Dr. André Brock
How does Blackness manifest in Western technoculture? Technoculture is our modern ideology; our world structured through our relationships with technology and culture. Once enslaved, historically disenfranchised, and never deemed literate, Blackness is understood as the object of Western technical and civilizational practices. This presentation focuses on a reorientation of Western technoculture’s practices of “race-as-technology” to visualize Blackness as technological subjects rather than as “things”. Hence, Black technoculture. Drawing upon recent examples of how Blackness can be captured as digital phenomena - "Blackfishing" and "Digital Blackface" - i offer a critical perspective on these practices to show how the Black digital is more than outrage, stereotype, or appropriation. Instead, Black Twitter is an exemplar of Black cyberculture: digital practice and artifacts informed by a Black aesthetic.
Presenter BiO:
André Brock earned his PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign in 2007. He is an associate professor of media studies at Georgia Tech. He writes on Western technoculture, Black technoculture, and digital media. His scholarship examines Black and white representations in social media, videogames, weblogs, and other digital media in New Media and Society, The Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Media, Culture and Society, Information Communication and Society, and Games and Culture. He has also published influential research on digital research methods. His award-winning book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (New York University Press, 2020) theorizes Black everyday lives as Black joy, mediated by networked digital technologies.