Distributed Blackness : African American Cybercultures – André Brock, Jr.

Softback

288 pages

New York University Press

ISBN: 9781479829965

An explanation of the digital practices of the black Internet From BlackPlanet to #BlackGirlMagic, Distributed Blackness places blackness at the very center of internet culture.

André Brock, Jr. analyzes a host of platforms and practices (from Black Twitter to Instagram, YouTube, and app development) to trace how digital media have reconfigured the meanings and performances of African American identity. Brock moves beyond widely circulated deficit models of respectability, bringing together discourse analysis with a close reading of technological interfaces to develop nuanced arguments about how "blackness" gets worked out in various technological domains. As Brock demonstrates, there's nothing niche or subcultural about expressions of blackness on social media: internet use and practice now set the terms for what constitutes normative participation.