André Brock
Biographic Data
| ID | 227557 |
|---|---|
| NAME | André Brock |
| GIVEN NAMES | André |
| FAMILY NAME | Brock |
| SIGNATURE | BROCK A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Iowa |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6084-9995 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 144 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Illumination of Black Twitter: Charles Mills, Race, and Digital Media Theory
Social networks are simultaneously information and media platforms, but Blackness becomes understood differently depending upon which frame is deployed. While Black media creators have been lauded for their inventive enlivening of digital and social media technologies, Black information users are often considered as lacking technical, written, or mainstream cultural literacies. Mills’ works – from ‘Alternative Epistemologies’ to The Racial Contra…
Technics: Media in the Digital Age
The Key Debates series was launched in 2010 with the aim of revisiting "the central issues that continue to animate thinking about film and audiovisual media," which we have now done across ten volumes.All of these have followed a pattern of reexamining foundational texts and issues, while also investigating new lines of transmission and interpretation.Our book series' dual interest in foundations and novel lines of inquiry is demonstrated by the…
Mode of Black Life
This discussion essay offers a Black digital perspective on Lewis R. Gordon's Fear of Black Consciousness (2022). Through a reading of Blackness as an informational and ratchet identity, the author contends that the typographic duality of a lowercase blackness and an uppercase Blackness offers a liminal, fleeting opportunity for Black digital agency between these two states
Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures
This book addresses Black culture, Web 2.0, and social networks from new methodological perspectives. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis, the chapters within examine Black-designed digital technologies, Black-authored websites, and Black-dominated social media services such as Black Twitter. Distributed Blackness also features an innovative theoretical approach to Black digital practice. The book uses libidinal economy to examine Bl…
Black Technoculture and/as Afrofuturism
This essay argues for a reboot of Afrofuturism: a thoughtful engagement with the Black everyday, enacted through technoculture, to ground continued speculation on possible Afro Futures. This approa...
Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures
Critical technocultural discourse analysis
Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) is a multimodal analytic technique for the investigation of Internet and digital phenomena, artifacts, and culture. It integrates an analysis of the technological artifact and user discourse, framed by cultural theory, to unpack semiotic and material connections between form, function, belief, and meaning of information and communication technologies (ICTs). CTDA requires the incorporation of crit…
Deeper data: A response to boyd and Crawford
Data analysis of any sort is most effective when researchers first take account of the complex ideological processes underlying data’s originating impetus, selection bias, and semiotic affordances of the information and communication technologies (ICTs) under examination
Interrogating information access: Quantitative and qualitative research on digital divides
From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation
“He can read my writing but he sho can't read my mind.” —Zora Neale Hurston Twitter's combination of brevity, multi-platform access, and feedback mechanisms has enabled it to gain mindshare far out of proportion to its actual user base, including an extraordinary number of Black users. How best to understand Twitter's reception and uptake by Black Americans, who surprisingly comprise over a quarter of all U.S. Twitter users? This article approach…
Beyond the pale: The Blackbird web browser’s critical reception
The browser has become part of our communicative infrastructure, invisible to our information literacy practices until a rupture occurs. In December 2008, the Mozilla-variant ‘niche’ browser, Blackbird, was released. Blackbird’s cultural affiliation with African American users became the rupture for pundits and early adopters. It was derided as racist, unnecessary, and pejorative to the actual needs of Black internet users. This article examines …
When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong: Resident Evil 5, Racial Representation, and Gamers
Videogames' ability to depict cultural iconographies and characters have occasionally led to accusations of insensitivity. This article examines gamers' reactions to a developer's use of Africans as enemies in a survival horror videogame, Resident Evil 5. Their reactions offer insight into how videogames represent Whiteness and White privilege within the social structure of ''play.'' Omi and Winant's (1994) racial formation theory notes that race…
Cultural Appropriations of Technical Capital: Black women, weblogs, and the digital divide
