Unfortunately, due to a subject of mine who is no longer comfortable being on my #BlackTwitter exists website any longer, I had to delete that page. If you would like to see the ethnography video that goes along with that project, it is still up on my youtube page. Here's the direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVJYND05Olo. Enjoy! Again, sorry I had to delete that page, but hopefully you'll get a new site added this year! :)

Over the course of this semester, I have a learned a lot more about how to write using research and still incorporating my own opinion and writing style. The hypertext essays that we did in this class were useful for exploring more in depth into things that involve race, gender, and media. They also helped to propose ideas for solving the gaps found in all of these areas.

With my first hypertext essay, I tried to stay a bit more facts driven with my work which to me made it a little boring. My main goal of this website was to focus on a purpose, which in this case was to prove that the lack of diversity across all media industries has a negative impact on modern society. The whole format of a hypertext essay is to make an interactive website and an engaging piece of writing. I think as I started reading and editing my first essay which I entitled Defining Us, I think my writing style started to shine through more towards the end of the essay to the point where you could get a clear understanding of my voice. Overall though, with a few more tweaks that I might add before class ends on Monday, I think that my first essay was a successful introduction to what kind of work I could produce for this class.

After I completed my first project, I think it was pretty easy for me to come up with the topic for my video ethnography project. I knew I was going to do something that focused solely on black culture, but I also wanted to keep it fresh and not restricted to the everyday news that we hear about African Americans and their communities on a day-to-day basis. The great thing about this project is that I learned to respond to the needs of different audiences by having to make a 10 minute video and supporting my video with pages of written work. I chose to do my video ethnography on #BlackTwitter because I know how prominent it has gotten and I also am a very avid user of it. I know that the kinds of people who participate in #BlackTwitter use it for entertainment, but they also use it to express frustrations whether it be in their schools, neighbor hoods, media representation, or they entertainers that they choose to support. Black people hold each other to such a high standard that sometimes we come off too harsh when people "fall." As a group of people, blacks in America are always told that they have to work twice as hard just to get something accomplished compared to their white counterparts and in a way you can see that frustration come through on #BlackTwitter. I know that my actual video seemed to be lacking a few things but that is because I was trying to get more of subjects thoughts and opinions on the topic versus my ow but I made up for that with the writing pieces that can be found on my website called Black Twitter Exists. Overall, I think this second project went better than the first.

For this last hypertext essay that I am producing for this class, I think this may be the best project that I will produce for this class. I plan on using it as a basis for the website I want to make for the non-profit organization I'm working on with my parents. This project will be my best work because it is the most personal to me. My last website is called Mentally Sane and its purpose is to explore how exactly we can use activism to inform and fight for people who don't always feel they have a voice if they are suffering with mental illnesses. What I like the most about this project is that it helped me adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality for the audience that I am trying to reach. The first part of my website gives a lot of background on why the subject is important to me and it gives pure facts about what depression and anxiety are and why they are problems. The second half of my essay will continue on with more facts but it will also explore the current issues that those who already have organizations in place are lacking at when it comes to truly helping with this issue. I find that most of the people who are bold enough to say they are dealing with mental illness are white, like what we've talked about in this class countless of times. White people are not the only people in the world. Within the past year I have heard about, met, and seen first hand plenty of minorities who are dealing with depression, anxiety, substance abuse, cutting, and so much more because our culture always told us that we need to be strong. I mean I can't tell you how many times my own father has said, "Suck it up. You are strong. You stand on the backs of many people who risked their lives for you to have what you have today. We are a strong group of people." And do you know how that makes you feel? It makes you feel worse off than you were before because you feel wrong for feeling emotional in the first place. I don't want to give away too much from my website, but I plan to delve more into this ideal. Activism starts with a group of people who are willing to see a problem and act on it, and I want Mentally Sane to point out the problems in current forms of activism and propose ways to fix them.

With all of that being said, I think that my work has been consistent and has shown growth in making my writing style more concrete and my voice more prominent. It's also taught me ho to sight things in ways I never exactly thought of and helped me to learn how to writing more reader friendly work. I'm always thinking about how can I make my site more user friendly and I think this class taught us, that as media changes, the way school and education works has to change too. That starts with learning how to do make work more accessible online and engaging the reader in all aspects of your work. Sometimes adding in some personal narrative to a research type of paper makes a paper stand out and I'm starting to realize that. Getting a sense of my voice in all my work is very important.

