Home Is Where the Ok Is? Early Okayplayer Message Boards & an Ethos of Acknowledgment

Abstract

In this essay, the author considers the online community of Okayplayer (OKP) as a pivotal progenitor in the development of a Black digital ethos. In particular, the author situates and interrogates Okayplayer as a “dwelling space” where self-identified Black identities developed digital voices and a communal ethic of acknowledgment. Indeed, 5 years before Facebook, and 7 years before Twitter; Okayplayer was a social media precursor—made for and by black folks. Prior to social media era, the OKP message boards were the rare space where black digital voices could be heard and acknowledged by peers and fellow recording artists such as Erykah Badu—a digital home or dwelling space. In this essay, I sample and extend Hyde’s redefinition of ethos as “home”; to online communities of color. Hence, this essay retrospectively examines OKP’s digital ethos as a cultural communal co-production where “discourse is used to transform space and time into dwelling places where people can deliberate about and know together some matter of interest” (p. xiii). By viewing OKP as discursive site, the paper interrogates the function of rhetorical voice in establishing dwelling spaces. My critical lens is informed by Mitra and Watts advocacy of marginalized digital voice. Voice is actualized as an architectural event, only when it is acknowledged. In relation to OKP, Watts contends that historically, Black voices that find acknowledgment develop a dwelling place based on ” a sort of collaboration..as a kind of “magic” by a communal will.