I recently completed a workshop where we examined the unanticipated impacts of IT artifacts through a social informatics lens. Social informatics appears to be what you get when IT professionals discover cultural anthropology and sociology, so keep that context in mind while reading the rest of this post. The class was broken up into groups, and our group worked on the currently-flailing social media service Twitter. Though not generally a fan of group work, I was quite pleased with how well we worked together and the work we produced. Below are some of my contributions to our final paper, including references (I won’t post anyone else’s work, because it’s not mine to post). My section dealt with the “unanticipated societal-level impacts,” and I chose to focus on Black Twitter and the effects on existing activist culture. I don’t pretend to be any kind of expert on Black Twitter, and certainly not on Black American culture; my work was rooted in the existing scholarship. Also, I borrowed the “Superficial Solidarities” sub-heading from an article in Logic.

#BlackTwitter

Community formation was anticipated by Twitter, but “Black Twitter” is something unanticipated—sociologist Roderick Graham and criminologist ’Shawn Smith have identified it as a “counterpublic” (2016). Counterpublics were originally described by political philosopher Nancy Fraser (1990), and exist in parallel to the mainstream public. The “public” is a conceptual space that is neither explicitly economic nor explicitly political—in the sense of pertaining to the state—where the members of a society come together to discourse … [continue reading] “Unanticipated Societal-Level Impacts of Twitter”