Postponed - Computers and You

Postponed until the Winter 2025 term.

"Computers and You: Black Women and Early Digital Culture in Essence"

Presented by Myrna Moretti, post-doctoral fellow (Western University).

All are welcome.

Part of the 2024/25 Mediations Lecture Series.

Attend in-person: FNB 4130
Attend online: Zoom link

Abstract: In the 1980s, the magazine Essence published numerous columns and articles about the changes and opportunities of the burgeoning computer age. This paper offers an overview of how the coverage evolved over the course of the decade with particular attention to the ways that habits and time management were evoked. This paper offers insight into widespread and commercially produced attitudes about technology that were targeted toward—and often produced by or with—Black women. Drawing from scholarship on Black temporality, my approach shows how Essence’s discourse of building computer habits both exists within— and arguably extends—a contemporaneous framework of capitalist time management while simultaneously imagining modes of Black feminist liberation. Compared to the articles authored by white writers, the articles authored by Black women often  invoked a multivalent and collective temporality that meditated on the past amid examinations of the changing present and speculations on the future through the computer. This paper contributes to a growing body of scholarship that emphasizes the role of Black women in the development of digital culture.