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>> Good afternoon Mark I'm less hope for it and I'm proud to introduce our speakers to the Georgia Tech library is co-hosting the African-American student union a discussion with Dr Andre Brock about his new book distributed by Africa many African-American cyber cultures Joining us to lead the human a is the president of the African American student union the brilliant jailor Williams to Williams is an undergraduate researcher in the act of safety for autonomy.

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And in the 3rd year her computer engineering degree is also the vice president of external affairs for the Georgia Tech chapter of Tripoli research interests include from our development in that it Systems machine learning and robotics are entering Brock is an associate professor at a little studies here at Georgia Tech is a Ph d. in my brain information science from the University of Illinois urbanisation and and a Masters in English in rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon is scholarship is essential reading on racial representations social media video games black women and what bugs whiteness that no culture and black Twitter Dr Brock is not only invited to speak all over the country in academic settings and companies such as Google but he also meant appearances on full frontal was cemented in his could in a ruling still.

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It was a visiting researcher for the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England in 2060. Is a true thought leader and has a blue check mark by his name to prove it on a personal or when he taught at the University of Iowa School of Library and Information Science classes were highly recommend into new students by the older Co I overcame my fear of Erie and discourse driven learning and jumped in.

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The classes were as good as everyone said and better under a challenge assistance to the incisive rigorous coherence as well as curing compassionate people in themselves and others I now believe that these 2 lessons are in fact next trip will judge him by his golden implementation Dr Brown takes a transformative changing experience very those doctors that he imaginable other groups of oppression those of distributed blackness no one understands how technologies of race in the digital must be framed and reimagined right now better than on trade UK this bill disrupts and defines the tremendous experience in reach blackness on the internet will make anyone who thinks they know the history of the way we consider all the problems of race and racism on the Internet or any inescapable rock helps us we center choice our law and resistance to Dr Bernanke and you tell us more about your bill before we get into the q. and a good afternoon everyone.

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Thank you let's wait for that marvelous introduction it's been a pleasure to know ya know you for all these years Welcome to everyone who has assembled online. Including my August colleagues my fabulous students and the love the administrators of Georgia Institute of Technology also thank you Kathleen Massey ripple in this together and to Michelle Williams who is going to interrogate I mean run the q. and a following this presentation but let's get started.

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A few a work morning before I start talking I talk fast and I deliver a lot of content if I have 15 minutes and this 15 minutes is not go very quickly because I'm just going to keep you in the here take notes where you can mark points of presentation where you want to ask me questions and then we're open it up later for questions from the audience reading your song about it if you go.

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All right. This talk is drawn from my book distributed blackness African-American cyber cultures which is out now available in the Georgia Tech library but also available and open access through the open square and why you press the org website and I'll post that link for those who don't have a message to show Access and have joined us post that link on my last Also if you are a graduate student or an undergrad who can afford to buy the book and doesn't want to necessarily sit there and navigate the libraries website I will provide a p.d.f. I can send it to if you direct message me on Twitter or email me and I'll send you a p.d.f. copy of it as well so this book is drawn from my empirical research of the last decade into The Cure phenomenon of black folk being black on my mind in the black **** business and the ways that American cause for interaction and understands their blackness agency and digital expertise they I'd like to introduce you to someone at the erotica and empirical and sites I've gleaned while studying the digital and black digital practice.

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Discipline my book is that black folk have a natural affinity for the end digital media and I'm very much aware that the idea that black people are essentially good for something as a problematic construct or black folk here in the United States in some ways it's been used against us in many ways has been used against us as the idea that we are naturally athletic and naturally amoral naturally deviant has been used against us in both policy and technological venues but I have a couple of reasons why I made this claim the 1st part is pragmatic that the expression of blackness black expressive a-T. is rightfully celebrated in literature and art and also in reaction guess is it Mr Gittis we don't work that out later but luckily freshen the way we talk is consider uncultured and an educated and modern that is technical and professional society but black digital practice puts paid to this belief right through its inventive energetic discourses and online spaces My claim is also ecological that black folk have made their spaces their parts of the Internet a black space whose contours have become visible through sociality and distributed digital practice while the century of whiteness as the default in an identity war over I'm arguing that this black natural Internet affinity is as much about how black folk understand and employ digital artifacts and practices as it is about how blackness is constituted within the material and virtual world of the digital itself I'm naming these black digital practices online spaces racial enactments and performances and cultural phenomena online as black cyber culture are very intention for this book but the spillway from Western and American technological or technical cultural norms of digital practice that being modern and online must always be productive and efficient.

