Spatiality at the Cyber-Margins: Black-Oriented Blogs and the Production of Territoriality Online

Abstract

This essay analyzes the challenges African American–oriented blogs must confront in terms of spatiality, specifically that associated with racial trolling. I argue that racial trolling, which encompasses a set of actions wherein users make inflammatory comments in a manner designed specifically to advance racist tropes, represents a mode of spatial aggression that operates in ways reproductive of the power relations that characterize the offline world. I further argue that neoliberalism, which has transformed these sites from relatively small, niche communities of primarily black users to commercially oriented sites open to mass participation, has strengthened the mobility of whiteness on the internet and exacerbated the trolling behaviors. In confronting the challenges these spatial aggressions pose, community members invoke their own sense of agency regarding space, mobilizing various types of user moderation as means of preserving these sites as their own cyber-territories. In constructing this argument, I conduct a critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) of discourse from the comments sections of two black-oriented websites, TheRoot and VerySmartBrothas.