DISCO Field Reviews

Kevin Winstead and André Brock explore the growing anxieties around the changing social media ecosystem and, more specifically, the unease of Black social media researchers around increasingly inaccessible or decayed digital cultural data. Addressing this critical juncture for the Internet, Winstead and Brock explore best archival practices and institutional apparatus for the preservation of the digital mundane through two presentations delivered during the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2023 conference: 1) the case of @Crystal1Johnson, a Russian-controlled account on multiple SNS aimed at creating misinformation during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement’s engagement with the 2016 presidential campaign; 2) the Library of Congress’ efforts to archive Twitter.

Lida Zeitlin-Wu analyzes the visual, haptic, and auditory features of popular meditation apps such as Headspace and Calm. She reveals how these apps look, sound and move in a way that claims to be deracinated and apolitical, but are in fact designed for an assumed white and able-bodied user while capitalizing on a sanitized version of "Eastern philosophies" (particularly Zen Buddhism).

Rianna Walcott examines how migration and making a way out of no way is a historical condition of transatlantic Blackness that has mapped onto the digital. Here she posits that Black migration — both voluntary and involuntary, physical and digital — converts unfamiliar and hostile terrain into home via transformations that adapt spaces to Black community needs.

David Adelman explores the current state of technobureaucracies of care in the United States in the wake of Covid-19; Technobureaucracies of care manage, triage, ignore, and erase the most vulnerable amongst us—including and especially disabled people. Thus, weaving together a constellation of disability, care, and technology, and moving across the supposedly ahistorical minutia of care technologies—wheelchairs, electronic surveillance, and healthcare legislation, Adelman invites the reader to (re)imagine their relationship to care, as well as more just futures.

Bethesda Softworks released their much anticipated space RPG Starfield on 9/6/23. Since then, after hundreds of hours played, this game has left me delighted and frustrated -- often simultaneously. Though, what’s more is how it has forced intense consideration on my place (a technically mediated selfhood fusing my character’s created fiction and my own [novel] position as a Black game player) amid the Blackest Sea’s penetrating depths. During my playthrough, as I navigate in, through, and betwixt, the game’s expansive narrative structures, many systems and mechanics, glitches...and yes, (too many) load screens, these -- what I am calling -- field notes stitch together in ways that are inevitably frayed, incomplete, but hopefully provocative a thesis on the possibility of Blackness after Earth, Black play as a necessarily imposing and intervening animative force, and the undertheorized Black scopic tradition of gazing at and to the heavens.

Jeff Nagy analyzes recent efforts to use big data to diagnose depression, showing how these systems represent a dramatic break in the practice of psychiatry and shift the politics of disability.

Huan He examines the Asiatic forms of blockchain as it manifests in digital gaming. What’s “Asian” about blockchain encompasses both its user-facing aesthetics as well as its demographic concentration. He situates the social life of blockchain within new forms of racialized labor, refashioned as play.