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You know there's are held by a stream society by journalistic institutions and by the everyday spaces that we move through but seriously they're also held by conservative elements of black culture or respectable folk who want their children and cousins known to act better the distributive blackness turns away from this appropriate perspective on technology use good examine the black man bang in the digital I have her on the slide one example of the ex-president getting and mention that in online blackness can be found through this race black girl magic put her power user and creator of the hashtag misquotes on Thompson wrote Black girls head black girl magic is black girls they do hair in their kitchen disabled black girls lesbian black girls bad black girls who are black girls black girls what relaxers and weak but girls a single mothers black girls that haven't figured out how to blend their makeup that girls that are incarcerated and black girls teenage black girls an educated its last under educated black girls black girls at work low paying jobs black girls at present as masculine as.

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I see this particular moment the creation of this hash tag and these articulations of blackness that is embodied and aware as illustrating and after a future where the Black Monday is inscribed in the digital or a distributed communitarian virtual black cultural space distributed blackness is dedicated to exploring these places and trying to make sense of them.

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I approached the digital from a critical perspective but when it comes to the internet who isn't critical these days right everybody has something pessimistic to offer and their and their take on whether the Internet is based on dooms scrolling or how it is cheap in political discourse or the fact that Twitter is understood popularly as a mob space with the mob mentality.

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As a critical researcher However my goal is to interrogate the cultural social and professional digital contacts and tend to repeat. Assumptions regarding the social value of f. nation and communication technologies despite empirical evidence to the contrary and I usually bring this up in my classes where I asked my students what's what is the difference between Apple i Phone users and Android phone users and while the discourse is kind of gotten faded away over the past few years I can still tell you that for many police circulating about i Phone users as being sheep as being only driven by fads or as not as to technologically sophisticated as and are used right so it's my my goal as a researcher then as a critical goal is to unpack why people believe these things about the use of a device when placed side by side you can barely tell the difference between a current i Phone and a current Android phone they're both featureless slabs of black glass sometimes with mirrors attached but with no other distinguishing feature and so the screens turned on to tell them apart from one another in my Georgia Tech courses I encourage students to question established social cultural assumptions and values regarding these information communication technologies and a status understanding of information and data particular as they play themselves out and are institutionalized in your classes in your training and in the rivers and lakes that you're used to or your own cultural assumptions.

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I bring this last part out contra cultural assumptions because no one is able to escape bringing their experiences values and training into technology design or technology instruction in many cases across universities and I've been fortunate to be employed at I've been the only black professor that my students have ever encountered right that's even in literature but for the technological students that I deal with in engineering and computer science my own degree is in information science I've even more isolated as a black professor and as a black professor that critiques the ways that they're taught how to understand information data and technology design these monocultural experiences lead end to Silicon Valley I don't know if you guys have heard of the term broken hammers right but it may be familiar to you the idea that there is a masculist hypersexual culture hyper sexualized culture of men who run the types of industry that we that many of us aspire to work for because the pay is awesome right but as they're doing this as they run the spaces in those particular Massena lies I perception lies ways they're also bringing belief that technology will be innovative or disrupt.

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The my research inquiry then recognises this by preemptively conceptualizing technology from a 3 part perspective artifact or technical practice organizational and belief or cultural and I take this particular perspective from Arnold pacing is one of my canonical influences I make every class read him every semester regardless of what our teaching because he asks us to conceive of technology in these 3 ways.

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And I have our practice and belief and the way that I write it he resists technical organizational and this is important he argues that and mainstream and academic conceptualization the technology we can only Fergus focus on the 1st 2 aspects that is. What technology is and how technology works and when we do that we're still we're stuck on the instrumental or functional aspects of technology which leaves an exam and how we understand ourselves when we use.

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One of my favorite quotes is from a author name and hacking a philosopher and he says the computer creates the user not the other way around right but in my research I argue that culture and belief work behind the scenes to situate ourselves within the technology and this becomes hugely important when examining beliefs about black folk and technology because across this more modern era and I'm going all the way back to 61000 black folk have always been understood as technical objects never subjects even when black folk do pick up technologies we are often seen from a deficit perspective where the least educated we're seen to be the least educated the least wealthy the least moral right and these beliefs get written into technology design and policy.

