The Hip Hop Anthropologist

  I used to think social anxiety was a private wiring, something that lived inside a person and only occasionally flared in crowded rooms. Then I began to watch people I know—friends, younger cousins, former students—change shape under the pressure of life lived online. Their stories are not clinical case notes but small, living proofs of how connectivity can manufacture isolation. Miriam: The Curated Self Miriam built a life in public. Her feed was meticulous: staged mornings, witty captions, carefully edited triumphs. Off‑camera she was frayed. I remember sitting across from her at a café as she scrolled through her own hour‑old post and counted likes with the intensity of someone auditing their pulse. She described conversations that never happened because she had rehearsed them for an audience instead of a single listener. Her anxiety came from the mismatch between an exhausting, performative visibility and the quiet absence of true intimacy. She was visible to thousands and al...

 Prompted by weariness with the pedestrian fare found on social media, a group entitled "Black Intellectuals" seemed to be the ideal landing spot. However, unless I am missing something, it is also bereft of content. There is a lot of news directly impacting Black folks throughout the Diaspora. But "Black Intellectuals" are not discussing any of it either critically or in depth. In fact they seem to be "missing in action." I used to be in a group that will remain anonymous because a member there is also a member of Black Intellectuals. We used to have always lively, often raucous, sometimes bitter conversations about topics that engaged Black men of all races. It had over ten thousand members during its height of all political persuasions.  The group's owner was around my age in his mid-sixties but unlike me, retired. After a series of posts Meta's online reputation management (ORM) system and/or human censors found objectionable, the group had to ...