#Ferguson Digital protest, hashtag ethno

#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States Bonilla & Rosa, 2014

Useful for thinking about where the paly study goes next. This week’s readings, particularly the Bonilla and Rosa piece, answer the question I asked earlier. 

Shared temporality: I remember participating in Tahrir Square

Within this context, social media participation be- comes a key site from which to contest mainstream me- dia silences and the long history of state-sanctioned vio- lence against racialized populations. Upon announcing the Ferguson grand jury decision, St. Louis prosecutor Robert McCulloch claimed that media coverage, and particularly social media, had posed “the most significant challenge” to his investigation. Social media cast a spotlight on this small Missouri township, but more importantly, by pro- pelling Ferguson into a broader, mediatized, virtual space, social media users were able to show that “#Ferguson is everywhere”—not only in the sense of a broad public sphere but also in the sense of the underlying social and political relationships that haunt the nation as a whole.

Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller 2012 Digital Anthropology. London: Berg Publishers. Bruns, Axel, and Jean Burgess 2011 The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics. Paper presented at the European Consortium for Po- litical Research conference, Reykjavik, August 25–27. “Black Twitter” (Florini 2014; Sharma 2013)  some suggest that the viral- ity and ephemerality of social media can only ever produce fleeting “nanostories” (Wasik 2009)

Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press.

Baudriard, Disney Land, the real and the fantastical 

Nikassis, Brand, citationality, performativity

Yuri McMillan Embodied avatars