We Tried to Tell Y'All : Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives

Black Twitter is all at once a social media phenomenon, a place, and a people. Through interviews with Black social media users, news media analysis, and her own perspecive as a Black Xennial journalist, Meredith D. Clark makes a definitive contribution on the digital legacy of Black media production in the 21st century. We Tried to Tell Y''all: Black Twtter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives, offers both testimony and admonition to those whose sense of ''the Black experience in America'' relies solely on news and entertainment media.

Through interviews, news analysis, and personal observation, Meredith D. Clark presents the first book about how Black Twitter users carved out a vital space for fast-paced, incisive commentary on Black life in America not found in the mainstream press. Since 1827, when Freedom''s Journal, the first newspaper to be published by free Black men in the United States, Black folks have been making use of the media technologies available to them to tell their own stories in their own ways. In We Tried to Tell Y''all: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives, Meredith D. Clark explains how Black social media users subvert the digital divide narrative while confronting centuries of erasure, omission, and mischaracterization of Black life in ''mainstream'' media. This ethnographic exploration of Black Twitter draws on news media analysis, in-depth interviews, and personal observation to trace the phenomenon''s three levels of community connection, and advances a theory of Black Digital Resistance that illustrates how Black social media users harnessed the platform to annotate and narrate everything from play to protest to everyday life. From chapters that recognize the "locomotive power" of Black women and femmes'' intellectual labor to a thorough takedown of so-called "cancel culture", We Tried to Tell Y''all offers readers a rich exploration of the latest chapter of Black media production. Regardless of the future direction of the platform, Black Twitter will forever remain an important moment in the long history of the Black press and Black social movements in the United States.