Monday, February 7, 2011

Everett Chapter 2

Chapter 1

Toward a Theory of the Egalitarian Technosphere: How Wide is the Digital Divide?

This is an interesting chapter that pushes against the notion that blacks have not taken part of the digital revolution. I think this is really important because it complicates the idea of the digital divide. It seems that this chapter has an optimism that is lacking in other books we have read and yet seems to be able to challenge the overly optimistic writings of scholars like Henry Jenkins. She keeps pointing to the 1990s as being the point in which blacks began to make a presence on the internet, which makes me wonder what other racial or ethnic groups were prominent on the net around this time period. Also, how does the digital divide further stereotype certain groups of people?

Forging a Digital Black Public Sphere

o She points to the 1997 Million woman march as being a moment in which blacks were incorporated into the digital world.

o She believes that early adapting blacks have been able to (much like in music) create new culture through digital expression.

· Historicizing Democratic Turf Wars and the Privatization of the Public Sphere

o She points to instances, such as a documentary film about the policies of the New Deal, which perpetuates the idea of a welfare state that benefits a suburban model and doesn’t highlight people who do not have white skin.

· Television and the Electronic Participatory Democracy Model

o TV helped to frame a dangerous black public sphere by emphasizing the violence of the civil rights movement.

o News created decontextualized images of blacks which helped to cause great fear in white populations.

· Black Technophiles are in the Virtual House: The Phenomenal Rise of Black Participation Online

o Since there was a lag in which blacks were not prominent on the internet, there was this perpetuation of the myth of black ignorance; however, there were many issues of access that were being ignored.

o Black use of the internet has been long ignored by the mainstream media.

o She pushes against some of the issues of the digital divide, claiming that there were blacks on the internet in urban areas since the mid-1990s.

· Afrofuturism, Marinetti Redux, and the Digital Agora

o She argues that technology has been central to African Americans since the early 1930’s. From science fiction novels to hip hop, technology has been used in many different ways in order to create unique cultures.

· Droppin’ Science: An-Other Futurist Manifesto Goes Online

o Marinetti’s futurist manifesto as being central to understanding the lack of blacks in the rhetoric of the future.

· Staking Claims on the Cyberfrontier: Black Early Adopters and Later Arrivals- Some General Contours.

o Black Geeks Online initial online campaigns in the late 1990’s

· Establishing Cybergateways to the African Diaspora: Geopolitics in the Digital Age

o The idea that the internet is changing the way that we think about community (imagined communities)

· Imagined African Communities in Cyberspace or Digitizing Double Consciousness

o Blacks took place in a digital global village early on.

· New Africanities and the Reverse African Brain Drain or a Digital African Brain Reattachment

o The idea of double consciousness in both challenging notions of postcolonialism as well as taking advantage of modern technologies throughout the world.

· Speaking In Digital Tongues: Disembodied Africans Pounding Digital Talking Drums

o The creation of these diasporic digital communities that have the ability to challenge the dominant cultures.

1 comment: