Distributed Blackness by Andr Brock Jr.;

Author:Andr Brock, Jr.; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC056000 Social Science / Black Studies (global), SOC052000 Social Science / Media Studies
Publisher: New York University Press

Benchmarking the Ratchet: Appropriate Digital Practice

To strengthen my argument for ratchetry as deviant digital practice, however, I must discuss “appropriate” internet digital practice. Given the wildly heterogeneous nature of the web, it seems disingenuous to suggest that there is a “right” way to internet. As I found in chapters 2 and 3, however, both white and Black internet users believe Black folk behave online in certain ways—practices, performances, and discourses—even as the different groups disagree along racial lines about whether those activities are appropriate for online spaces and devices. Thus it makes sense to argue for ratchet digital practice’s deviance by benchmarking what appropriate digital practice might be.

The web’s heterogeneity can be traced back to the epistemology of the hyperlink. Conceptualized by Tim Berners-Lee as content-agnostic, the hyperlink’s design draws on Vannevar Bush’s (1945) and Ted Nelson’s (1974) arguments for connecting culture and information. Its function enables access to any media stored on remote servers via any client or protocol. This freedom has been extremely generative for the web, encouraging the development of an incredible variety of websites, applications, platforms, and services—enough so that many believe the internet has its own culture. However, race has never been fairly considered as a contributor to that culture. Whiteness is rarely understood as an element of internet culture(s) even though the vast majority of creators, coders, engineers, venture capitalists, and designers are white or white-adjacent. Their copresence in and proximity to the internet standardize their conduct as a norm for internet behaviors. Consider the activities of two former Google employees, James Damore and Kevin Cernekee. Damore was terminated for posting a ten-page manifesto arguing that women are less capable than men (Conger, 2017), while Cernekee was fired for proposing that his colleagues fundraise in support of white nationalist efforts (McKay, 2019; Copeland, 2019). These examples and other recent events illustrate that racism, sexism, and misogyny are long-standing practices in the tech community. The refusal to mark whiteness as an identity powers the concept that internet culture is raceless, that racism is a “glitch” (Nakamura, 2013), and that Twitter is the cause of internet incivility.

How, then, does Black embodiment—not just performance but enactment—manifest in online spaces? Earlier I suggested that ratchetry can be understood as a hypervisible, embodied performance of agentive deviance. Despite the absence of physical embodiment in online venues, Black folk have constructed, contested, and maintained cultural online places through symbolic means: online discourse—including images and memes—and the design of home pages and social media profiles.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.