Potent quotables
invisibility of members of counterpublics who, despite increasing token inclusion and celebration as objects of consumption, are still vastly underrepresented and misrepresented in contemporary politics.
New Yorkers and other Americans hijacked the New York Police Department’s public relations hashtag #MyNYPD to tweet a seemingly endless stream of stories about police brutality…
Yet what is missing from much of the mainstream commentary about trending feminist hashtags is not only that women of color often lead creative and political work on popular hashtags but also that they regularly create and lead racial and ethnic in-group conversations about feminist issues.
We don’t need to wait for a network or a producer to come and tell us, “I want to do a story on your life.” No—I do a story on my life every day. And so in that way, I no longer have to look at mainstream media to represent and reflect me. I can go to a hashtag and find more people that reflect me. I can find my people. And then I can find myself. And then I can be empowered because I found my people and myself to then share myself with the world.
This rapport building between members of the network does important discursive community-building work, shaping cultural solidarity and providing important emotional and psychological support.
Yet evidence has long pointed to the need for white people—specifically, Americans of European descent who have benefited from systems of white supremacy—to actively reject racist ideologies and structures in order to eliminate them.10 There is no reason to believe that the contemporary online struggle for racial justice is any different. Indeed, in light of the tendency toward demographic clustering online and algorithmic filtering online, and the finding that online activism works best when a committed core of activists and a large periphery of supporters work together, supportive white allies that help advance messages of racial justice across demographic and ideological groups may be more important than ever.
We agree that true social change requires coordinated action that extends well beyond the internet. Indeed, the issues we study here all involve a complex interplay of events and responses that occurred online and offline, often simultaneously.
The selling or giving away of user data and content on social media platforms is part of what makes them lucrative and of interest not only to advertisers and other corporations but also to the state. Academics and journalists alike have documented how police and corporations use social media to track particular activists and social movement trends in the interest of “national security” or “corporate reputation.”
As we presented earlier versions of our work, several activists we spoke to described their experiences with surveillance and resistance to it, from being electronically followed by law enforcement during protests to deliberately altering or deleting content to avoid inadvertently revealing protest plans.
The internet has become such an important medium for activism that it cannot be deregulated into oblivion. Our work shows the power of user-generated hashtags to aid activism and the need for consumers to push back against cable and phone companies that whittle away at access to the internet.
When basic human needs like food, access to clean water, and shelter are still contested, a fight for the right to broadband may seem superfluous. But as we have shown, the internet allows users to make claims and create actions that affect these material realities.
Lit review
I loved this book. Loved, loved, loved it. Gave me so much hope and excitement for future research.