La cárcel cultural

The central focus guiding this chapter is analyzing how users respond to the

citizen-generated videos shared on Twitter during the aftermath of Mike Brown's murder,

and how the public articulates the police and the overall case based on these tweets. A

critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) allows me to analyze how the shooting

was conceptualized, and how the rise in individual use of technology, along with the

emergence of mobile phones with video capabilities and social media platforms, have

both enabled people to participate in citizen-journalism on a large scale, and also affected

perceptions of police. Andre Brock (2012) describes CTDA as a framework that “draws

from technology studies, communication studies, and critical race theory to understand

how culture shapes technologies.”

As a network of social platforms and concerned citizens, the Ferguson

movement and activists within it produced and supplemented mainstream discourse of

the protests following Brown's death, largely through videos. Without Twitter or mobile

phones, activists and the citizens of Ferguson would be largely excluded from creating or

adding to the mainstream narrative. I use CTDA to examine some of the most influential

and retweeted citizen-generated videos in Ferguson and the accompanying discourses

responding to these videos, as well as to examine the counter-networks and themes of

mass-self communication that took place alongside these videos.

Method

According to the report Beyond the Hashtag, there were millions of tweets

using the #Ferguson in 2014 following Mike Brown's death. The report also posits that

attention given to the #Ferguson over #MikeBrown suggests there was “a greater

emphasis on the protests and resulting police response than on the victim”(p.47), which is

part of the reason I utilize #Ferguson in my collection of responses. In order to narrow the

scope of this study, I used Twitter's advanced search page to focus my analysis in three

essential ways. First, I used the search page to narrow the time frame in which I collected

tweets to analyze. I chose two separate time frames that amassed national coverage in

Ferguson, MO, according to the report Beyond the Hashtag; first, the time surrounding

the death of Mike Brown and initial protests, which is August 9-August 31, 2014; and

also the non-indictment of Darren Wilson, November 24 - December 2, 2014. Then, I

chose the central activist in Ferguson as found by the report “Beyond the Hashtag, DeRay

McKesson. That study of social media activism reports that DeRay was the most

referenced participant in their dataset that included millions of tweets. I then input

DeRay’s username, in order to narrow down the tweets and videos analyzed within those

time frames. This method generated 152 tweets and 39 videos, which I use as the primary

source of data in this chapter.

According to The New York Times, after watching protesters in Ferguson clash

with a militarized police force and following on the ground citizens on Twitter, DeRay

left his house, packed his things and tweeted, “En route to Ferguson.” In the years since,

DeRay has become a full-time protester and organizer, and a go-to source for reporters

covering protests around the country. I chose to analyze DeRay’s videos for several

reasons, but mostly because he shared more videos that remain accessible, than any other

on the ground activists in Ferguson during those time frames, and also used the

#Ferguson, meaning his videos and tweets were accessible to a wide variety of people

who were following that hashtag.

Analyzing Tweets

After limiting the tweets by time frame and username, I clicked on the “Video”

tab, and analyzed user responses to each video that either showed police, or talked about

police, in order to examine how citizen-generated videos played a role in police-citizen

encounters in the aftermath of Mike Brown's murder. Despite the variation in support

surrounding the activists videos, I include all 152 tweet responses to the videos recorded

by DeRay in the timeframes named. Each of the responses were read and annotated (e.g.,

notes were made about specific hashtags used, style of writing, and references to police,

protestors, the Black community, and Mike Brown), and then discourse themes were

generated based on my notes. Each response was analyzed with a focus on the users

description of police, the state, the protests/ors, and police brutality more generally. As

topics repeated, they confirmed existing themes. Similar tweets were compared to each

other within categories to ensure continuity and authenticity. This iterative process

resulted in the creation of four main themes; support of the police, support for the

activists and DeRay, criticism of the police/state, and criticism of the activists, and also

various sub-themes that presented how the public understood the events unfolding in

Ferguson. The tweets that are presented in this chapter, were chosen because they

showcase a particular theme well, and additionally, were from unprotected accounts.

Mass Self-Communication and Counter-Networks

I begin the analysis by illustrating how DeRay was able to use video as a form

of mass self-communication and to contribute to counter-networks during the Ferguson

uprising. DeRay used video in ways that proved influential in how the public understood

the protests and the police present there. I counted how many videos DeRay uploaded to

Twitter during the selected time-frames, and analyzed them with a keen eye for patterns

revealing mass self-communication and/or counter-networks. These frameworks have

been used to showcase the ways citizens have participated in social movements across the

world, and I intend to explore how citizen-generated videos are increasingly being

utilized in counter-publics and how they have been influential in giving ordinary citizens

a voice.