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So in the book to operationalize my conception of technology and the way in which I conduct my end and career I came up with a method to interrogate how belief shapes technology use of design and it's based on critical interface announces and critical discourse analysis and I call it critical techno cultural discourse analysis and I've article that's on Google Scholar that if anybody is interested in this particular method as I describe it I can send that to you as well e.t.a. as a parallel multimodal analysis that combines as of the meaning making of interface design right and I know that some of you engineers may be like well everything we do doesn't have an interface and I'm like somebody has to use it at some point let's talk about it right alongside this analysis of the interface because I argue that it's the front facing part of any computational artifact I have an analysis of the articulations of every nation technologies using those technologies one of the articles one of the chapters in my book focuses on a browser called Black Bird and black bird which was a Mozilla browser that was custom I for the customized to the needs of information.

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Lack information users I looked at how 2 different groups understood their the way that black part was I looked at tech and do c.s. on the psycho arse technical another called Tech Crunch and I looked at black technology commentators and pundits on the book and strangely on Ars Technica which is a very much tech enthusiasm for a they thought the black vote would only uses browser to get rid of weapons charges and how to find the best price of 40 miles.

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So these beliefs get interpreted by the people who are they are themselves understood as the creators of this technology. Though c.t.a. offers an opportunity to think about the technology the practice and the belief parallel and I do this by using a conceptual framework or interrogating power relations in order to tease out the connections between in doing so this approach provides a holistic analysis of the interactions between technology culture ideology and technology practice it can be unwieldy at times and complex but it produces some compelling we searched such as follows reading a book let's quickly walk through another a fuller example of the analysis I conducted a survey of blackness on January 5th 2017 following the election of our 45th president Yahoo pub Yahoo business published a bad batch week they took it down to 20 minutes but the on the Internet screenshots are for after the 20 stone simply references the trumpet ministrations desire to ramp up military presence for naval dominance in the Pacific Ocean over China and there are a number of possible interpretations of this tweet that were borne out and research on.

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A normative instrumental reading of this text busy to me as a technical publication error you know stupid auto correct although I have no idea how you are correct to set up to refigure to rewrite bigger as never have no idea how that works right negotiated Ethel Blue Coat reading a **** is a hippo that's a typo is didn't feel in your heart but in the process and in the process noting that it could be read as offensive.

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And oppositional reading right the recent conservative freakouts over Council culture would reject this text altogether seeing as as implicit evidence of the bigotry of the Trump administration on one side or the main the bigotry and bias of the mainstream radio which promotes this type of stuff to bring trot down and that allowed the tweet to be published in the 1st place the c.g.a. analysis however the one that I do encourages us to consider how the black community surely the ones most injured by this tweet will consider the Africa the results will surprise you I can't resist I've had 2 cups of coffee and is going to do this 20 minutes after the Yahoo tweet was posted a new hash tag popped up this hash tag you **** Navy can be viewed here as a Vulcan black joy the us defensively discuss naval warfare military institutions and their practices but actually to darkly critique labor practices social protocol and it.

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Black parenting strategies and much more as you can see the shenanigan are enacted there are black cultural discourses and recollections of lived experience although not depicted here other tweets concessional as the hash tag and this particular tweet with photos of black celebrities or black media culture all mediated by the call and response functions of Black Twitter hashtag practice and by that I mean I and my research I write that the hash tag is a call it serves 3 functions it serves as an archive of all the discourse referenced by the tweet it's an invitation by the original poster for people to join and talk about it and it's also holding place for all the responses to that particular.

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Thing it's also an algorithmic a machine a way of capturing discourses in a particularly digital space that is very different from words that have been printed on a page and then discussed over the watercooler right from a c.t.d. a perspective that one that I do throughout the whole of my book Black Twitter can add joy not a naive happiness to black girl magic it's not about being a naive it's a celebration of life despite all the inequities levied against and in the practice of doing so it articulate a joyful its response to inadvertent racism and empathetic yet critical take black culture dignifying on something that originally had nothing to do with black culture in the 1st place but most importantly for this presentation while it could be read as a resistance to anti blackness or social death like joy instead offers a Authority response and able through inventive creation and digital media as a forms as a media display of distribution plus social media as affords us for sharing media that's a lot of media words and that's why I need to fix them though.

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Distributed blackness the book doesn't really have a conclusion it ends with a provocation if Western techno culture the way that we are ready I'm not navigating maternity as a nest or bad position as a technical object then I argue that blackness needs its own formulation of technical but what is the belief of life technicals it clearly cannot just be limited to anti-racism right we can't necessarily walk through the world worried about white fertility and it can't be the perfectible utopia of what kind or after futures I mean can't just be both they can't just be both of those I argue that it must contain how we managed to every day as well right as I said throughout this presentation or as I've alluded to that this presentation racism and the practice of race right should not be the sole defining characteristic of black identity Moreover black techno culture should not be confined to just middle class aspirations of achieving a size so I posted the black romantics we earlier on and one of the reasons why I did as soon after Miss Thompson posted her black girl magic tweet and articulation they got captured by respectability proponents who wanted to I think one of the canonical examples is when the peed on the on go one the right and some sparkling black cartoonist boasted of.

