Black Twitter? Racial Hashtags, Networks and Contagion

Abstract

Race itself has become a digital medium, a distinctive set of informatic codes, networked mediated narratives, maps, images, visualizations that index identity. (1) There is a growing body of research exploring issues of race and ethnicity in digital environments. Social networking relations, modes of online communication and digital identities have been revealed to be far from race-neutral. (2) Research has raised questions concerning how extant racial segregations and inequalities have spilled over into the virtual realm, highlighting the creation of new kinds of digital divides. The oft-cited, iconic 1993 New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner announcing 'On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog' captured the apparent freedom of a blossoming World Wide Web. However, the original cyberspace promise of 'leaving the meat (body) behind' has done little to withstand the racialization of online spaces. The internet has always been a racially demarcated space and today the plethora of online communication platforms (instant messaging, email-lists, blogs, discussion forums and social media) continue to exhibit varying degrees of identity marking and racialized segregation. (3) The internet, in other words, is a manifold set of sociotechnical practices, generative of digital privileges and racial ordering. It has become apparent that online race is complex and mutable. This picture supports Geert Lovink's declaration that: 'The idea that the virtual liberates you from your old self has collapsed. There is no alternative identity'. (4) That digital media should be understood as merely an adjunct to the 'real' world is, then, an increasingly tenuous standpoint. But this should not be taken to mean that there is a static replication of 'off-line' identities online, far from it. Online racial inclusions and exclusions are dynamically transforming, augmented by the explosion of 'Web 2.0' social networking sites, and modes of access (broadband and mobile phones). For instance, the rise of social networks witnessed the 'white flight' of users from MySpace towards Facebook. (5) And variations in the adoption of social media by different ethno-racial groups have become more visible. (6) The hype of Web 2.0 celebrating user participation and content generation has obscured the racialized protocols that circumscribe our online interactions. (7) Web studies exploring race and ethnicity have principally conceived identity as a 'lived' social construction or hegemonic mode of representation. The relationship between communication platforms and identity practices is difficult to unravel, particularly as research in this field risks essentialising online activity in relation to supposed ethno-racial designation. The rapidly expanding digital landscape poses a further challenge to researchers, as the 'real-time' speed, propagation and irruptions of race online create a presentism that seemingly resists critical analysis. (8) Modalities of race wildly proliferate in social media sites such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter: casual racial banter, race-hate comments, 'griefing', images, videos and anti-racist sentiment bewilderingly intermingle, mash-up and virally circulate; and researchers struggle to comprehend the meanings and affects of a racialized info-overload. (9) The complexity of online racial formations raises the question of whether adequate attention is being paid to the significance of the online environments that race exists in: how are both race and digital networks transformed in their mutual encounter? This essay offers an analysis which centres upon exploring the technosocial production of race. Digital networks are generative of race and can be grasped by an approach attentive to the operations of online platforms. My contention is that a move to a materialist understanding of digital media and networks (10) opens up new possibilities for rethinking how race works online. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White intimate that 'race itself has become a digital medium'; thus the materiality of both race and the digital can prompt an alternative approach and method, beyond the mantra of race as a social construction. …