Black Lives Matter and Communications Technologies

Abstract

I t has been often noted that the history of Black American activism from slavery to the present has been catalyzed by developments in communications technology. This has been especially true in moments of crisis when activists and intellectuals havemoved quickly to take advantage of sudden shifts in themedia environment to convey their message and organize themselves. The posters and pamphlets that detonated the British movement against the transatlantic slave trade were signal expressions of late eighteenth-century culture made possible by a new kind of printing plate produced from plaster molds. Likewise the abolitionist movement in the United States was amplified in mass-produced pamphlets and newspapers made possible by cheaper costs of steam-powered printing. The civil rights movement in the United States was expanded and strengthened by unprecedented andwidely circulated photographic evidence of atrocities committed against Black Americans, including images of Emmett Till’s corpse published in Jet magazine and news broadcasts of protestors and bystanders attacked with police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1991 the LA police roadside beating of Rodney King was filmedby GeorgeHolliday on a SonyHandycam, creating what many have called thefirst viral video, which set off an insurrection that remains a vital precedent for current activism against police brutality. The articles surveyed in this note take this story up to our present, considering how contemporary movements take advantage of the affordances of media and social network technologies to organize and advance their work. These movements have produced new kinds of political documentation, which are leading to new archives and new styles of analysis. Obviously there is nothing at all about these social movements that is reducible to the mediums through which they have been documented and expressed. These essays propose, however, the need to take into account how the success of these movements has been enabled in part by their ready adaptation not only to new platforms (such as Twitter and Instagram) but also to new styles of communication (such as hashtags and memes). In their wide-ranging essay “#StayWoke: The Language and Literacies of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” Elaine Richardson and Alice Ragland show that the “rhetorical practices” and “cultural literacies” of