The aim of this paper is to use cultural and technical capital as a sensitizing framework for exploring novel ways of thinking about information and communication technology and social inequalities. This paper takes a particular focus on three weblogs in which women of different ages, social classes, and races constructed discourses on Black womanhood. The participants employed their personal experiences, structural analyses of racism and sexism,…
Life on the Wire: Deconstructing race on the Internet
This paper focuses on the construction of racial identity online through the mediating influences of popular culture, old media, weblogs, and Internet users. This paper examines the production of race on the Internet by examining the elements that make up the weblog Freakonomics: the topic, the environment, the medium, and the users. Recent cyberculture research has called for Internet studies to integrate critical theories of race and culture in…
A Belief in Humanity is a Belief in Colored Men: Using Culture to Span the Digital Divide
Building on Harrison and Zappen’s (2003) contention that technologies are infused with the values and social goals of their creators, I argue that Web content reproduces existing norms, rules, and power relations, some of which may prove inimical to Black identity, culture, and information needs. To explore this claim, I construct a culture-specific framework based on W. E. B. DuBois’ analysis of race and racism in the United States, that is then…
Critical technocultural discourse analysis
Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) is a multimodal analytic technique for the investigation of Internet and digital phenomena, artifacts, and culture. It integrates an analysis of the technological artifact and user discourse, framed by cultural theory, to unpack semiotic and material connections between form, function, belief, and meaning of information and communication technologies (ICTs). CTDA requires the incorporation of crit…
When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong: Resident Evil 5, Racial Representation, and Gamers
Videogames' ability to depict cultural iconographies and characters have occasionally led to accusations of insensitivity. This article examines gamers' reactions to a developer's use of Africans as enemies in a survival horror videogame, Resident Evil 5. Their reactions offer insight into how videogames represent Whiteness and White privilege within the social structure of ''play.'' Omi and Winant's (1994) racial formation theory notes that race…
A Belief in Humanity is a Belief in Colored Men: Using Culture to Span the Digital Divide
Building on Harrison and Zappen’s (2003) contention that technologies are infused with the values and social goals of their creators, I argue that Web content reproduces existing norms, rules, and power relations, some of which may prove inimical to Black identity, culture, and information needs. To explore this claim, I construct a culture-specific framework based on W. E. B. DuBois’ analysis of race and racism in the United States, that is then…
Deeper data: A response to boyd and Crawford
Data analysis of any sort is most effective when researchers first take account of the complex ideological processes underlying data’s originating impetus, selection bias, and semiotic affordances of the information and communication technologies (ICTs) under examination
Beyond the pale: The Blackbird web browser’s critical reception
The browser has become part of our communicative infrastructure, invisible to our information literacy practices until a rupture occurs. In December 2008, the Mozilla-variant ‘niche’ browser, Blackbird, was released. Blackbird’s cultural affiliation with African American users became the rupture for pundits and early adopters. It was derided as racist, unnecessary, and pejorative to the actual needs of Black internet users. This article examines …
A Belief in Humanity is a Belief in Colored Men: Using Culture to Span the Digital Divide
Building on Harrison and Zappen’s (2003) contention that technologies are infused with the values and social goals of their creators, I argue that Web content reproduces existing norms, rules, and power relations, some of which may prove inimical to Black identity, culture, and information needs. To explore this claim, I construct a culture-specific framework based on W. E. B. DuBois’ analysis of race and racism in the United States, that is then…
Life on the Wire: Deconstructing race on the Internet
This paper focuses on the construction of racial identity online through the mediating influences of popular culture, old media, weblogs, and Internet users. This paper examines the production of race on the Internet by examining the elements that make up the weblog Freakonomics: the topic, the environment, the medium, and the users. Recent cyberculture research has called for Internet studies to integrate critical theories of race and culture in…
Cultural Appropriations of Technical Capital: Black women, weblogs, and the digital divide
The aim of this paper is to use cultural and technical capital as a sensitizing framework for exploring novel ways of thinking about information and communication technology and social inequalities. This paper takes a particular focus on three weblogs in which women of different ages, social classes, and races constructed discourses on Black womanhood. The participants employed their personal experiences, structural analyses of racism and sexism,…
