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 on matters concerning everyone (Fraser, 1990, pp. 57, 60). A counterpublic is a similar discursive space for members of society who are marginalized due to factors like race or gender, or otherwise excluded from full participation in the mainstream public (Fraser, 1990, pp. 59–61). Counterpublics emerge in response to that exclusion (Fraser, 1990, p. 68). More fully,
they are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs (Fraser, 1990, p. 67).
By nurturing discourse on topics of specific concern to marginalized groups, counterpublics allow them to develop strategies for influencing the dominant public (Fraser, 1990, p. 67; Graham & Smith, 2016, p. 434). In the United States, Black churches, barbershops, and Black-owned newspapers have been the physical manifestations of the Black American counterpublic for generations, though some scholars suggest that Black Americans had not had a functioning counterpublic since the 1960s (Graham & Smith, 2016, p. 434–435). The status of a functioning Black American counterpublic prior to the emergence of Black Twitter remains unresolved in the literature.
Graham and Smith (2016) analyzed tweets based on hashtags associated with Black Twitter and other groups to determine if it had the features of a counterpublic, specifically those related to in-group discourses and strategies for affecting wider change. Comparing patterns of interaction and thematic content across hashtags they found that, though Black Twitter was by no means a monolith, when compared to the mainstream hashtags, “there was not just a different perspective on issues, but different issues were discussed altogether” (Graham & Smith, 2016, p. 446), including counter-hegemonic strategies.
According to Fraser, in addition to developing strategies to influence the dominant public, fundamental features of counterpublic discourses are “alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech” (1990, p. 61). Film and media studies professor Sarah Florini (2014) writes about how Black Twitter repurposes traditional Black American oral communication styles in ways that fit the features of counterpublics identified by Fraser (though Florini does not use that term). She identifies “signifyin’” in particular as “a powerful performance of Black cultural identity because it indexes the genre’s previous instantiations, and the sociocultural contexts in which it was cultivated and practiced” (Florini, 2014, p. 224). It is also a “space for the expression of Black cultural knowledge, a vehicle for social critique, and a means of creating group solidarity” (p. 224). Though only one of several Black American oral communication styles to successfully make the jump to text on Twitter, “signifyin’” by itself satisfies Fraser’s final fundamental feature of a counterpublic.
Black Twitter also challenges the narrative that Black Americans’ experience of technology is defined by the digital divide and oppression. Princeton University professor Ruha Benjamin’s influential book, Race After Technology (2019), examines how technology and race intersect, especially for Black Americans, but focuses on the ways in which that intersection harms racialized people. Scholars studying Black Twitter, like Florini (2014), however, find that humour, creativity, and play are essential parts of the online counterpublic (p. 227). She also identifies Black Twitter as one of the few online spaces where African American Vernacular English has successfully made the transition to text, resulting in AAVE spellings becoming standardized for the first time (Florini, 2014, p. 233).
Rich with text versions of previously oral forms, like “signifyin’,” which require sophisticated, overlapping cultural competencies to fully participate in, and meeting all of Nancy Fraser’s criteria for a counterpublic, Black Twitter is a unique, positive social impact that Twitter could never have predicted.
Superficial Solidarities
A less-studied unanticipated impact of Twitter is its effect on pre-existing, structured forms of activism. Activist groups and similar organized communities are different from counterpublics and other organic communities. They come together consciously, around specific goals or ideals, and are not necessarily driven by discourse.
Media scholars Malav Kanuga and Todd Wolfson (2022), who study the relationship between media and activism, recently compared pre-social media activist projects like Indymedia to Twitter and other social media networks. Launchedin 1999, Indymedia was a successful international project that coordinated independent and activist-led journalism at 200 independent media centres (IMCs) around the world.
Founded on the Zapatista “idea that a diversity of movements and visions of emancipation could be connected” (Kanuga & Wolfson, 2022, p. 65), Indymedia was instrumental not just in organizing large-scale protests and other actions, but also in allowing different movements to pool resources and work in solidarity to achieve common goals. It “gave form to the global anti-war movement in 2003, just as it gave form to the anti-globalization movement a few years earlier” (Kanuga & Wolfson, 2022, p. 65).
