André Brock
André Brock is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. His scholarship examines racial representations in social media, videogames, black women and weblogs, whiteness, and technoculture, including innovative and groundbreaking research on Black Twitter. His NYU Press book titled *Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures* was published in February 2020, offering insights to understanding Black everyday lives mediated by networked technologies.
His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field, in his words, preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter in particular continues to evolve as a communication platform. He has also authored influential research on digital methods, gaming, blogging, and online identity.
Supervisors: Caroline Haythornthwaite, Norman Denzin, Lynette (Kvasny) Yarger, Ann Peterson Bishop, and Fernando Elichirigoity
Address: School of Literature, Media, and Communication
686 Cherry Street
Atlanta, GA 30332-0165
His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field, in his words, preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter in particular continues to evolve as a communication platform. He has also authored influential research on digital methods, gaming, blogging, and online identity.
Supervisors: Caroline Haythornthwaite, Norman Denzin, Lynette (Kvasny) Yarger, Ann Peterson Bishop, and Fernando Elichirigoity
Address: School of Literature, Media, and Communication
686 Cherry Street
Atlanta, GA 30332-0165
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Papers by André Brock
This article describes in detail the formulation and execution of the technique, using the author's research on Black Twitter as an exemplar. Utilizing CTDA, the author found that Black discursive identity interpellated Twitter’s mechanics to produce explicit cultural technocultural digital practices – defined by one investor as “the use case for Twitter”. Researchers interested in employing this technique will find it an intervention into normative and analytic technology analyses, as CTDA formulates technology as cultural representations and social structures in order to simultaneously interrogate culture and technology as intertwined concepts.
["bitch is the new black" illustrates how weblogs help Black women articulate identity and develop social capital]
Author Posting. (c) 'Information, Communication & Society', 2010.
This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of 'Copyright Holder' for personal use, not for redistribution.
The definitive version was published in Information, Communication & Society, Volume 13 Issue 7, October 2010.
doi:10.1080/1369118X.2010.498897 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2010.498897)
As a third place, the Internet encourages intimate discursive interaction, similar to the way Black barber shops and beauty salons allowed private spaces for identity discourses between Black men and women. The Internet also opens these formerly private spaces to non-Blacks, who contribute to the articulation of Black identity online.
This article describes in detail the formulation and execution of the technique, using the author's research on Black Twitter as an exemplar. Utilizing CTDA, the author found that Black discursive identity interpellated Twitter’s mechanics to produce explicit cultural technocultural digital practices – defined by one investor as “the use case for Twitter”. Researchers interested in employing this technique will find it an intervention into normative and analytic technology analyses, as CTDA formulates technology as cultural representations and social structures in order to simultaneously interrogate culture and technology as intertwined concepts.
["bitch is the new black" illustrates how weblogs help Black women articulate identity and develop social capital]
Author Posting. (c) 'Information, Communication & Society', 2010.
This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of 'Copyright Holder' for personal use, not for redistribution.
The definitive version was published in Information, Communication & Society, Volume 13 Issue 7, October 2010.
doi:10.1080/1369118X.2010.498897 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2010.498897)
As a third place, the Internet encourages intimate discursive interaction, similar to the way Black barber shops and beauty salons allowed private spaces for identity discourses between Black men and women. The Internet also opens these formerly private spaces to non-Blacks, who contribute to the articulation of Black identity online.
References
Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Star, Susan Leigh. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Brock, André. (in press, 2015) Critical technocultural discourse analysis.
Daniels, Jessie. (2015) The trouble with White feminism: Whiteness, digital feminism and the intersectional internet. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2569369
Herring, Susan. and Stoerger, Sharon. (2013) Gender and (a)nonymity in computer- mediated-communication. In J. Holmes, M. Meyerhoff, & S. Ehrlich (Eds.), Handbook of Language and Gender, 2nd edition. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.
Marcotte, Amanda. (2012, June 13). Online misogyny: Can't ignore it, can't not ignore it. Slate. Available from http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/06/13/online_misogyny_reflects_women_s_r ealities_though_in_a_cruder_way_than_is_customary_offline_.html.
In previous work, I argued that Twitter serves as a cultural conversation, both forming and encapsulating the worldview of its users. While it is tempting to assume that the incivility towards Richards is symptomatic of only a small, deviant minority of Twitter users, I instead argue that Whiteness, technoculture, and masculinity serve as a baseline for this Twitter discourse, as do beliefs about Twitter-as-a-medium. To support this argument, I present a pilot Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis of several hundred tweets addressed to Richards three days after the incident. Preliminary findings indicate that the interactants describe ‘appropriate’ use of Twitter based upon articulations of male privilege, technocultural ideologies of ‘appropriate’ women’s conduct in male-dominated tech spaces, the normalization of sex terms as technocultural discourse, and as an enabler of hate speech.