Beyond the pale: The Blackbird web browser’s critical reception
The browser has become part of our communicative infrastructure, invisible to our information literacy practices until a rupture occurs. In December 2008, the Mozilla-variant ‘niche’ browser, Blackbird, was released. Blackbird’s cultural affiliation with African American users became the rupture for pundits and early adopters. It was derided as racist, unnecessary, and pejorative to the actual needs of Black internet users. This article examines …
When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong: Resident Evil 5, Racial Representation, and Gamers
Videogames' ability to depict cultural iconographies and characters have occasionally led to accusations of insensitivity. This article examines gamers' reactions to a developer's use of Africans as enemies in a survival horror videogame, Resident Evil 5. Their reactions offer insight into how videogames represent Whiteness and White privilege within the social structure of ''play.'' Omi and Winant's (1994) racial formation theory notes that race…
From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation
“He can read my writing but he sho can't read my mind.” —Zora Neale Hurston Twitter's combination of brevity, multi-platform access, and feedback mechanisms has enabled it to gain mindshare far out of proportion to its actual user base, including an extraordinary number of Black users. How best to understand Twitter's reception and uptake by Black Americans, who surprisingly comprise over a quarter of all U.S. Twitter users? This article approach…
Interrogating information access: Quantitative and qualitative research on digital divides
Deeper data: A response to boyd and Crawford
Data analysis of any sort is most effective when researchers first take account of the complex ideological processes underlying data’s originating impetus, selection bias, and semiotic affordances of the information and communication technologies (ICTs) under examination
Critical technocultural discourse analysis
Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) is a multimodal analytic technique for the investigation of Internet and digital phenomena, artifacts, and culture. It integrates an analysis of the technological artifact and user discourse, framed by cultural theory, to unpack semiotic and material connections between form, function, belief, and meaning of information and communication technologies (ICTs). CTDA requires the incorporation of crit…
Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures
This book addresses Black culture, Web 2.0, and social networks from new methodological perspectives. Using critical technocultural discourse analysis, the chapters within examine Black-designed digital technologies, Black-authored websites, and Black-dominated social media services such as Black Twitter. Distributed Blackness also features an innovative theoretical approach to Black digital practice. The book uses libidinal economy to examine Bl…
Black Technoculture and/as Afrofuturism
This essay argues for a reboot of Afrofuturism: a thoughtful engagement with the Black everyday, enacted through technoculture, to ground continued speculation on possible Afro Futures. This approa...
Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures
Technics: Media in the Digital Age
The Key Debates series was launched in 2010 with the aim of revisiting "the central issues that continue to animate thinking about film and audiovisual media," which we have now done across ten volumes.All of these have followed a pattern of reexamining foundational texts and issues, while also investigating new lines of transmission and interpretation.Our book series' dual interest in foundations and novel lines of inquiry is demonstrated by the…
Mode of Black Life
This discussion essay offers a Black digital perspective on Lewis R. Gordon's Fear of Black Consciousness (2022). Through a reading of Blackness as an informational and ratchet identity, the author contends that the typographic duality of a lowercase blackness and an uppercase Blackness offers a liminal, fleeting opportunity for Black digital agency between these two states
The Illumination of Black Twitter: Charles Mills, Race, and Digital Media Theory
Social networks are simultaneously information and media platforms, but Blackness becomes understood differently depending upon which frame is deployed. While Black media creators have been lauded for their inventive enlivening of digital and social media technologies, Black information users are often considered as lacking technical, written, or mainstream cultural literacies. Mills’ works – from ‘Alternative Epistemologies’ to The Racial Contra…
Computer Science (12 works) · Social Media and Politics (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Psychology (5 works) · World Wide Web (5 works) · Digital Communication and Language (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Gender Studies (3 works) · Media Studies and Communication (3 works) · Political science (3 works)