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A little cartoon of a little girl drawing on the floor with Lupita and her trophy on her wall celebrating and a host of Nicky Manasseh thrown in the trash are we don't need to do that we don't have to tear down one aspect of black culture that we that some people may find on.

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Unappealing in order to celebrate the stuff that's appropriate we can do right. So I hold tightly to the belief that's also justice activism should not be the end goal of black digital practice we're not all black clouds matter we don't get up angry in the morning we don't gang bang on bake right online activism right now is simply the most visible and appropriate manifestation of online blackness to the mainstream for black techno culture and cyber culture blackness is living the celebration of life and of care so this is my black technical term matrix with the qualities of blackness intersection ality invention in style America and Asterix the government and the future and briefly the reason why America is an asterisk because I recognize of blackness is a vast for a convention so there are different ways to understand blackness depending on whether you look at an imperialist or colonialist you perspective the black Brits are different the cultures in Africa that I've been colonized by Europe have a different of the Caribbean has different Latin and South America are different but they also have a common core of blackness to which they are have been constructed by maternity and I think that context is important understand.

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Explain one because I'm not atop. The basic question Henri of blackness represented the elective 1st person communitarian and I meant intentionality in space as Paul Mooney says everybody wants to be a native but nobody actually wants to be right and he was actually referring to the current actions but we'll leave that there homo.

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And this attention to space happens across cultural aspects of black of blackness along the way this black identity highlights how the white western Libin the economy right of anti-black ness the belief in logic irrationality that excludes black subjectivity and agency objectifies and constructs that world that black Americans find themselves right so this this communitarian identity of blackness expands opens up that world and reintegrates the mind and the body and the world but this we're in this matrix and this reintegration returns of Oreo control and intent over blackness of black folk and black culture so black techno culture that deals like technologic technology used as a relationship between blackness American racial ideology and the technologies themselves.

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Here I'm drawing on Charles Mel's argument that race can be ontological without being a biological metaphysical without any physical existence or without being essential taking from one's being without being one shape that is just because the police want to arrest you and identify you as a criminal in the moment does not say anything about how you are living your black **** life prior to being hailed by that siren as you were driving down the street you are a whole person a lot of Castillo or Eric Garner or George Floyd or Corrine canes they were hope people before the police caught them up and into their lives I want to slide over from technical term broadly design defined to the digital or cyber culture one of the reasons why I think a theory of black cyber culture is how full this thing about unpacking believe that information and communication technology can be understood as affording blackness space within which it can look Syria recover and grow.

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Enclaves like the Black Beauty Salon in the hood where we Galatea do care about people and a good food from enclave from white western society while still the ember Kade in that context this possibility exists because of the disinviting and able by virtuality and simulation that is and heritage to the digital that is we're participating in an online space blackness losers' of excess and so here unrestrained by the fixity empathy toward reduction of the Black Sea that occurs offline online I am not only a point of view but I am also a point that is he lacks our culture that can be understood as the change Cecily changing protean nature of black identity mediated by black various digital artifacts services platforms and practices individually and then concert or blackness as an informational identity or missed upon Libin all affectation online expressions and practices of joy and catharsis about being black expressed through semiotic immaterial relationships between content hardware and code Thanks ready for questions if ya'll are ready I know I said a lot less lies had numbers on so if you can remember them I'll go back to them if you need to but I turn now over to jail Ok So have you waited a few days earlier when a letter really makes you and I please excuse on her lays out over the phone against editing and we want so you know it's.

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The present I have the doctor but is that I really enjoy reading about Black Planet in black bird and he spoke a little bit more about the beginnings of life as a presence. So black people always been online but not necessarily in numbers visible numbers large enough to count or visible to the wider mainstream but planning is considered one of the 1st social networks it came online around 2000 and then it kind of fell off real woke couple of years ago my salon decided to promote her most recent album through it but it has always been a space where black folk were able to construct through a sea of male and c.s.s. their own web pages and these were the if you remember late ninety's 2000 says that if you cannot get some audience can write they were sparkly cursor rolling blackouts a one picture tiled over and over again auto playing music all the beautiful things that you can imagine one of the interesting things about life on it for me is that many folks who are in the tech industry now got their start making money as high school students middle school students even selling a shemale web pages to older folk who wanted to be blamed for lack of a better we're on Black Planet and so I see this is immensely technical space but a black technical space where we were able to him in bed and it's a gray our own perspective on the world and these versioning Web 2.0 technologies.

