This dialogue features media historian Dr. Jane Rhodes, who tends to “think back as well as forward,” and media sociologist Dr. Herman Gray, who asks a guiding question of Black media studies, “What does Black add to [the] formulation [of Black media studies]?”
“We’re competing in a world of production, and consumption, and circulation that I don’t think that we’ve seen before and the velocity of it is so intense, and the impacts of it are so intense. And so the capacity to silo ourselves and speak only to the echo chambers in which we operate makes this challenge even more urgent…We are now in the midst of participating in these industrial logics. We are nodal points.”
“Totally. Right now on Zoom we’re doing it and we’re all constantly contributing to the algorithm regardless of what control we think we have.”