Social media – in this case study, Twitter – mediates and is mediated by the culture of its users. Twitter’s combination of brevity, multi-platform access, and feedback mechanisms has enabled it to gain mindshare far out of proportion to its actual user base, including an extraordinary number of Black American users. How best to understand Twitter’s reception and uptake by Black Americans, who surprisingly comprise over a quarter of all US Twitter users?
I approach these claims through an analysis of Twitter from two perspectives: an analysis of the interface and associated practices alongside critical discourse analyses of online discussions of Twitter’s utility and audience. This dual analysis employs critical race and technocultural theory to understand how mainstream online authors (out-group) and Black online authors (in-group) articulate Twitter as a racial artifact employing technocultural practices. Initial findings indicate that Twitter’s feature set and multi-platform presence play major roles in mediating cultural performances by Twitter users. These same features also, depending upon the racial affiliation of the discussant, mediate how those cultural performances are understood: for example, Twitter was seen as a venue for civic activism (or public sphere) or as an active facilitator of deficit-based Black cultural stereotypes. I conclude that recent demographic changes roughly correlating to the “‘browning’ of America” and the resultant changes in patterns of ICT usage allow us to understand Internet norms of communication as White, technocultural practices instead of solely computationally determined communication styles. Future directions for this research strand include a compilation of a critical whiteness framework to more clearly articulate how Twitter ‘norms’ of communication map onto White male geek subculture.
In November 2008, 40A’s Blackbird browser, designed for the informational needs and interests of African Americans was introduced. Blackbird was designed to tightly integrate social network sites with web browsing, as well as to provide targeted search suggestions and results for Black cultural information searchers. Instead of focusing upon its speed at rendering web pages or displaying multimedia, the rupture for reviewers and early adopters was Blackbird’s open declaration of its cultural affiliation. It was derided as being racist, unnecessary, and pejorative to the actual needs of Black Internet users. These reactions are unusual for any modern information technology, let alone one as ubiquitous as the web browser. During this talk, I’ll review Blackbird’s social and culturally-aware user interface features, followed by my findings from an analysis of selected blog discussions reviewing the browser.
Advances in graphical technologies have led to increasingly realistic depictions of human characters in videogames. Accordingly, the expectations of gamers, critics, and developers have risen with regard to environmental, narrative, and cultural aspects of human character development. Most recently, two videogames — Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft) and Resident Evil 5 (Capcom) — deploy players within extremely detailed re-imaginings of Africa to interact with a variety of racial and fantastic non-player characters and enemies. The developers’ attempts to create culturally appropriate settings received a variety of responses that wandered far afield from the usual tech- or game-oriented criticisms of interface, genre, game mechanics, and multimedia elements. Instead, these games (particularly Resident Evil) garnered enormous amounts of polarized culturally-oriented criticism with respect to the relationships of the White and Black characters within the game worlds.
Cultural ideologies are nearly invisible to discussions of information and communication technologies that arise in the public sphere. Instead, a baseline of white Western privilege as a “technological zenith” undergirds the use, dissemination, and understanding of technological artifacts and literacies (Dinerstein, 2006; Brock, 2007). Carey (1989) has argued that communication technologies transmit cultural beliefs while Pacey (1985) argued that technology must be considered a tripartite arrangement of artifact, practice, and beliefs about that technology. Videogaming has long excavated tropes of white superiority that employ European mythologies, science fiction and fantasy, and other literary genres to provide narrative frameworks over a multitude of game environments for the gamer’s actions.
For this paper I propose to conduct a critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) of three elements that comprise each game: the ludic, mechanical, and graphical aspects of the game; the associated videos and interviews generated to market the games; and a sampling of the discussions generated between gamers participating in comment threads following blog posts about the racial significance of each game. This analysis seeks to answer the following questions:
What do gamers’ perceptions of racialized characters in Far Cry 2 and Resident Evil 5 tell us about the role of cultural competence principles in videogame design, marketing, and use?
How do the mechanics and genre choices of the respective videogames shape interactions between players and racialized antagonists/NPCs?
How have the respective marketing campaigns — viral videos, developer interviews, and game trailers — shaped perceptions of racial identitites in the games?
I will employ a framework using critical whiteness theory, critical information studies, interface analysis, and critical discourse analysis across all three media forms (blogs, videos, and games) to understand how each form plays a part in shaping racial identity. Initial findings by various game review sites and game critics indicate that color-blind ideology, based upon uncritical views of technology and playing games, play a part in the negative responses of gamers to criticisms of the games’ racial depictions.