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Review of Chapter 1 - Toward a theory of the Egalitarian Technosphere: How Wide Is the Digital Divide? (From the Book Digital Diaspora by Anna Everett)

In Everett’s historical reflections on the formative years of the Internet and its impact on racial dynamics, she considers 1995 the crucial year for African American access to the web.  She attributes this upsurge in African American presence on the web to the moment when Yahoo categorized African American content on its search engine (p.10). Referencing Rheingold’s The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Everett argues that the unprecedented networking opportunities that the Internet offered was its most attractive quality and the most significant force driving its growth and development (p.12). She concurs with Rheingold that people began appropriating the technology for their own personal and communal uses.

She notes that the popularization of the Internet was a watershed in the continual struggle of marginalized and oppressed groups in negotiating the public sphere to mediate issues within their private lives.  She points out that African Americans traditionally attempted to engage this “politicization of the space and place” with demonstrations on the streets in demand of civil rights and justice (p.14).

Tracking public unrests over civil rights tensions and racial prejudice in the 1950s and 1960s, she points to the ensuing segregation, and polarization of the public, through “white flight”, as operating to deepen public anxiety of the reality of American plurality (p.18). She argues that the popularization of television sets within white neighborhoods offered an “antiseptic” to the realities of racial discordances (p.18).

She notes that during the formative years of the Internet, the absence of black recognition in shaping the development of television content fed a general presumption that blacks would also be absent in shaping Internet content, an ideology she terms “black technophobia” (p.19). She traces this general notion to historically prevalent myths of black intellectual inferiority.

Replacing the concept of “black technophobia” with that of ‘black technophilia”, she argues that what actually happened was the widespread embracing of the Internet by black peoples in unanticipated ways (p.20). She makes the effort to list a plethora of sensational headlines and deconstruct sample reports in the mainstream press that captured the ubiquitous consternation and cynicism of the non-black public to this phenomenon. She writes that this exaggerative and disproportionate response works to “contain and marginalize” the ingenuity, gumption, and foresight of the black pioneers of the information age (p.24). I was pleasantly surprised to learn from the reading that, the mobilizing efforts undertaken over the Internet by organizers of the 1997 Million Woman March was one of the most significant factors contributing to the success of the event.

She likens this type of distortions to the prevailing ignorance and denial of African American involvement in the innovation and development of other media technologies. She cites as a contemporary manifestation of this, the disregard for African American science fiction authors. She notes that notwithstanding, these authors have created their niche that portrays strong Afrocentric features, a dynamic that Mark Dery calls “Afrofuturism” (p.28)

Leaning on Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, Everett, outlines how black people used the early years of the Internet to ferment movements, aesthetics, and politics that insured their engagement of and participation in the new information age, even when Newsweek Magazine in February 27, 1995 failed to notice (p.29).

She cautions against viewing this black revolution of the Internet as operating simply within the purview of the black elites, although undoubtedly they were the driving force in the embryonic years, but the cultural impact of the “bootstraps” values which explains much of black approaches to self-reliance and self- determination was a powerful force in ensuring black presence on the web (p.31).  This particular observation really resonated with me, and I stopped to think that really that neither I nor my siblings ever took any computer classes, but at least two of us had above average Internet skills. Then I thought, really, my country belatedly included computer classes in the high school curriculum only on the eve of the new millennium. What then accounted for the widespread use of the Internet throughout my country? How did so many people become Internet savvy to the point that going online is the norm?

So I agree, the experiences of the African Diaspora’s use of the Internet throughout that period testify to this. But perhaps most profoundly it was the creation of the imagined communities of peoples of African descent that most aptly characterizes early black presence on the web. These communities mobilized support and interest in political and social issues affecting black peoples throughout the world. She spends considerable pages reviewing the impact of the early years of the websites, Naijanet, The Association of Nigerians Abroad, and Unwembi to provide evidence of that epoch.

By this cross-border interaction African peoples intensified their revisiting of the Eurocentric, Anglo-Saxon records of their history, making their own interventions, adjustments, and corrections. It was this redefinition of time and space that invigorated people of color from around the world, many of whom with heritages blurred by White interests.  Vincent Mosco, in his book Political Economy of Communication, calls this “spatialization”: the process in which the media restructures and redefines space and time to create new concepts of reality.

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Everett, A. (2009). Digital Diaspora. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Mosco, V. (2009). The Political Economy of Communication. Carlifornia: Sage Publications