Prometheus 6

I just made the hotel reservations.

ASALH's 91st Annual Convention
Atlanta, GA USA
September 27 - October 1, 2006
Celebrating Community: A Tribute to Black Fraternal, Social, and Civic Institutions

ASALH's Annual Convention in Atlanta will be special. We will celebrate black institutional life in a city rich with black institutions. As has become the custom, the convention will be both an academic conference and a celebration of black life and history. Events such as our new Institution Builders Reception, Youth Day, the ASALH Film Festival, the Black History Tours, and the Friday Unveiling of the Carter G. Woodson Library Collection at Emory University, will bring together the Atlanta community and our conventioneers.

Said reservations were made because Professor Kim and I are going to do a panel discussion inspired by this here study.

Self-Presentation In Cyberspace: The Internet and The Construction Of
'Community' Among African-American Social Groups by William Berry

The objective of this study was to determine how selected
African-American recreational and leisure organizations (e.g., skiers,
golfers, reading clubs, anglers, steppers teams, etc.) are presented
and represented via the Internet, and to examine the extent to which
those groups use the World Wide Web as an interactive communications
resource, including as a site for establishing social networks and
some conceptualizations of virtual "communitiy." Anyone who drops in
an African American barbershop or hair salon or tunes in to a call-in
program on BET or ethnic radio will hear the message expressed that
Blacks often are ignored altogether or, more often, presented in a
negative light in mainstream communications media. Studies of
advertisements, newspapers, movies, television entertainment and
television news programs have confirmed this (Entman, 1992; Oliver,
1994; Gilliam, Iyengar & Wright, 1996); Dixon & Linz, 2000). While
researchers have studied how African Americans are represented in more
traditional media forms and formats, few scholars have examined the
content of the Internet to determine the images presented there of
this sector of the U.S. population. The hypothesis and expectation of
this study was that because many Internet representations are
constructed by individuals and organizations themselves, the
construction of African-American identity in cyberspace not only will
be less negative, but also more prevalent, self-affirming and
laudatory, given that the editorial "gatekeepers" who control and
restrict access to traditional media have less influence concerning
who gets their messages and materials posted on the Internet. Findings
confirmed the hypotheses.

Truth, I haven't seen the study yet...I need to read it.

My part of the panel discussion will look something like this.

I'll be discussing the online communities I've been a part of, with
particular focus on two that I had significant influence on.

• Black Issues/Black Experience conference on RIME, a computer bulletin board network
• Prometheus 6, a public Internet weblog

In each case I was creating a free discussion space for Black people,
but the conditions I had to work under were totally different. In the
first case I was a "conference host" with no real power in the network
other than to report violations of network rules and arguing the case
when the violator inevitably denied the offence. In the second case I
was, and remain, the sole owner and operator of the web site, which
operates at my descretion.

Other topics will include my impression of others' efforts at creating
Black online personae and responding to white folks in Black spaces.

I'll be messing around with some of the issues I want to go over in future posts here. Maybe make a cute button for the sidebar. And I'll probably annoy folks with infrequent but regular reminders.