Digital technologies have fundamentally transformed everyday communities, including processes of social activism.

Pre-Media And Post-Media Campaigns Seldom did online organizations call for pre-media campaigns, or proactive interventions for racial justice.

Digital Activism for Media Accountability Through national media accountability campaigns, CoC members mobilize around racist images and statements in the media, incidents that invoke collective sentiments that spur action in Black communities. With thousands of participants, protests and petitions demand collective responses. During the 10-year period between January 2006 and January 2015, CoC fostered 24 media accountability campaigns. These campaigns aimed to hold media professionals and organizations accountable in the media.

As a grassroots civil rights organization, CoC differs from traditional civil rights organizations in two primary ways. First, CoC only supports laws and regulations that serve the interests of Black communities. To uphold this standard, CoC only accepts financial donations from individuals and businesses that share similar values (Gonzales and Torres 2011: 366). In contrast, traditional civil rights organizations have come to align with multinational conglomerate corporations over time.

ColorOfChange.org One way that social activism happens online is via Black online organizations

Online racial collectives are especially prominent in Black communities, as communication through the Internet is a utilitarian way for Black Diasporas worldwide to remain connected (Eglash and Bleecker 2001).

social movements

Compared to the offline world, the Internet is branded as a more democratic space for the participation of marginalized communities in society. Increasing the speed of mobilization, digital technologies facilitate the rapid spread of news and critical discussions about national and global events. Taking advantage of this new era, African Americans use digital media to band together in groups as online racial collectives that, among other things, engage in productive activities to combat racial inequality and transform society. With cost-effective online forums, the advent of digital media has made it possible for underrepresented groups and their allies to innovate new ways to mobilize around issues of racial injustice.

Our account of Twitter race-talk

An initial exploration of the #notracist dataset suggested that the most appropriate reading of the data would not come from considering it as having any kind of time-dependency – little within this data is found to change across time.

o date, no study of strategies of online racism denial have been conducted.

A dataset of approximately 25,000 individual twitter messages (tweets) that included the hashtag #notracist was generated, and formed the basis of analyses.

other concerns [of] minority [populations]”.

the culture of a more elite group of younger women activists who are immersed in digital spaces.

unifying force

about elsewhere ,

“universal” to young activists’ experiences in social movement organizing and feminist networking especially: marginalization.

McLuhan’s visions of “the global village” or Castell’s notions of “the network society”, both of which hinge on ICT connectivity, have been realized

FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS

And as Bonilla-Silva suggests, it’s a method employed to mask racist practice and intent

So

both micro and macro level comments within the forum

colorblind racist attitudes

Scholars define the paradigm of resistant masculinity as an attempt by black men to resist oppression and assert their masculinity in a society that sought to strip away any sense of manhood.

One of major ways that Black men assert their power to resist

space leading

However, stigma involves perceptions of deviance that relate more to an individual’s character and identity.

Although deviance is mostly a socially constructed concept, deviant behaviors in most real world settings have been agreed upon by a consensus.

When default, privileged users within virtual settings suggest that “that’s not how you twitch” or “console gamers aren’t real gamers” or “they are too urban”, or any host of other disparaging comments, it means that a cultural product is denied its legitimate existence and excluded.

Within virtual communities that value privileged bodies, oftentimes the marginalized populations’ contributions to the field, to innovation, to knowledge are not valued or not seen to contribute to the cultural work within the digital era.

The performance of Whiteness and masculinity are accepted as legitimate and embedded in the continued cultural practices within digital technology (Gray 2012)

more specifically privileged bodies.

default gamer

Their presence within Twitch exists counter to the hegemonic norm.

As Tiziana Terranova (2000) suggests, the internet does not truly turn users into enfranchised creators and producers, though it is in the interest of the culture industries to let them think that—to present them as wielding cultural and economic power/capital rather than as laboring as part of the culture industry’s efforts to monetize culture.

Twitch, as a technology that allows one to be disengaged from commercial media dictating game narratives, has the capacity to produce counterhegemonic messages unarticulated by the cultural industries.

As de Certeau (1984) argues, audiences are not passive consumers but instead active interpreters and the ability for gamers to interpret games through their own lens empowers these users. This follows Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model of communication (1980) where each person will create their own meaning from the same text, depending on their situation and unique background. As such, it is important to allow the marginalized voice to become active in hegemonic arenas such as video games (Gray 2015).

This act of actively participating within the game extends immersion of users within games; while gamers utilize Twitch differently, a primary reason is to provide in game commentary

Twitching can be examined through the lens of cultural production as it is material generated by non-professional users (Strangelove 2010). Twitch allows users the ability to actively engage in gaming culture by providing their own narrative and commentary while simultaneously playing.

situate their actions

One area in which they resist hegemonic Whiteness and masculinity specifically is through Twitch, a live streaming platform featuring players and actual gaming content.

But in developing a conceptual framework, the project argues that these claims of authenticity and subculture, as well as of agents’ power to self-construct identities, must be tempered by the economic, political, and social realities of the cultural production process. More importantly, notions of cultural work must be considered within the larger systems that govern production especially within the gaming world.

The process of legitimation is initiated by the desire to be recognized from a different perspective.