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For the next Christian and that is that you write about the Internet as if especially it and what do you mean. Asking the question one more time and I will. Be right about that as a infrastructure in your burn What do you mean. Infrastructure in the sense that it is invisible to us until it breaks I'm like you know the highway system or the street system or the power grid right we're aware of it because it provides a way for us to navigate our everyday lives but we're not really thinking about it and the many.

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And so many words invisible to. And I say it's infrastructure now because it's hard to conceive it's hard to conceive of a way to conduct the lives that we once led without the Internet so when I tell my students that we used to call we had to pick up pay phones and Darfur one line to find out what time it is right there like well look it's a face.

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Or the welfare right or that call waiting meant that when you caused by the House you got a busy signal meaning you had to wait right it wasn't they could go over to tell you that they're on the other line right those are things that we take for granted now then if you all have grown and you my students have grown a sense 911 and a world that has always had the Internet as always has marked phones at least from when they can remember right has always has social networking services and many of those consumer functions are even more expanded when you can consider business functions writes Being Middle East where Jobs has been offset outsourced to electronic apps where you never see the person that you're hired until after they see your application for Amazon Amazon developed algorithms last program that manages the employees in their warehouse docks them if they're not moving fast enough and can fire them all without the and original person right so that when I say infrastructure I mean I have this thing called Crimea I don't know if any of y'all have it right where I order stuff because I was on prime and then I forget about it until it shows up there or 4 days later that's infrastructure then because it's not like you didn't think it would come it's just that you go about your day because it really was so mundane so trivial but order something and then wait for it to show is that help that answer your question who you found.

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And if you. Can Now yes then I have just Levering for me was unforgiving and I ordered my Christmas I said the Pakistani. So we have a question in the chat Dr Brock How have you seen online I've been to be like This Is It comeback that I heard is now.

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There go Ok I still have. Yet specifically black online identity change in the airco in 90. I don't think it has I think. And someways blackness is a microcosm of what goes on and western society of the surveillance that people are worried about now thanks to tick tock but also to the ways that our our identities are trafficked and so between social networking services communication carriers and businesses all those types of surveillance black folk have been undergoing for years right the difference and Cove it is that in some ways we've retreated to ways of sustaining and nurturing ourselves in online spaces that we didn't have before and specifically think in purse de nice on Instagram with this while our d.j. sets but then more recently the versus Sunday was last night was Patti Labelle verse is that a sign for those of you who don't know a versus our it's a concert format where 2 artists come together it used to be just perform the songs that they like that you might not have heard of but now it's become ours performing hits and that kind of sort of battle right and it got so big it was a really just ad hoc conversation between general and his was beat but it's got so big that Apple has now started producing it was on You Tube last night so that was an uncle could actually watch right but those are ways if you look at not only the concert last night but in the week leading up to it many people were posting photos of things that that were preparing their mind and their spirit for the blessings that were about to happen on Sunday night though whether it was picture of gene that say and white diamond cologne or the Harshad Berry Candy that her grandma used to hand you in church or the plastic cover of houses used out that used sat on a stump to me which a visit all these things that were familiar to us and comforting to us were posted online as black identity as ways I understand this online and that was a.

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Link to the chat. You mention Collin response in terms of the way that I asked backwards and I am most in that cause abuse and improvisational do you think that there is a correlation and that if it really hateful or cutting point of view expressed is usually. Yes in part because Jazz's originated by black folk right and of course we brought our particular invention and creativity to that musical form Same thing with blues I argue that in many ways it's easier to understand Twitter and social media as the blues than it is to jazz right jazz takes us on flights of fancy the blues drowns us and making it through another day with all the resources of our bodies being in you know worn away by capitalism or modernism yet we still find joy eyes but yes to the question.

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Then the improvisational humor as well Italy that Simpson and jazz and the blues and online spaces is a way that black folk have managed to. Build from African traditions of discourse to take pleasure in the wit of the word write we love a turn of phrase and I call collar response one aspect of signifying to confront is usually understood as the dozens of jokes but it's much more complex than that if you've heard of shade that signify if you've heard of being dragged or being read that signify.

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In some ways people some focus try to capture some signified as dunking on people but that's just really come that's not really strong enough actor for a good drag to watching someone get dumped on right and all of these ways one of the ways I talk about in the book is.

