“Doubly Conscious: Black Cybercultures," André Brock, associate professor of media studies, Georgia Tech.

Abstract: Given the creativity and reach of Black folk online, is it time to name their efforts as Black cyberculture(s)? How can we understand Blackness within the ideology of Western technoculture? Technoculture is the American mythos (Dinerstein 2006) and ideology; a belief system powering the coercive, political, and carceral relations between culture and technology.  Once enslaved, historically disenfranchised, never deemed literate, Blackness is understood as the object of Western technical and civilizational practices.  

This presentation offers a critical approach to new media research and digital sociology, reorienting Western technoculture's practices of “race-as-technology” (Chun 2009) to visualize Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things”.  Utilizing critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock 2018), and drawing from his upcoming book Distributed Blackness, Brock employs Afro-optimism, libidinal economic theory, interface analysis, and critical race theory to illuminate Black Twitter as an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic.

Brock's scholarship examines racial representations in videogames, black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as innovative and groundbreaking research on Black Twitter. His book Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (NYU Press, February 2020) offers an innovative approach to understanding Black everyday lives mediated by digital technologies.

Sponsored by the Georgia Workshop on Culture, Power and History and the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts.