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.
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.