Today, most of the IMCs are gone, having been outcompeted by Twitter and the deep pockets of venture capital (Kanuga & Wolfson, 2022, p. 70). The most recent posts on the front page of the group’s primary website, as of February 2023, are dated from 2019 (Indymedia, n.d.).
The media strategy of social movements, by necessity, now depends almost entirely on spreading awareness through social media (Kanuga & Wolfson, 2022, pp. 65–66). This is not to say social media, and Twitter in particular, are not without advantages for organizers. Communication moves at an astonishing pace on Twitter (Florini, 2014, p. 233; Kanuga & Wolfson, 2022, p. 72), and activists leverage that speed for rapid-response and to offer counter-narratives to mainstream public discourse, similar to how counterpublics operate. Unfortunately, this speed also leaves activists open to message hijacking, and pushes social movements into an economy of social capital, competition, and influencers that is ill-suited to building solidarity (Kanuga & Wolfson, 2022, pp. 72–73). Movements are known primarily by their Twitter hashtags instead of their accomplishments, having little real capacity for unified action or resistance behind them (Kanuga & Wolfson, 2022, p. 65).
Kanuga and Wolfson (2022) conclude that while Twitter has benefits for social movements, activist-controlled projects like Indymedia are, in the long-term, more effective for building effective strategies of social resistance and solidarity between movements (p. 75).
From the “Mitigation Measures” Section
Mastodon
Twitter is not the only “microblogging” social media network. Mastodon was founded as an open-source alternative in 2016 by Eugen Rochko, who was unhappy with the state of Twitter (Mastodon gGmbH, n.d.). Unlike Twitter, which is a centralized service, Mastodon is based on a federated model, where users with technical knowledge set up “instances” of the Mastodon software on their own servers and invite other users to sign up to a particular instance. The various instances form a loose federation, meaning Mastodon users can follow and interact with each other regardless of what instance they sign up on, but each instance also has a “local” feed of posts available only to those whose accounts reside on that particular instance. This allows semi-private communities of interest to form without separating from the network as a whole. For instance, if a user is interested in books, they may wish to make their account on the mastodonbooks.net instance. They would still be able to follow or interact with users anywhere on the Mastodon network, but would also have access to a feed on their local instance made up of users who want to talk primarily about books. Some instances are created based on shared interests, some based on geographic location, and others are general purpose.
This open-source, federated model is an opportunity for activist groups who have been undermined by Twitter and other for-profit social media to take more control in that space. Activist groups could establish their own instances and use the local feed to build deeper connections within the movement with less fear of message hijacking or other negative consequences of their presence on Twitter, while still having access to the larger federated network to put their message and materials in front of a wider audience. It is also possible for Mastodon users to migrate their accounts from one instance to another; if an activist group begins to attract users from other instances who wish to join up, it is possible for those users to migrate to the group’s instance to participate in the local feed.
Climate scientists and activists have already begun to move from Twitter to Mastodon after the former was acquired by Elon Musk in late 2022, sometimes over concerns that he may allow climate change misinformation to proliferate on the platform (McCracken, 2022).
Mastodon is a more complicated system for users than Twitter, and relies on volunteer labour to maintain and moderate. As of this writing it is unclear if it will ever reach the kind of user base required to seriously challenge Twitter as a company, but its federated model echoes the Indymedia model that proved so successful in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
References
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. Polity Press.Florini, S. (2014). Tweets, tweeps, and signifyin’: Communication and cultural performance on ‘Black Twitter’. Television & New Media, 15(3), pp. 223–237.Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text, 25/26, pp. 56–80.
Graham, R., & Smith, ’S. (2016). The content of our #characters: Black Twitter as counterpublic. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2(4), pp. 433–449.
Indymedia (n.d.). Indymedia.org. https://indymedia.org/
Kanuga, M., & Wolfson, T. (2022). When we were the media. Logic, 18, pp. 63–76.
Mastodon gGmbH (n.d.). Joinmastodon.org. https://joinmastodon.org/
McCracken, J. (2022, November 17). What is Mastodon, and what does it mean for ‘climate Twitter’? Grist. https://grist.org/technology/twitter-mastodon-climate-change-elon-musk/