My definition of activism is simple because the real goal of any activist is all the same. The goal of activism is to inspire, lead, educate, take action, and leave in impact so much so that people are aware of the constant battles that society is facing every day. Activist want to spark a fire in people to want to make a change and a good activist will work that happens. So what is activism? Honestly it's more than just 5 words the five words above. It's the process that activists take to make a change. Its the accumulation of all the work put in to fight for something you feel passionate about. Activism is the work!

Below is a map that I plan on using for my website!

When I think about activism, I immediately am drawn to the idea of organizations whose sole purpose is to help make the taboo subjects of things like suicide and depression something that people can talk about. Mental illnesses are things that many people choose not to acknowledge that they exist. The problem with the notion that its not socially acceptable to talk about these topics forces more people to live in pain. What I've found interesting about social media's current plight of popularity, is that it's giving a platform for young people to become less scared to talk about mental illnesses. There are many organizations like The It Gets Better Project, To Write Love on Her Arms, Love is Louder Than..., and the Semi-Colon Project which all have used social media to make the missions of their organizations heard to people around the world. Their usage of social media is helping to  break down the barriers that help make mental and emotional illnesses so hard to talk about.

What I've found is that many of these organizations have taken action by just being able to provide information to large groups of people via the internet but what about in every day life? The goal of many of these non-profit organizations is just to educate on what it means to deal with depression, anxiety, and thoughts of suicide. I often find it frustrating to see that there is no "ground work" being done to make that happen. Due to that reason, I would like to explore how to bridge the gap between education and helping real people in every day situations. Currently, I am working on getting my own nonprofit organization underway that aims to help people of color--mainly college students--with how to deal with depression and anxiety while in school. The college atmosphere heightens those feelings in certain people and minorities are never thought of to having to suffer with depression or anxiety. I know how media can help inform people, but how can I use it to help people that need assistance today? How can we be on the front line of saving someone from drug abuse, cutting, alcoholism, and suicidal thoughts by only using media? There has to be a way to take action on these issues beyond just telling someone that certain feelings are unhealthy. I hope that by researching this topic, I can help myself learn how to be a better activist and how to make my nonprofit organization successful.

The word activism seems to have a totally different definition in today's society than it did just 4 years ago. The goal of activism is to bring change politically or socially that will help to effect the society that you live in. In the 1960s during the Civil Rights movement in the United States most of the ideas that the movement was based on were created on college campuses and community churches. Large amounts of people were informed of what was going on in their communities through word of mouth and local press coverage before the national news caught on to what was going on in the south. Contrastingly, in 2014 activism begins online, with just one person. If that person uses the resources of social media to their advantage then they can start a discussion that leads to something bigger. With more and more people having access to social media and who are willing to publicly voice their opinions, and activism can be picked up on by the press just by what is said online. This brings into question whether activism is just talking about it, or is it acting on it?

I decided to do my video ethnography on #BlackTwitter because I'm an active participant of it, and because I find myself asking the question, "why," each time I log onto twitter. Why are so many Blacks, whether African or Caribbean American, so involved in the world of social media? Why are topics spoken about online limited to what I would consider to be racial points of view? Why aren't more people of other races using twitter in the same way that Blacks do? 
As I've been doing research online about Black Twitter, I began to notice that I'm not the only person who's intrigued by the success of Black social media users. Many online news sites have cited #BlackTwitter as a guiding point that is helping to shape culture and pushing to a more racially acceptable world. Social media has taken the black community by storm and has brought to light many injustices that are done to blacks across the country today. I think that what makes #BlackTwitter and black social media users so powerful is that it is creating a safe haven and a platform for the black community to support each other despite geography and economic situations. 
While doing research I've learned that the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, NewsOne, Complex Magazine, and many other credible sources find the good in Twitter usage by the black community, but I wonder how it negatively impacts us and why we think social media is even important to begin with. I have a theory, and I think that what makes Twitter and now Instagram so popular in the black community is the presence and evolution of Hip Hop. As much as I hate to admit it, Hip Hop has began to shape the way that black people integrate into American culture. Hip Hop and its crossover appeal, to a certain extent, helped to put President Barack Obama in office. The power of Hip Hop and its increasing popularity has given more young people things to talk about and people to share. I believe what has made Black Twitter so strong is that young blacks have used social media to help get the music artists they want to hear, famous.  Famous artists like Drake, Nicki Minaj, J. Cole, and Kendrick Lamar gained increasing popularity and notoriety from pure buzz on the internet. Once African Americans started to realize the power that social media had to get their favorite artists on the radio, the black community on social media sites took on a mind of its own.
Twitter is a quick way to get ideas across and over the last few years, #BlackTwitter has shaped popular culture into something that the whole world is talking about. Though it seems as though #BlackTwitter is full of good ideas and is all positive, I'd like to suggest that it may hurt us more than it helps us. Twitter, in a way, sways you to think the same as everyone else. The social media site has a bandwagon appeal. If one person is talking about something, especially a popular person, then everyone else will follow suite. With my interviews this weekend, I hope to push my interviewees to look at #BlackTwitter holistically and weigh the pros and the cons. Are we romanticizing the idea that the Black community on twitter is an avenue that will make the race stronger, or is it merely just a façade to hide how simple minded this generation can be? 