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During the receipts. As shown in the receipts particular and on My Space This is where it's improvisational culture a pretty social critique that is highlighted upon bringing up past evidence of transgression in this case using screenshots or old tweets the current form right now is a tweet from back in the day when you were at when you post something on Twitter and they just say this you.

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Right and that tends to center the behavior that you did in the past connected to your current identity and asked why you're trying to be different now in this moment why you try to be virtuous and this moment when you used to post homophobic to homophobic tweets Kevin are right or why are you trying to be supportive of black women when you have rape charges leveled against huge men right it's very much a way of doing critique that this digital rights and specifically digital but centered and black discourse particularly black women and black weirdest sources of saying how it is calling it like they see right and so to me that improvisation that cultural critique but also that humor right because trust me if somebody points out that somebody messed up and says This you the rest of us are snuggling and giggling in the background like.

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You got busted right and so there's humor in all of those things as well Ok. The next up we have what are your views on how black Africans specifically Nigerians are stigmatized in the media as iver criminals even when it's obvious that Nigerians are one of the most educated immigrants in America and you're.

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Saying the Middle East. I do not have the capacity to answer that question fully in the way that I think you want me to answer what I will say is that the Nigerian scam or archetype is much more a critique of the naive it's a and gullible menace and greed of Western people than it is about a critique of Nigerians themselves it's actually pointing out how sophisticated they are at getting white people to play themselves and send the money right and to me that's in line with the Nigerian folk technical cultural and social accomplished but if you look at it in a white Webster constant it's portrayed as deviants right how dare they take advantage of our right but I actually argue it should also be understood as a way of it's a hostile right and the hostile is really important about his identity employed identity you can get over it over right and so I find the age of Twitter to be really interesting and fascinating right and part because they are professional and.

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Accomplished but they're also very much sensual and. Interested if it weighs a committee Razzo Nollywood as an industry as some of the most compelling feel that I've ever seen but also some of the most wretched that I've ever seen write and so you try to consume publish things together.

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Did you mean to say that the difference between i Phone and Angel razors are that Israel uses as are perceived as cheap as dirt cheap Zachary's and raises are perceived as seen in not technologically savvy Africa everyone that I know raft race in i Phones as well as Italy.

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Thank you no I didn't say cheap meat did not come out of my mouth like white on them are so no not as cheap although I will say Android phones are the base baseline. Mark on adoption right if you think about the prepaid networks around the world the for Middle East North Africa and India those are lower stacked lower.

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Memory capacity phones built for those emerging markets right in part because those emerging markets don't have as much of a robust telecommunications infrastructure the cellular size table things and the data economies right where you have to buy data by the chock a set of the unlimited that yeah right so not cheap definitely not technologically unaware or on savvy right actually tech Android users even the ones that don't know how to route their phones and saw stuff right still think of themselves as more economically savvy because they're not just spend a lot of money on i Phones like i Phone users are like Never Never mind the fact that Android phones are heavily subsidized by carriers right I don't know if you paid attention but.

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It doesn't just introduce a flip phone for $2000.00 flat right and so i Phone difference it is being more aggressive because an apple at 1st refused to let carriers do that heavy discounting in order to sell phones but the phones cost the same right and many ways especially with the move were the move of one of the primary enjoyed users from Web o. s. to Android then copied by i Phone The interface is look the same right there are certain things that are particular to each interface and each manufacturer but there s. so that belief then comes up right if I ask them who's in a coffee shop what type of technology will they have have an i Phone and i have a mac right nobody ever says they'll have a Lenovo think Pat we even those with a little Think Pad looks like Apple stuff as I did a viable and there for.

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Or attaches beliefs to it right that are some ways dismissive of the fact that people actually like their technology one of the hallmarks of American and Western culture is if a thing is difficult and it displays some sort of savvy or a cutie on the part of the user of the dismissive look in the literature write for those of you have taken literature courses do they ever highlight the romance novel as an aspect of the highest evolution of Western literature No they're also stuff like a.s.d. or.

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Who's out of person that I hate so much Tolstoy write they never focus on the romance novel in his Harlequin Romance iteration the one that millions of women read every day write as something that people should aspire to write and so technology works the same way the more complicated it is the sleeker it is the more we say it's accessible to an elite status of technology user went all over the place on the list are.

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Still in your book you write them black letter is certainly a sin of black culture I didn t. express their digital practices in any form by cultural discourse that is about black every day like any talk a little bit about this phenomenon as it's a technical artifact a practice in the police who Ok so during the presentation I talked about appropriate technologies and in the book I argue that Twitter has never been seen as an appropriate technology can this is an appropriate technology banner is an appropriate technology if you think about the ways that they reinforce institutional practices in order to hail you as a student and as a user how does Twitter hell you write Twitter just came on the scene of bust on the scene and said What are you doing for.

