By Karringtan Harris
While many people have become addicted to tweeting and retweeting, others believe it is a silly social networking site that causes more harm than good. Meredith Clark believes Twitter is the contemporary way to protest.
Clark, native to St. Louis, Missouri, has a B.A in Political Science, a M.S in Journalism, and is presently working on her Ph.D in Mass Communicaton. She became involved with the twittersphere when she noticed the growing focus on social media in the journalism world.
“New technology has come along and if I want to continue my mission I need to know what’s going on,” she said. “The same problems that are going on in print are going on with the digital work.”
While turning her focus to the digital aspect of Journalism, Clark discovered a group on Twitter named Black Twitter. Black Twitter is a group of people who use Twitter to talk about their beliefs and opinions about relevant events in society that concern the black community.
“I became interested in Black Twitter when I saw that other journalists had no clue what they were talking about, when they reported on ‘what black people do on Twitter’,” she said. “That realization spoke to my calling as a journalist –to give a wider more descriptive picture of personal experiences and perspectives of black people.”
Devoting her attention to the Black Twitter group she searched for a way to promote the organization and communicate what the organization stands for. She came up with the idea to apply the values of the holiday Kwanza to the Black Twitter organization.
“I wrote my dissertation on Black Twitter,” she said. “When I was looking for ways to explain what they were doing, I found that the values were the best way to explain that.” The values that Clark refers to are unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, creativity, purpose, and faith.
She chose to apply the holiday of Kwanza to Black Twitter because she believed the values helped unify the community. In Clark’s journalistic works she strives to accurately report on her community.
“Through my work I try to present pictures of African-Americans experiences that will help a wider audience better understand what it’s like to live as a black person in America,” she said. Clark believes that the black community cannot be simply confined in a tiny box.
“There’s no single definition, because there’s no single ‘black experience,’ ” she said. “Thus my work touches on a lot of different aspects of black life.”