#anna everett

A Quasi-Timeline for Blackness on the Internet

Went into the archive, spent some time re-reading Anna Everett’s essay in Afrofuturism. Took these notes:

1827, Freedom’s Journal founded

1991, Nigerian at Dartmouth College starts forwarding to friends email news about his home country (Bastian 1999; Everett, 139)

1992, Naijanet is born, (Everett, 140)

1995, Yahoo adds an Afro-related news category (Everett, 140)

1995, The Afro-Americanstarts an…

Went into the archive, spent some time re-reading Anna Everett’s essay in Afrofuturism. Took these notes:

1827, Freedom’s Journal founded

1991, Nigerian at Dartmouth College starts forwarding to friends email news about his home country (Bastian 1999;…

This response here might be one of the most interesting ones that I have written for a few reasons. Digital Diaspora does a lot for me. It makes me want to know and do more as far as black communities and technologies. Anyone that knows me knows that I like to talk about race and gender all day long in any context that is worthwhile and interesting. So when I picked up Anna Everett’s book, I was jumping for joy about the class discussions that would go along with it because I could show off what I know about being black and what I know about being black and using technology. Then I cracked open the book and everything changed.

I must give Anna Everett some credit though. Her arguments are valid and well put. I found myself particularly attracted to chapters 1 and 3 and the arguments that she presented there about the need for powerful black public spheres. In the first chapter, she contends for a need to forge a digital black public sphere for African Americans to express themselves and to continuously strive for racial uplift. She uses these chapters to acknowledge that there have many numerous early black adopters of media technology are ignored in the historical context of internet progression. Blacks have helped shape the information superhighway, a fact that I was not necessarily shocked to see but glad to see presented. She contends that the new media that is out now can “erect new possibilities for concretizing” a “powerful trope of black ‘double consciousness’” in black public spheres and digital diaspora. This statement alone is one of the ones that had me all giddy with academic joy.

I also loved how she muses that “our possessive investments in racial communities…are less secure than ever because the fact of virtual bodies and their troubling manipulations in cyberspace destabilizes our presumptive knowledge of people and institutions in new manifold ways.” The migration of black presses to the Internet proves that the struggle is continuing; even the connotation of “migration” adds on to the historical, political and social discourse of black journalism’s progression. In these regards, I feel that Everett was more than on point in her contentions. But then, I take issues in other areas.