On mainstreaming black folk for the web

In 1997 I wrote an essay entitled “Is the Web too Cool for Blacks?” In it, I suggested that blacks were not flocking to the then-nascent Web because its chaotic, unconventional mechanisms ran counter to the very conservative impulses that run deep in the Afro-American psyche. “Yes,” I wrote, “black folks brought you jazz. Yes, we are famed in the popular mind for adapting forms of music, speech and worship to suit our own ends, the rules be damned. And we have historically been demonized in the majority mind for congenital lawlessness. Yet, in fact, we are the product of a culture that is among the most conventional and, yes, even timid in modern America.”

Asked to take another look at that piece, I see that blacks have largely bridged the famed digital divide. We still lag somewhat in high-speed access, but that gap, too, is closing. This, however, is less a testament to our rousing ourselves from a shattering complacency than a sign of the deep mainstreaming of the Web, which is now an engine of the status quo. Yes, some insurgents snuck through the door when it was still wide open, but by and large, the big players online are the most familiar ones: TimeWarner, Microsoft (failing for now to gobble Yahoo), CNN, News Corp, Viacom (which ate BET) etc. Back in ‘97, it seemed the Web might be anybody’s playground, but like one of those retro games in which you tilt the little balls into the clown’s eyes, the universes of power and information have come to rest in their standard orbits. Oh well…