The Digital CultureSHIFT: Moving from Scale to Power to Achieve Racial Justice - Response

 

The Digital Cultureshift: Moving from Scale to Power to Achieve Racial Justice

Area 1:

   As the supposed democratization of political and social outreach continues to grow with the access to mobile technology and social media, why is it that we have not seen a tremendous progress in the status quo when it comes to institutional racism? This transcript from the keynote The Digital CultureSHIFT: Moving from Scale to Power to Achieve Racial Justice explores that question through a myriad of avenues and issues including: the sensationalist nature of news broadcasts, diversity in news media, net neutrality, the surveillance state, and the power of the individual story. While digital technologies are a great tool in theory for the awareness of racial injustices, the way they are structured, and their surrounding context, can make it difficult.

     

Area 2:

   The discussion of how social media is structured to perpetuate the suppression of marginalized stories was very interesting to me. I have always heard the old adage of “If you're not paying for it, you become the product” when it comes to social media, but this reading reminded me of the ways in which this manifests, especially when it comes to people of color who often have their tragedies morphed into a marketable source of revenue and traffic. In the same vein, when a person from a marginalized group is given a platform, they are often encouraged to “sell” it in a way that can be understood by those with inherent privileges. As someone who regularly scrolls through social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit, it is not shocking for me to see instances of inequity and exploitation with thousands of likes and comments. However, it seems like very few people involved are actually interested in inciting real-world change, but rather they just get caught up in the spectacle of it.