[00:43:12]
White Western culture the idea that you would ask somebody how they're doing is seen as in consequential right it's seen as basically a. Disgrace you pretending like you like someone right in order to get a conversation started right but in black culture asking someone how you're doing is really an inquiry to ask how you doing the 2nd question when I say just how you doing it how you mom and write.

[00:43:39]
That is a black cultural commonplace and so in some ways what are black Twitter users were able to. Highlight their use of Twitter as a way to do this type of discursive kind of activity the way that we care about each other the way that we uplift in the one each one another let me not this make a scene like it's all so shining games as black women are definitely struggling on Twitter many ways are they get harassed they get it they get docs they get death threats just because they're women who happen to be black and that happens by black men and other non-black men right so women in particular have a hard time a social network but the blackness of it all in many ways also provide spaces were black women are the forms of black girl magic as a hash tag serve to collectively bring forth the possibility that black people who are not affluent like people who are trying to make a dollar out of $0.50 were just as worthy or justice.

[00:44:37]
Capable of bringing forth that collective communitarian joy that Twitter and in some ways is really built on demonstrating and I would say Twitter is a different network than Facebook right to it is a different network and even Instagram right and that Twitter allows for the separation of followers of follow easy yet still allows for discourse between those groups to be seen right and interacted on even if you don't follow them right that's not necessarily something that happens on Instagram or Facebook and we can talk about that and different come up with talk about it.

[00:45:11]
And so it's winter and that way that it builds up this communitarian conversation between people closely maps on to the way black Botox another one another but also the invention that Twitter encourages right the idea that you can post a hash tag that says **** namely and 5 minutes later or 7 hours later people have Bill all these examples of how they understand this hash tag to work at their from their own experience that's an event of moment that really we had difficulty seeing until Twitter and that pretty topic slash hash tag and so it works in concert these beliefs structure practices these practices Wow ostensibly built for purposes different than the one that people use also highlight the one of the best use cases for what Twitter is and so on and so.

[00:46:03]
But you spoke about the expansion of black identity and take no culture. Beyond humor races or explore in political How do you see that it's not a bad effect in any outcome and was you consider mobile technology the great equalizer. I mean we could have been so covert and when we realize that mobile technologies are not going to save us that's not enough van with her children you're your younger siblings to be able to access the high intense video streaming and even connectivity that is required by these k. through 12 school districts the mobile is an imperfect bridge across a divide the divide itself is a problematic awestruck for me because again it resides on a deficit model right the divide is premised on the idea that minority populations populations which are minorities despite themselves like women who happen to be more than men in the world but there is that are minorities these minority Thais populations are somehow at fault for not being able to access information resources in the same way that white male middle class Christian.

[00:47:10]
Suburban families can access right and so I try to see I am sharply incomer I'm in charge conversation with the digital divide as a way of saying it's not the best way to understand how people access the Internet it's still though has some relevance right especially if you try to understand critically where the connectivity fails where the infrastructure doesn't work right and so in this moment I think it's really instructive to understand why zoom crashes from 8 am to 3 pm.

[00:47:40]
Monday through Friday as his Try to use it as a learning tool or canvas as m. perfect tool for trying to understand how you are engaging with the content that myself and my colleagues are trying to communicate to you as we work through this remote learning semesters last year right as for the divides are more complex then as often given credit for but they're also imperfect measure understanding the problems that are imparted by policy decisions by economic this discrimination by environmental difficulties and the like.

[00:48:19]
Can you share this brain your thoughts on what kind and other they so indications of black technology needs who. Yes. What kind is a construct of the Walt Disney Company and of Marvel Comics what kind of was created by a white man Jack Kirby. And 1968 and his idea was to create an African nation because you know his understanding of the Black Panther who in the like we're black people had a not autonomy right they were colonial subjects and they possessed a resource which in many ways made them technically superior to the rest of the west right and from that perspective this glorious but when you capture that and the Disney vision you kind of get well you definitely recapitulate a lot of stuff that Kirby thought of when he 1st started using and started building out work on right but Disney itself has its own issues with intellectual property capture right with portraying womanhood in certain ways with portraying masculinity and certain ways right the fact that Disney owns marble doesn't necessarily make marble a better space it kind of as the Disney aesthetic to these superheroes or underwear perverts as my colleagues like to call them I can you imagine people just flying around in long johns and we celebrate them as if they're the best people the world you walk around in La Das to tell me how people sorry.

