Digital technologies have fundamentally transformed everyday communities, including processes of social activism.
This is a good statement but it does not follow the case study as it is currently presented. I think this is where other reviewers are intervening.
Pre-Media And Post-Media Campaigns Seldom did online organizations call for pre-media campaigns, or proactive interventions for racial justice.
Ok this confused me. I finally figured out that you were using the prefixes (pre- and post-) differently from markers of time. I think you mean proactive and reactive campaigns?
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.
Too short to be a section. Either fold it in somewhere else or beef it up.
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.
Oh! You get to my earlier questions here. But tied to theory/literature...
ColorOfChange.org One way that social activism happens online is via Black online organizations
Is CoC different from or similar to traditional "organizations" in the social movement sense? In particular I'm thinking about the centrality of the NAACP to black social movements, for example. How or why does CoC emerge in this age? Do traditional orgs not do this work? Don't do it well? Is this a generational organization divide (although I loathe generations as a meaningful concept but maybe tied to media eras)? This is one of those places where the social movements literature would be helpful. Or, a structural approach using major race theories about media would also work.
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).
A fuller discussion of this citation and your link to it here would do a lot of necessary theoretical work. This is key.
social movements
This primes me for social movements literature and framework...
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.
If the analysis begins here and narrows to the case of the Stanley article/backlash there is a way into a more analytical framework.
Our account of Twitter race-talk
I like this discursive framing. Harkens to classic race literature.
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.
This reads as a qualitative decision based on the intertextuality and meaning of the content? Is this accurate? If so, please say more about how those choices were made and perhaps provide examples for independent readings of the claim.
o date, no study of strategies of online racism denial have been conducted.
This is a singularly powerful claim that hinges on how you define "strategies of online racism". A definition here would be useful.
A dataset of approximately 25,000 individual twitter messages (tweets) that included the hashtag #notracist was generated, and formed the basis of analyses.
bounded by time at all? or no?
other concerns [of] minority [populations]”.
What, briefly, are these other concerns?
the culture of a more elite group of younger women activists who are immersed in digital spaces.
Interesting and critical point to your argument. Do the respondents describe this culture?
unifying force
and democratizing, it seems.
about elsewhere ,
I appreciate your modesty but here is one of the rare occasions where a self-citation would be totally appropriate.
“universal” to young activists’ experiences in social movement organizing and feminist networking especially: marginalization.
Unclear: the existence of marginalization within the TFN's is universal or the TFN's are universally organized to redress 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
I am very sensitive to this argument. More critical interrogations of the network society are definitely in order.
FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS
The findings are intriguing but it could use far more data presentation. The analysis would also benefit from a clearer discussion of the methods so that the reader can trust the conclusions drawn from the data.
There are several ways to do this and the following suggestions are not prescriptive. First, a summation of the 2-3 themes in the data would be helpful at the start of the Findings section. The micro analysis suggests there were frequency counts? If so, a table with that data could be helpful. If not, then there is space to display representative data for each theme in a table. This visually links the method to the data to the analysis in a way that shows how the concepts differ when this analytical lens is applied. Also, I was unclear about the micro and macro data discussion head in the methods section. It may be too brief or not simply described. The themes are macro? if so, is that observed through frequencies or a different coding method? And then the micro would be what? Specific racialized words? There needs to be some clarity there.
And as Bonilla-Silva suggests, it’s a method employed to mask racist practice and intent
there it is. citation and also cite earlier as mentioned in earlier note.
So
delete
both micro and macro level comments within the forum
Explain?
colorblind racist attitudes
This is the first I see of this construct in the paper. It looks like it is key to the research design and analysis. Therefore it should be addressed conceptually in the literature review and cited. I suspect you're going with Bonilla Silva and the like? That would certainly ground it in a current sociological literature on the corrosive effects of "colorblind" ideologies.
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.
citation
One of major ways that Black men assert their power to resist
just "resist".
space leading
,
However, stigma involves perceptions of deviance that relate more to an individual’s character and identity.
I think stigma is more precisely about what someone is whereas deviance is a set of activities.
Although deviance is mostly a socially constructed concept, deviant behaviors in most real world settings have been agreed upon by a consensus.
To some extent. I'd like to push here on the idea of consensus. Perhaps use a more precise term?
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.
Ok so gamers who embody (or perform? because i'm not sure what level of visibility gamers have on Twitch; can people see them or do people use avatars?) the default gamer delegitimize the symbolic capital of black gamers through discursive denigration?
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.
Word choice
The performance of Whiteness and masculinity are accepted as legitimate and embedded in the continued cultural practices within digital technology (Gray 2012)
Wondering about who/what is doing the action here. I can certainly imagine that this legitimation is co-created by socioeconomic histories, realities and actors? Accepted by whom and under what conditions?
more specifically privileged bodies.
"more specifically, privileged bodies."
default gamer
I intuitively get the ideal type you're talking about here but it would not hurt to spell it out specifically.
Their presence within Twitch exists counter to the hegemonic norm.
antecedent confusion. "Black gamers' presence..."
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.
This is a critical citation. Mechanics are garbled, getting in the way of the work it's doing in the paper.
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.
Ohhhh. Ok, I get it. I'd like to see this earlier. It can even be repeated. Perhaps the abstract and/or the intro. This is key to why Twitch, why look at marginalized voices there, "so what?" etc.
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).
Tight. Got it.
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
This act of actively narrativizing? within the game extends gamers' immersion within games (built worlds?. While gamers use 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.
I am sure this is about my ignorance. I've read and heard about twitch, but I'm not a gamer. I suspect that I won't be the only such reader. Could you do a little descriptive work about the platform here? A couple of lines about it being a third party gaming platform that gamers register for and play on to game with others in real-time (for example because I am sure that isn't accurate)
situate their actions
antecedent for pronoun
One area in which they resist hegemonic Whiteness and masculinity specifically is through Twitch, a live streaming platform featuring players and actual gaming content.
It seems to me that Twitch is a site where resistance can be seen as opposed to a site where one chooses to enact resistance specifically? A very fine point about implicit claims of causation.
Edit for clarity.
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.
Checking my read of this: the political economy of legitimacy and authenticity conditions marginalized gamers' participation in virtual game play?
The process of legitimation is initiated by the desire to be recognized from a different perspective.
I'm confused by the operationalization of legitimation here.