One of the greatest achievements of the internet is that it promotes a culture of participation among anyone who uses it. The internet allows for its users to have a voice that is free to feel important and needs to be heard, but are these voices really heard? Are the voices of countless people who publicly state their opinions online important enough to matter in the grand scope of the internet?

Opinions are meant to be shared and I believe that the biggest advantage of the internet is that it leads me to believe that I am important. This little black girl from Atlanta, Georgia has a voice that someone out in the world needs to hear. This ideal is what drives the participatory culture of the internet. Someone online must be able to relate to what I am going through. Someone online can be helped by just reading what I have to say. 
Media makers are integral to the success of the internet because they make participating with others online so much easier. Like highlighted by Henry Jenkins in his article entitled "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century," not everyone has to contribute to what is going on but they must feel that they are free to contribute when they are ready. When you feel that you are free to state your opinion it makes the internet feel safe for everyone that uses it.
This might explain why I feel so safe to express my love for Beyoncé where ever I find myself on the internet. Social media tools are a great way to say what you want to say in a non-threatening atmosphere online. I know when I get on Twitter, I probably express my love for Beyoncé on a daily basis. I've even stirred up some debate online when I said that I thought she was this generation's Michael Jackson. She has done things for music and the black community that can only rival the late musician's success in his lifetime. I feel very strongly about that topic and I have my own personal reasons to back up my statements.

Jenkins argues that because of the success of the participatory culture online which has "created a community that provides strong incentives for creative expression and active participation," we should incorporate this world into education. I actually think that the English class I am in currently is a great representation of what Henry Jenkins possibly wants education to achieve. While learning about new topics, the students in my class are free to be creative in their thought processes by using the internet to help guide their opinions on topics. How else could I be able to write this blogpost about Beyoncé? Thanks to this class, I feel comfortable enough to give my opinion on a topic and try to relate my opinion to anything that was read in class.

How do I make Beyoncé a topic that makes sense in the realm of education? Well Beyoncé is more than just a person, she symbolizes strength, empowerment, some feminist ideals, and growth. She has made strides in the entertainment industry that most people could only dream of and she's pretty much a walking legend. So why should anyone care about her besides me? She's my connection to how I make sense of the world. I form opinions about topics because of how she fearlessly represents her self in the public eye. She is an example of what it means to be confident in what you're doing, what you say, and how you get your message across. I believe that in a way, the participatory culture of the internet has helped to increase the success of her career because it gives participants a chance to creatively think of new ways to make her presence seem more and more important to each future generation.


What's lacking in education is the ease of participatory culture in a sense that creativity doesn't have to be structured in a formulaic essay. Opinions can be stated online freely and they promote the thinkers of the next generation. School lays the building blocks and it seems as thought the internet is just helping people learn how to put it all together. Media making is an integral experience to students and should be integrated in the classroom to force students to have an opinion about something. Having strong opinions pushes students to be more informed citizens in the future and will make them want to learn and be more involved in the classroom.