[00:49:51]
That rest so what kind is interesting to me because is it the black after future that I agree with right do I necessarily live for the idea that somewhere in Africa which is 6000 miles away there's a group of people who have isolated themselves from the rest that were refused to help the other countries around the being dominated by the West I'm not their right I don't see it as necessarily a stunning achievement after Futurists right in many ways the Black Panther Party is after future that I'm interested in not necessarily because they were militant but because they also provided school lunches the right medical care and the like in the process of saying we deserve to arm ourselves against white supremacist ideology right that's an after which I could leave because they were attendant to the every day and the needs of our children as well as to the possibilities of liberation in the future right and so what how does a problematic space from them still he have somebody watching from Colombia.

[00:50:52]
So they asked do you think it could be convenient to create a black platform like it's a Twitter they interconnect all black people around the world taking the count that our data and speak to be compromised by hackers or bad as they don't like or people being. Who's going to fund it.

[00:51:12]
One of the. Things I learned about when writing about Black Planet and I've been writing about it for a while now I'm talking to Omar was how and carried a fan who are 2 of the founders Eccles the others that they had a lot of trouble getting p.c. interest right right now and this current moment Black Enterprises are the least funded of any venture they'll they'd rather waste money on a $300.00 Internet connected juicer than fund of platform that would lead to black liberation worldwide or even black makeup and natural hair which is one of the most booming segments of black business right now in the world right they that they don't you see Shark Tank you see how they don't want to fund that right and so that 1st question of funding it is really important to me because we've had moments where people create websites and even technologies websites apps and services that are primarily focused on the interest and needs of black people but without funding to maintain and expand those to scale those things and out of that we fail because the way the Internet is built up is that it requires this constant reinvestment that is not necessarily profit in order to make things happen right and so I'm pessimistic about it what I'm interested in is other on the other hand what I'm more interested in is the way that we take technologies that are already are funded and work to reshape them in ways that are beneficial to us of Blackwater's the perfect example but I would argue black Instagram and Latina Instagram those are 2 of the most over indexed populations on Instagram right well above their demographic numbers they have created spaces that are directly responsive to the information concerns needs and desires like what is the purpose of the shape right that but the desires of what black folks on those faces like right so I'm much more interested and capturing what is out there that is already funded and bending it to our will then necessarily struggling right in order to try to get convinced the mainstream to fund their ventures that are most.

[00:53:16]
I'm social still and she's just plain black men in the mirror and I correct and is so nice I mean where about how your public prosecutor researched me cause you personal surfer I mean I don't know if you saw the George Floyd video Muskoka. But watching these policemen kneel on the neck and back and hips of this black man for nearly 9 minutes.

[00:53:56]
And many ways felt like being witness to a lynching that I could no fact I couldn't stop and could easily have been me they escalated that incident apparently all he did was possibly have a $20.00 bill that was counterfeit and for that he was executed I don't know how you could not be affected by that particular video.

[00:54:22]
And my research I talk about something called racial battle fatigue that's in the book as well and this idea. Social media algorithms continually service these images of black death at the hands of the state right now because we want to see them every time somebody else is killed and we find out that their video my timeline on Twitter and on Facebook is flooded with people saying do not share this content we don't need to see this but the algorithm shows it to us anyway because algorithm is purchased on engagement M's wrong emotion and genders engagement the algorithm will continually service the videos the reactions and the arguments against them why black people should just go along and that won't necessarily stop and so personally I have a reaction to it but also academically I have reactions but I don't know how you cannot write the fact that we can the fact that I'm a technology researcher does not shield me from being accosted by police on campus I work for Georgia Tech I work at Microsoft that will not stop the police from pulling me over and treating me real bad and so I try to be that is my aspect of the critical that I hope to focus on research that while I do talk about black Joy I also talk about our service ran the fact that we costly have to navigate a world that is premised on depicting us resenting us portraying us apprehending us as objects of a regime of white supremacy and I would be remiss I would be wrong if I didn't highlight in the work that I did why that's a problem.

[00:56:02]
I think that'll be the end of the tour in a session or today thank you Michel. My thanks to the problem Jarrod for joining us today and I just I love to you speak I'm so glad that I got to sit and listen in a long time. For everyone who joined us as participants thank you for I mean the Georgia Tech like Mary is can it hurt hosting public programming that is open to everybody he said Tell your friends and we hope that you'll join us for some of our upcoming programs to help on the web.

[00:56:43]
In Pekin close out and everybody have a lovely afternoon.