How Black People Use Twitter (Words That Lead to Trouble)
Posted by Gabriella_Mangino on Thursday, Aug 19, 2010
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A flurry of controversy followed Farhad Manjoo’s article, How Black People Use Twitter. His not-quite-a-case study followed some curiosity into the popularity of hashtags produced by young black users on the site, but why?
To him it appears there is something intrinsically different about how this racially-defined (mostly identified by profile pictures) group of users. But is there something at all interesting or insightful in making this distinction—is it anything more than teenagers using a social network to be….social?
NPR’s All Tech Considered returned to the “story”, Danielle Belton of blacksnob.com said of the interest in black tweeting,
It’s like a black person on a bike — I’ve never seen that! Black people ride bikes? There’s a black guy on a skateboard? Black people ride skateboards?! And it becomes a sort of thing. But no, they’re on a bike and a skateboard for the same reason why anybody would be on a bike and a skateboard. There’s no special, racialized way of skateboarding or riding a bike, and that’s the same way it is with Twitter.
The article was also accompanied by a sorta insensitive brown Twitter bird in an oversized cap with Blackberry in hand. Over the course of the last week the bird was an immediate meme reproduced in numerous forms.
The pictures spread back across the medium the article focused on, and Alicia Nassardeen, who first altered the illustration said “I was happy to have played a part in fostering creativity while “taking the piss” out of an article that ruffled a lot of feathers (no pun intended…ok, maybe a little bit)."
People talk about the Digital Divide limiting some social groups online access, but perhaps the growing number of smartphones and other ways of getting online are bringing people to the table, whose presence wasn’t so obvious before.
So Farhad’s curiosity and fascination with young black tweets, is only natural—he admittedly has no black teenage friends in the offline world. And now, thanks to Twitter, he has their social life at his fingertips, and the hierarchy of the hashtags makes #wordsthatleadtotrouble seem as important as the top news of the day.
Maybe more than anything, these issues that get racialized are more about personal experience than the authors would care to admit.
danah boyd, has spent time thinking about the way language can create a racial divide on Facebook and MySpace, and writes
We often talk about the Internet as the great equalizer…And yet, what we find online is often a reproduction of all of the issues present in everyday life. The Internet does not magically heal old wounds or repair broken bonds between people. More often, it shows just how deep those wounds go and how structurally broken many relationships are.
Plenty of other groups, like white male techies mentioned in the NPR article, engage in group interaction on Twitter, but nothing is ever really made of it. And Farhad tried to save face at the end of his article saying “it is probably a mistake to take them as representative of anything larger about black culture.”
So then uh, why does it matter?
Check out video of danah boyd talking Internet privacy and read more about Twitter and memes on Motherboard
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About the author
Sometimes the world has a load of questions (me too). gabriella@motherboard.tv
