Reading
- Neill Selwyn, “Reconsidering political and popular understandings of the digital divide”, New Media & Society, 2004
- Also please watch this video of a talk by Safiya Noble, “Speaking Black, Speaking Back: Counternarrating the Erasure of African American ‘Technigrationists’”, at the Command Lines conference. That link should bring you to the start of her talk, which begins at minute 39 and continues for 20 minutes until the 1 hour mark. For more context, the Command Lines conference program is available here
- (Optional.) André Brock, “‘a Belief in Humanity is a Belief in Colored Men:’ Using Culture to Span the Digital Divide“, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2006 (Note: I previously had the wrong date here)
- (Optional.) Elise Lemire, Black Walden, excerpts.
Objects
Let’s also think this week about the Technological Disobedience project, by Ernesto Oroza: an archive of objects that represent hacks, kludges, workarounds, and other forms of vernacular innovation created out of necessity by everyday people in Cuba during times of scarcity. Much of this work was documented by the Cuban government itself as Con Nuestros Propios Esfuerzos to “encourage and empower the population to keep building, repairing and reinventing their surroundings.” How is Con Nuestros Propios Esfuerzos (With Our Own Efforts) similar and different from DIY culture (“do-it-yourself”) and the so-called Maker Movement?
Please read some of this great interview with Oroza here from here from Assemble Papers.
[Big thanks to Amy for bringing this up in class and reminding me of it again, which prompted me to share it with you all this week.]
Listen
- Kai Wright, “40 Acres in Mississippi”, The United States of Anxiety, January 2020. This is a longer radio segment (45 mints) originally broadcast on WNYC. It discusses another very different take on “back to the lang” than the perspectives we’ve been looking at in class so far. Rather than the off-the-grid folks in the Vannini and Taggart documentary, the New Communalists of Fred Turner’s book, and the radical feminist separatists, this pieces discusses the apocryphal promise of “40 acres and a mule” to formerly enslaved African American people in the US, and how, in this case, that has yielded a commitment among one Black family to self sufficiency and holding on to a plot of farmland for generations.