Consider a collector who writes a postcard to a loved one from a position of caring and, on the other side of this correspondence, shares an image of someone being brutally murdered.
We should ask ourselves about similar models of commitment and complicity that are implemented in this moment in which we look at things through our screens, exchanging materials of violence against black people. The question, really, is how this can be sustained by a broader public as part of the Internet economy.
Given the speed at which black images move across the Internet, so quickly stripped of all context, is there any way to regain ownership?
Part of the interest in writing black meme, and for it to exist as a physical (book) away from our screens, was the idea of creating slow media. So the slow media that then intersected with the fast media of now (cyberspace and digital space) are very critical because part of this discussion is around mitigating speed.
What happens when things circulate and are compressed in massive acceleration, when many things are perceived as copies of copies? Images degrade over time. We often don’t see them as they are. We are seeing them as an outline rather than better understanding and situating the truth that lives within that transmission. What I propose is the need to engage a different model of thinking around the transmission of black culture, as well as black people and their representation through and beyond our screens.
The opposite of slow media is our current reality. We are bombarded with media at all times. The speed is constant and unpredictable. What is the danger of how social media, specifically digital spaces like Instagram or TikTok, have shaped our understanding of how memes live or die?
It is important to ask questions about the sustainability of the black meme.
Sustainability, yes.
Vine in particular was a place where many Black people created space and community, as well as engaged in performative actions. I call it performative action because it was presented in different forms of sound interaction, movement and gesture patterns. The very idea of Vine was essentially a site where black people put it to good use, and then it reached a point where it could no longer stand on its own, and from there came the rise of Instagram. Now TikTok is part of that larger equation, of that brief, furious history.
Platforms like TikTok are increasingly under scrutiny because they are used as sites of organizing and sharing for and by people of color in many different diasporas. As economies change in that space, certain platforms cease to exist or collapse entirely, the question is: who does that affect?
Generative AI seeks to automate every part of our lives. In black meme, you ask for royalties and reparations around those issues. What does this mean for the images we will increasingly encounter, specifically within the black visual medium? Are they threatened or is a new window opening?
That’s a great question. It might be helpful to complicate rather than simplify.
OK.
As we’ve seen in the early stories of digital automation, many think pieces have been written about the feminization of automated work and what that looks like. Be it the feminized frame of Alexa or Siri. There are aspects of these technologies within the economics of gender and class, and also in the economics of race, although this is discussed less frequently. There has always been a gender imprint within technologies as a means of making them familiar.