Emerging with Media
When I first thought about emerging media, my mind initially thought that new and most types of media I am not familiar or comfortable with. Social sites and digital spaces like Tik Tok, Discord, VR, and NFTs leave me feeling lost, mostly old. As a 32-year-old, I remember our family having one computer at my Aunt Michelle's where we needed to coordinate what time we could come cover because she did not want her phone line tied up as we were on her dial-up internet. I remember patiently waiting and hearing the computer scratches made to open my AOL account and Yahoo email. While we would share one-to-one instant messaging, at that point, I did not have a complete understanding of how vast the internet was, nor did I feel like it was social. My younger sister and I typically would message our small group of friends, but we mostly visited my aunt and uncle's place to practice typing on the Mavis Beacon application. Mavis was a Black woman who felt like an extension of my family and who taught me where to place my hands and type quickly without looking.
Then, in high school, I joined MySpace. Ellison and Boyd mention the history of media describing MySpace showcasing the "Top 8." Still, your personality through your profile picture and even a playlist users could curate as visitors came to your page. The article "Sociality Through Social Network Sites" redefines social networking sites by naming that the platform has distinctively identifiable profiles that users develop and share the content, connects are public and can be consumed, and others can interact with the content. In reflecting, I remember being a young person who created a unique MySpace profile and worked on writing posts about my teen life, showcasing my favorite shows (SpongeBob SquarePants) and my favorite music (Destiny's Child), developing a personality that was parallel to myself in real life and on the internet.
Over time the continued development of the internet, mobile phones, and applications, my understanding of emerging and new media developed as I grew up as a digital native. Still, I was also curious about creating space for myself and finding community. I came out as LGBT in college, and Tumblr was the safest place for me to not only find community but explore my identity beyond what queerness was assumed to be in the cornfields of Bowling Green, Ohio. Tumblr felt like an updated MySpace with its ability to really curate and individualize my presence online. It felt like an honor to the now distant developers and tech geeks who created social media that mattered to people, as Danah Boyd writes in "Social Media: A Phenomenon to be Analyzed". In my first year of college in 2008, Barack Obama was running for President, and I was just old enough to cast my first vote for him. Amid this Black family nearing and winning the White House, my political education was also born on the internet with Twitter and Facebook. Racism and the Confederate flag were closer than I had ever known, and I began to become more engaged in social justice issues. Boyd writes about how the 1990s tech developers developed the technology as a form of resistance to the dot-com era and that we, the people, were co-constructors of social media working to reflect values and norms against the ever-consumeristic, neo-capitalist, and data surveillance world that was developing. The internet developed me as an activist, especially during the time that Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and Michael Brown were murdered, and social media created a fear in me but also the bravery to join in political movements locally; I was the President of the Black Student Union, and nationally, becoming a founder of the Black Lives Matter, Atlanta chapter.
While in college and even graduate school, the internet became a scary and traumatizing place for me; I began to retreat from the use of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. While was also emerging as media is also emerging and becoming more and more important, the progress of Black activists, scholars, thinkers, and creators has helped me fall in love with social media all over again. Kamal Sinclair defined emerging media as:
… communication formats or channels in the process of becoming known as part of a long evolution of our communication architecture. That process involves an interplay between the following:
• Creatives (i.e., artists and scientists) who imagine an experience they want to communicate in a particular manner that cannot be done with existing media.
• Investors/Funders, who decide which ideas will be resourced for exploration;
• Technologists, who invent and iterate on tools (i.e., hardware, software) that facilitate the communication of the imagined experience;
• Marketers, who figure out how to persuade people to use the new medium;
• Audiences, who participate in the experience and provide feedback;
• Stakeholders who use the audience responses to innovate further.
While other scholarly definitions were provided, I found this take to be the most refreshing. Because rather than focusing on what is new and novel, emerging media is an extension of a long evolution of communication architecture. Sinclair's writing and other creators have moved me from the fearful pessimism I had for social media and into seeing it as an extension of my passion for art, photography, and storytelling. Emerging media is flexible and can look in many ways. One of the most exciting perspectives shared by Morgan Willis, who was interviewed by Sinclair, shares how emerging media is decentering legitimacy. The landscape and space for stories are wide open, and I am excited to emerge with them.
