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I kind of took it and held onto it for a couple of years. And being a journalist I am particularly sensitive to media's representation of black life, especially when there are so many black people out there that you can talk to. Ramsey: Was there something specific that inspired your research into Black Twitter?Ĭlark: So, in 2010, as I was wrapping up my job at the Tallahassee Democrat, I found an article from Slate that had the headline, "How Black People Use Twitter." And what I read in the article wasn't at all reflective of how the black people that I knew used Twitter, what their interactions were, what they talked about, what hashtags they used, so on and so forth.
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Ramsey: Are you a member of Black Twitter?Ĭlark: I self-select as part of Black Twitter, yes. That's where you see the meta-network at work. And generally you see that, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, #AskRKelly, those sort of things. And then that third level of connection, where we see a lot of conversation about these networks and how they're linked, is when those personal communities and the thematic notes kind of intersect around a specific topic. It just kind of all depends on what topic we're interested in. They might be centric to where these individuals are in a certain part of the country. And those thematic notes could be anything from television shows, to ideologies, topics of religion. The second level I find is thematic notes, and that's where individuals specifically tweet together about certain topics, so they keep returning to this subject matter. And I take that personal community from Barry Wellman's work. I break Black Twitter down into three levels of connection: personal community, and that reflects the people that you are connected with in some other dimension other than Twitter. blacks, but blacks throughout the diaspora, and I think a lot of what we see reflects on blacks just in the U.S., but I do want to make that distinction clear, that it is not just of a matter of what we talk about here in the United States. And when I say "black," that isn't just limited to U.S. Meredith Clark: I define Black Twitter as a temporally linked group of connectors that share culture, language and interest in specific issues and talking about specific topics with a black frame of reference.
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A lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation follows.ĭonovan X. I spoke with Clark to discuss Black Twitter, its composition, activities, and impact. Researchers at the University of Southern California are currently engaged in one study to answer the question, “What is Black Twitter?” Late last year, Meredith Clark, a professor at the Mayborn School of Journalism at the University of North Texas, completed research with the goal of establishing a theoretical framework for exploring Black Twitter. What I know: w/o #Ferguson movements & #BlackLivesMatter, the #WalterScott story would not have been the lead story on the homepage - Sherrilyn Ifill April 8, 2015īlack Twitter is also the subject of academic inquiry. Don Lemon, one of cable news’ most controversial broadcasters, has also been called out by Black Twitter for his routinely offensive #DonLemonLogic. #IfTheyGunnedMeDown illustrated the pejorative selection of images used in news stories about black victims of police shootings. #EpicBraidLevels skewered Marie Claire's bizarre praise for Kendall Jenner’s cornrows. Black Twitter has also used its power to launch campaigns that criticize the incidents of racial tone deafness that are all too common across media. #YouOKSis raises awareness for street harassment, #IAmJada calls for solidarity for victims of sexual assault, #BringBackOurGirls forces attention to the abduction of nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls, and #BlackLivesMatter gives voice to the ongoing movement to reform police practices. Within moments, their accounts of what happened spread through the Twittersphere with the hashtags #Ferguson and #MikeBrown.Īnd then there are the hashtag campaigns. Witnesses to Brown’s killing broke the news via social media. This was the network largely responsible for focusing the nation’s attention to the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, last August. The term is used to describe a large network of black Twitter users and their loosely coordinated interactions, many of which accumulate into trending topics due to the network’s size, interconnectedness, and unique activity. It’s also not particularly well understood by those who aren’t a part of it.