Race and Social Media: How to Push the Conversation Forward

"2014 was the year everyone started talking about race," said Jenna Wortham, a New York Times technology reporter, at the Theorizing the Web conference in Brooklyn on Saturday. "Let's not let 2014 be the only year that everyone started talking about race."

Wortham's sentiment embodied the conference's keynote plenary, called "Race and Social Media," which considered how social media can amplify — and hinder — discourse about race, how we use social networks for social justice, and whether they're even the right tools to use.

Lisa Nakamura, professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and the author of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, said that in recent years, race theory has focused more on feeling: bodily experience, affects and trauma. Read more...