Where does Blackness manifest In 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 is a critical intervention for internet research and science and technology studies (STS), reorienting Western technoculture’s practices of “race-as-technology” (Chun 2009) to visualize Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things”. Hence, Black technoculture. 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.

André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. His 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 forthcoming book titled Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures will be published with NYU Press in February 2020, offering an innovative approach to understanding Black everyday lives mediated by digital technologies.

Free and open to the public, no RSVP required.

FOR REMOTE PARTICIPANTS: Video from this talk will be streamed live. For video, during the event visit this URL: http://umsi.info/black

Hosted by ESC: The Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing.
This event is co-sponsored by the Digital Studies Institute.

This lecture is generously supported by the School of Information; the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research; and the Department of Communication & Media in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan.