The book is no longer exclusively dominant in the realm of black ideas. The black digital intelligentsia flourishes in an epistemic ecology in which the scholarly impulse has been sheared by the cutting edges of new technology and the desire for instant knowledge and commentary on current ideas and events. Today, legitimate thinkers take to blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and even Instagram to hash out ideas, test theories, and explore intellectual options. The digital world serves as a forum for a kind of perpetual work in progress, or an extension, or remix, of existing work. For example, scholar Courtney Baker, in advance of her recently published book Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death, published a blog post entitled “Sandra Bland’s Face” at the Los Angeles Review of Books. The post explored the competing and conflicted uses of Bland’s image as the country attempted to interpret her death in a Texas jail cell—the same kind of work Baker explores in greater detail in her book. While Vincent Brown, a Harvard history professor, explores slavery and death in The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, he explores those same ideas, and others, in multiple media: He is the principal investigator and curator for the online animated thematic map Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative and was producer and director of research for the PBS documentary Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness. Salamishah Tillet is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the co-founder of a nonprofit that uses art therapy to fight sexual violence against women and girls. But her reach has been extended by her online columns in The Nation and her regular appearances on MSNBC. And Peniel Joseph, a history professor at Tufts University and author of Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama, uses his column at The Root to amplify his views on politics and current affairs. Even traditional outlets reflect the digital influence: Online newspaper columns and articles now come with a battalion of links to relevant articles, books, and even visual references to support the argument.

Savvy and gifted black scholars like Morehouse College professor and CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill and Lehigh University professor and MSNBC contributor James Braxton Peterson also take advantage of these new means to address social ills. Hill and Peterson have both published academic books. They also commented on the Ferguson uprisings: Hill in an online column for CNN, Peterson in a Reuters column that was widely circulated on the internet. Both discussed Ferguson, at length, on Twitter. A noteworthy article in an academic journal, or even a popular publication, may still garner the offer to extend one’s ideas in a book-length project, but nowadays the process is sped up by measures and leaps of bandwidth: Digital columns may lead to television appearances and thus more quickly to publishing or academic opportunities. Hill’s commentary and television reporting, combined with his high profile in social media, helped him land a book deal addressing the rebellion in Ferguson. Peterson’s commentary on a range of social and political issues on MSNBC, for web sites and in social media, significantly elevated his academic prominence.

Beyond the rewards of online success are the intellectual advantages of the immediacy that characterizes the digital vocabulary. The black digital intelligentsia is able to quickly judge where an argument needs to be revised, redrawn, or withdrawn altogether; previously, in my generation, an essay’s first draft may have circulated among trusted friends and no further. Now, publication online, as an essay or a tweet, permits strangers, some of whom may be terrifically skilled interpreters, to weigh in on one’s scholarship. Airing ideas online offers a potential aid to refining one’s argument. It doesn’t replace the need to sweat over the work, but it does provide eyeballs and eardrums in ways never before available to thinkers.

More important, black intellectuals who might not easily snag a hearing in traditional editorial circles—maybe they went to a second- or third-tier school, or didn’t have access to scholars who might recommend them for plum gigs in the classroom or for publication—might, by the force of their ideas online, arouse the attention of administrators or faculty in search of new talent. Brittney Cooper, a Rutgers professor who has not yet published a book, is nonetheless a highly regarded commentator on race, culture, politics, and feminism, having made her start with her Crunk Feminist blog. Cooper’s rise, and Hill’s and Peterson’s emergence, too, may have taken more time in an earlier era. Their conspicuous success illustrates the benevolence of digital acclaim. They are simply being smart about showcasing what they can do in a number of venues, or to use the appropriate term, on a number of platforms.