The Past, Present, and Future of the Black Lives Matter Network

You won’t see Cathy Hughes or her son Alfred
C. Liggins III named in recent headlines about Michael Brown and
Ferguson, Missouri. Sherrard Burton, Lee Bailey, and brothers
Tuckett and Michael Waite have not been
commanding candidates’ attention about how their presidencies will make Black
lives matter. We don’t associate these folks and others like them with the more
visible, more vociferous and more technologically mediated fight for racial
justice that many dub the “new civil rights movement.” But we should know their
names; they represent the many Web designers, software engineers, digital and media
entrepreneurs of color whose pioneering work in the early days of the Internet
powerfully contributed to today’s digital movement.

What’s new about the present movement is that a new generation of
activists comprises its front lines.
This younger cohort favors distributed leadership over following individual
leaders and holds the civil rights establishment at arms length. More
importantly, their efforts are distinguished by their ability to master and
marshal digital technology to mobilize people and resources. Their pioneering
efforts both innovate and stand on the shoulders of decades of organizing in
the streets and online and are an early indication of how the movement will
evolve in the coming years.

And they’re getting results. Consider that BlackLivesMatter.com alone
eclipses, on average, all member civil rights organizations that make up the
coalition of the Leadership Conference. Content from
the BlackLivesMatter.com homepage (created on July 7, 2013) has been shared
fourteen times more than the collective others, and its overall traffic rank
(MozRank) eclipses fifty-one (out of 59) other sites. Accomplishing this level
of visibility and circulation in such a short period of time (especially when
rankings weight site longevity so heavily) reveals a sophisticated
understanding of the Web’s social structure and audience economy. The
principals of Black Lives Matter exercised considerable technological erudition
to capitalize on and exploit the network infrastructure that existed when it
burst onto the scene.

But it is important to know the origins, complexity and sophistication
of what I refer to as the movement network, the current linkages between
websites and social media channels that distribute content by, about and in the
interest of Black Lives Matter and the broader movement that bears its name. If
we fall prey to a technological myopia that obscures the Black Lives Matter
movement’s digital past, we risk muting the impact of its present and future
significance.

Future allies to today’s Black Lives Matter movement have been blazing
the technological trail since the 1990s. How did we get here from there?
Understanding how these digital pathways and networks first formed and developed
over the past two decades reveals key reasons why today’s racial justice
movement flourishes online.

Sites distributing the Black Lives Matter message today are actually
pretty old (remember, the Internet went public around 1992 and the Internet
usage gap between blacks and whites had all but disappeared by 2000). Some, (like
aidamanduley.com) are mere infants, arriving just two months ago. But the
oldest (such as MTV.com) have been around for 21 years, and more than half date
back at least a decade. The volume of content shared by these sites palpably
demonstrates how site longevity contributes to the movement’s present success
in distributing content. There is a clear correlation; older sites equal more
shares. Median number of shares from sites ten years older and more equal 1,757
compared to 150 from those younger.

As important as site longevity
is, however, it takes a network to build a movement. Over the past year, I have
sampled the vast network of sites linking to Black Lives Matter (through its
website, a hashtag or its various social media channels) and using website “birthdates,”
reverse engineered the present network. What I have found by comparing the
movement networks of 1999 and today is that this movement was not created
spontaneously; it was engineered and evolved over time.

Today’s online movement network, which features strategic and
spontaneous relationships among its hubs, grew from a collection of disparate
sites that existed in the late 1990s. While 15 percent of sites in today’s
movement network existed in 1999, barely one percent of the total connections
that bind these sites together today existed back then.

Lacking connective tissue, the 1999 network was impotent to pursue common
ends in the way that the Black Lives Matter network fuses local and national
concerns, but it was beginning to organize potential connections. Legacy cultural
publications like Essence and Ebony, as well as pioneering,
exclusively digital sites like AllAfrica and NewsOne were increasing the reach
of online content to Black readers and paving the way for the future significance
of the music and pop culture sites like BET and RadioOne to increasingly
non-white web users.

The possibilities for extended reach to black web users were also
emerging in the traditional news media sites dotting the Web in the late
nineties, and the newly-minted blogs and news aggregators spanning the ideological
spectrum (from Salon.com to the Drudge Report). Sites like Human Rights
Watch and federal government information sites were planting the seeds for future
digital connections between advocates and powerbrokers.

In the late 1990s, these sites were hanging loose—maximizing digital
tools, cultivating audiences and spaces for people of color to congregate, and
expanding the public sphere available to discuss and critique the significance
of race. They were waiting for the evolutionary leaps that would provide both
the impetus and the concrete pathways to connect and collaborate to advance racial
justice.

Networks mutate, and the connections they form shape their identity and
what they are poised to do. This critical process began for today’s Black Lives
Matter network between 2006-2011, when the percentage of network connections
increased most dramatically. In my analysis, I discovered that two sites with
surprising and contrasting politics—FeministWire and GatewayPundit—were primarily
responsible for mediating this connective growth. Both highlight two of the
movement’s defining organizing characteristics: intersectionality and ideological
antagonism.

As a critical online hub, TheFeministWire.com brands the network as
intersectional and staunchly feminist. Founded in 2010 by a collective of
academics and writers set out to critique the myriad forms of feminism, the
site expands the movement’s reach by providing multiple points of connection
and exchange for individuals and groups with different social, racial and
political identities. The site’s ego network (the site itself and its direct
connection to other sites) reveals strong connections to four primary communities:
feminist (through other sites like Feministing.com), religious (e.g., uuse.org),
progressive, leftwing (e.g., Truth-Out.org and TheNation.com), and the academy
(folks with advanced degrees connected to higher education institutions pervade
these sites as content producers).

GatewayPundit.com, whose owner and content are fiercely conservative and
libertarian, emerged in 2004; it serves as a gateway to virtually every major
rightwing site. Since its inception, the site has frequently produced content
about racial issues and controversies. Although its framing of racial issues
contrasts sharply with much Black Lives Matter content, the site’s network
presence is important as the movement’s opposition, interlocutor, and foil. GatewayPundit.com
consistently expresses the contrary positions and policies that define the
terms of debate. This ensures that the Black Lives Matter movement’s message
and prescriptions for change do not exist in a vacuum.

By consistently keeping allied political communities connected and
helping opponents to organize controversial counterarguments, FeministWire and
GatewayPundit respectively laid the groundwork during the mid-2000s for a
receptive, networked response to later developments in the movement for racial
justice: Black Twitter, cell phone videos going viral, and the tragically
persistent occurrences of violence against Black Americans.

While infrastructure is critically important, it is also useless without
agency. Key activist figures in the Black Lives Matter movement engineered our present
moment by both cultivating and exercising the necessary technological expertise,
and demonstrating the political savoir-faire to know how to most effectively access
and build on the network that preceded them.

It’s critical to analyze and understand the past and present of the
Black Lives Matter network as we move toward its future, because the narratives
spun from a movement’s origin stories can determine its impact and outcomes
even decades later. Historians for instance
have shown that neoconservative arguments portraying the civil rights movement
as a brief effort limited to the 1960s blunted the movement’s effectiveness and
weakened its power to influence future generations by obscuring the ties
between the 1960s and the multitude of freedom struggles initiated since the
fall of Reconstruction.

If we are to avoid the same pitfalls, our narratives about what I call
the digital phase of the long civil rights movement must not be severed from
its technological history, where people of color – website designers, software
engineers, digital entrepreneurs, and social critics – labored, innovated, and
produced a foundation for the movement to continue well into the future.