“My Constellation is Space”: Towards a Theory of Black Cyberculture

Technology is the American mythos (Dinerstein 2006); a belief system powering the relations between—and politics of—culture and technology.  In the Western context, technoculture incorporates Whiteness, White racial ideology, and modernist technological beliefs. This presentation is a critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS), reorienting “race-as-technology” (Chun 2009) to incorporate Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things”.  

Utilizing critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock 2018), Afro-optimism, and libidinal economic theory, this presentation employs Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic.

About Dr. Brock

Dr. André L. Brock is an associate professor of Black Digital Media at Georgia Tech.  He is an interdisciplinary scholar with a MA in English and Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in Library and information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

His scholarship includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as innovative and groundbreaking research on Black Twitter. His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field, in his words, preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter in particular continues to evolve as a communication platform. 

The author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, Dr. Brock’s writings have appeared in prominent journals like Media, Culture, and Society, New Media and Society, Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Information, Communication and Society.

Dr. Brock is a charter member of the NYU Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies.  His forthcoming book titled Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures will be published with NYU Press in spring 2019.

Relevant Links

From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation

Download original audio or video from this event.

Subscribe to the Berkman Klein events series podcast.