Social media has taken the current generation of technology users by storm. Almost every website on the Internet can be linked to a person’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even LinkedIn page. Social media has become so widespread today that having no Internet presence in this current society of technology driven kids, teens, and young adults is almost like you don’t exist in the world at all. What I find interesting about social media usage, is that the need to make our presence known online has brought real life societal issues into the Internet stratosphere. Classism, racism, religion, same sex rights and even feminism have been issues that social media has magnified to see how people genuinely feel about pressing issues. To put it simply, social media has made it easier for people to say what they feel about anyone or anything without having to deal with the real life social repercussions.

One population of social media users that stands out to me is African-American, or Black users. Black Internet users have seemed to make a refuge for themselves online where they can talk about things that plague the Black community and stop them from moving forward. Contrastingly, it is intriguing to see that despite this world that was built to build African-Americans up, many of these same people just use the Internet to tear each other down. This brings up a very particular subset of Black social media users, that refer to themselves as #BlackTwitter.

#BlackTwitter is a group of mainly high school, college aged, and 20 something African-Americans across the United States who are extremely vocal about their opinions of their communities and the world. If you go on twitter and look up the hashtag, #BlackTwitter, I am sure you will find thousands, if not millions, of Black twitter tweets discussing things as simple as rap music to politics within Black social structures. With many people across all races on twitter commenting about how they view the world—which I think is a reflection of themselves and their state of mind—I always question why African-Americans segregate themselves and their thoughts on twitter without any help from other races.

Doing an ethnography on #BlackTwitter users will help me to gain a better understanding of why Blacks find this community online to be beneficial to their culture. I would also like to study #BlackTwitter to analyze the need to create the community to begin with. Why is it so much easier to create short tweets about the problems within Black culture instead of dealing with the problems in real life? How can this online community be beneficial to younger generations that are joining Twitter everyday? What does creating #BlackTwitter say about the African-American community to others that are not familiar with this world? Analyzing young people who have gained popularity and insight through this online community should help to gain a better understanding of these media makers and why they are so influential to this technology generation.

My first hypertext essay is going to be on the topic of racial divide in the media industries. I came up with this idea because of the article we read in Race After the Internet called "New Voices on the Net?" This article by E.J. Wilson III and Sasha Costanza-Chock goes in brief depth about how the lack of racial and gender diversity in the media industries effects the United States socially and economically. After reading this article I was inspired to do my hypertext essay on the topic of racial divide because of how I can see it affects minorities in my day-to-day life. Granted I am quite biased for the position of African Americans in media industries because I think my race is never adequately represented in the media, but after some thinking it made me realized how "white washed" American society still is today.
The United States is growing more and more diverse but anytime white America gets a hold of something culturally different that they like, they seem to take the culture out of it. For example, southern cooking is something that is highly associated with the south and people seem to think that it's always been that way. One day I was overhearing a group of white men talking about how they hate when people say soul food because soul food is just typical southern cooking. Hearing this made me cringe because that took away everything that is culturally relevant with this specific cuisine. Soul food is slave food. African slaves made food for their masters using scraps and odd bits to season things so that food could be on the table for their white owners everyday. Soul food is culturally black and by just simply calling it southern cooking, you take away the stigma that some how makes "black food" a bad thing. Though that's just a small example of white washing I've seen it happen with Cinco de Mayo, the Chinese New Year, and so many other culturally distinct things from other races that white Americans have seem to "Americanized" for the enjoyment of everyone.
My goals for my hypertext essay are to explore as in depth in possible why and how the racial divide in media related industries affect minorities specifically in the United States. I want my hypertext essay to engage it's readers to question why people do not bring more attention to these issues. Why aren't Americans not upset that 90% of media makers and professionals represent a group of people that do not relate to them? American society accepts this white washing of everything from music, television, news, magazines, books and so many other media tools like it is the norm. This shouldn't be the case. The United States is growing increasingly more diverse, and to other looking in, all the prominent faces and voices of America are white or negatively stereotyped ideals of American Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans. I hope to invoke the question of how can we change this dilemma through my hypertext essay entitled Defining Us.

I'm thinking about doing my video ethnography project on #blacktwitter which a twitter community that updates African Americans on things happening in their community but it also starts major social and ethical conversations that seem to plague the black community. I have some friends who have quite a large following in the #blacktwitter community that I was considering interviewing for my project.