in movies?
There’s a black twitter?
I don’t think it’s “official” but just a hang-out. But I could be wrong.
Isn’t a black twitterer sometimes called a black twatter?
Is there an app that causes tweets to display in cursive?
I don’t have to study Black Twitter to know all I need to know. A white person whose central identity was his whiteness and who tweets often about race and whiteness would be the same sort of person as a black with the same interests, and I would avoid that racist and dismiss all comments from the racist. Why would I treat a black racist differently?
Why is that? - ahhhh, because then they would start looting and burning down e-stores!
That person obviously never saw the 2013 "Oz, the Great and Powerful".
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