Black Twitter Research Paper

The emergence of a community known as “Black Twitter” cannot be traced separately from the emergence of Twitter on the social networking scene. While the exact time frame that the community formed is unclear, the demographic makeup, uses, and impact of the community are known to help understand the history of the group. Black Twitter is a cultural community that has grown from out of nowhere. There are no single identifiers or characteristics that define the member of the community as easily as we are able to define communities in the physical non-digital world. In fact, while many movements and protests have been arranged by and because of the community, the community holds a variety of viewpoints that are very often contradictory, but reflective

Black Twitter is a social construct that has been formed on the social networking site Twitter of self-selecting and self-identifying users. These users utilize their online personas to describe various aspects and the experience of Black life in American society. Even with this, everyone who is a member of Black Twitter is not racially identifiable as Black. Nor is every user that is Black on the site a member of, or even represented by, Black Twitter. In fact, nearly one in four African Americans are actually self-identifying as a member of Black Twitter (Duggan and Brenner). The Pew Research Center’s 2012 report on the demographics of social media users show that the Twitter is most appealing to African American and Latino urban residents between the ages of 18-29. Very little academic research has actually been done on, or even recognizes Black Twitter as a distinct sub-community of Twitter. It is not surprising that this is community makes up

With Twitter as a public forum, users are allowed to openly and clearly express themselves. Black Twitter utilizes “signifying” in order to express themselves through Twitter. Sociologist Sarah Florini defines signifying as a use of “figurative language, indirectness, doubleness, and wordplay as a means of conveying multiple layers of meaning” (Florini). Signifying is all a part of the performance on Black Twitter to utilize a space to be understood, but also misunderstood in a certain way that allows for meaningful impact and conversation. Florini adds, “these performances can foster levels of intimacy that may sustain and further cultivate social ties.” Additionally, Twitter allows for users to utilize the function of “hashtagging”. A hashtag is a number sign that precedes a word or phrase. This originates from early coding in computer programing, where certain key phrases and commands would be set apart from the rest of the code and searchable through the use of hashtags. (Kernighan and