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| Jasiri X, Moya Bailey & Alexis Pauline Gumbs (photo by Brett Chambers) |
#BT2Duke In the Mix: Responses to Black Thought 2.0 at Duke
by Faithe Day | HASTAC
Through the beauty of the Internet I was able to spend Friday and Saturday watching and taking part in discussion via twitter on the Black Thought 2.0 Conferenceat Duke University that was broadcast via UStream. Here are my notes, which mostly reflect the questions that were addressed and some of the responses, from my interaction with the conference as well as some additional links that I found interesting.
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by Howard Rambsy II | www.siueblackstudies.com
What was especially notable about the Black Thought 2.0 gathering was its live ustream broadcast and live-tweets with the hashtag #BT2Duke. The in-room audience for the panels included 60 or so people, but the online viewers increased the audience to nearly 1,000 during the course of the day.
The twitter activity taking place was dynamic and offered a way of reading what observers were taking away from the panelists' comments and how folks on twitter were receiving what was tweeted. Someone on the panel would make a point; someone in the room or watching on ustream would quote or paraphrase the quotation and post it on twitter; then others would re-tweet or comment. It was an engaging interplay, social media in action.
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by Faithe Day | HASTAC
A reoccurring theme during the Black Thought 2.0 conference, which is also reflected in Black Studies, was the idea of tensions between personas or a sense of double-consciousness. The main panel that discussed this tension was the second Panel titled“On the Grid: Teaching and Researching in the Digital” after the moderator brought up the question of having a public and private life in the digital world and in the real world. Howard Rambsy II discussed it in terms of a double-consciousness between the analog self and the digital self, while Allison Clark attributed this idea to “code-switching”. While only some of the panelists expressed a separation between their public and private selves in terms of their use of social media sites, I could not help but think of the idea of Black Twitter and the long history of doubleness when thinking about and/or enacting “acceptable” modes of cultural blackness and modes that are seen as “unacceptable”.
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by Howard Rambsy II | www.siueblackstudies.com
If I wasn't so behind on my literary history projects and my grading of student papers, I would be inclined to take up the task of writing a history of black digital or online intellectuals. And maybe, the term "intellectuals" doesn't fully capture what I have in mind. Really, it would be more about folks who were collaborating on technology projects and participating in various online conversations.
Whatever the case, I received a renewed spark to my interest in these African American (digital) histories at the Black Thought 2.0 conference at Duke University as Lynne d. Johnson was discussing her participation in New York-based online discussion groups during the early 1990s. Now, I had first encountered "lynne d. johnson" in the late 1990s when I became a participant on Alondra Nelson's afrofuturism (AF) list serve. Mark Anthony Neal was there. Nalo Hopkinson was there, and many, many more were on the list serve.
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by Jasiri X | Black Youth Project
This weekend at had the pleasure of participating in a revolutionary conference called “Black Thought 2.0: New Media and the Future of Black Studies” at Duke University. Convened and hosted by Dr. Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University and host of the weekly webcast, “Left of Black”, Black Thought 2.0 brought together some the best minds in academia with initiative entrepreneurs and activist finding success online.
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by Faithe Day | HASTAC
Critiques of the “Ivory Tower” of academia have been levied for many years against academic institutions but in the final panel of Black Thought 2.0 there was a greater discussion of what it means to be a public intellectual in the 21stcentury and how social media is changing that definition. The fact that there has been some recent discussion on HASTAC about the use of the term “public intellectual” shows that social media is greatly changing the way that we interpret the idea of being “public” and the role or designation of the intellectual. MarK Anthony Neal (@NewBlackMan) was the moderator for this panel and he had previously published a video that asked the question “What if W.E.B. Du Bois had a Twitter”coming to the conclusion that Du Bois would have been a prolific tweeter. This references the history of Black public intellectuals that were invested in being accessible to and mobilizing their community. As Neal noted during the panel Martin Luther King Jr. would frequent pool halls in order to talk to people outside of his church community about social issues.
