I spoke with Clark to discuss Black Twitter, its composition, activities, and impact. A lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation follows.

Donovan X. Ramsey: How do you define Black Twitter?

Meredith Clark: I define Black Twitter as a temporally linked group of connectors that share culture, language and interest in specific issues and talking about specific topics with a black frame of reference. And when I say "black," that isn't just limited to U.S. blacks, but blacks throughout the diaspora, and I think a lot of what we see reflects on blacks just in the U.S., but I do want to make that distinction clear, that it is not just of a matter of what we talk about here in the United States.

I break Black Twitter down into three levels of connection: personal community, and that reflects the people that you are connected with in some other dimension other than Twitter. And I take that personal community from Barry Wellman's work. The second level I find is thematic notes, and that's where individuals specifically tweet together about certain topics, so they keep returning to this subject matter. And those thematic notes could be anything from television shows, to ideologies, topics of religion. They might be centric to where these individuals are in a certain part of the country. It just kind of all depends on what topic we're interested in. And then that third level of connection, where we see a lot of conversation about these networks and how they're linked, is when those personal communities and the thematic notes kind of intersect around a specific topic. And generally you see that, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, #AskRKelly, those sort of things. That's where you see the meta-network at work.

Ramsey: Are you a member of Black Twitter?

Clark: I self-select as part of Black Twitter, yes.

Ramsey: Was there something specific that inspired your research into Black Twitter?

Clark: So, in 2010, as I was wrapping up my job at the Tallahassee Democrat, I found an article from Slate that had the headline, "How Black People Use Twitter." And what I read in the article wasn't at all reflective of how the black people that I knew used Twitter, what their interactions were, what they talked about, what hashtags they used, so on and so forth. And being a journalist I am particularly sensitive to media's representation of black life, especially when there are so many black people out there that you can talk to. I kind of took it and held onto it for a couple of years. Later, I decided it was a community that I was interested in studying and it just kind of went from there.

Ramsey: One interesting thing about your research is the way you outline the six-stage process of “being Black Twitter.” Can you break that down for me?

Clark: What I observed in my research was this process that the communicators went to, specifically to find some sort of redress as far as the media was concerned. That process started with first identifying as a black person who is interested in the topic that is being discussed. You kind of have to have that background and a comprehension of the language that's being used to talk about whatever the issue of the day is.