DJs, Playlists, and Community: Imagining Communication Design through Hip Hop: Victor Del Hierro
Communication Design Quarterly
Abstract:
This article argues for the inclusion of Hip Hop communities in technical communication research. Through Hip Hop, technical communicators can address the recent call for TPC work to expand the field through culturally sensitive and diverse studies that honor communities and their practices. Using a Hip Hop community in Houston as a case study, this article discusses the way DJs operate as technical communicators within their communities. Furthermore, Hip Hop DJs build complex relationships with communities to create localized and accessible content. As technical communicators, Hip Hop practitioners can teach us to create community-based communication design for more diverse contexts.
Recent work in Technical/Professional Communication has made calls for expanding the field by turning to social justice through culturally sensitive and diverse studies that honor communities and their practices by accounting for the ways that everyday users transform information across media, languages, spaces, and physical locations.
Can use Hip Hop to do this! Over the past 40 years, Hip Hop has globalized across diverse populations, using the same principles that technical and professional communication would identify as the user-localization of digital and communicative technologies.
By communicating through a variety of practices and leveraging a “communal countermemory,” Hip Hop has learned to engage across communities through the recognition of similar nodes of meaning making interpreted through local expressions known as translocal styles. These styles range from the recognition of black linguistic expressions like “yo” and “dope” across globalized linguistic communities to the various styles of music production like sampling or record scratching.
Hip Hop as a site of study for technical and professional communication. Examines a Hip Hop community in Houston and a mixtape series (Screw Tapes) as examples of the complex relationships that digital and written texts have in Hip Hop communication. Looking specifically at the workflow of creating new mixtape, it articulates the roles that Hip Hop DJs play in creating, curating, and maintaining the flow of information within Hip Hop.
With an emphasis on building community to create effective communication, Hip Hop DJs draw on localization and accessibility as the staples for creating and sustaining the transfer of knowledge.
Through this project, author articulates how further analysis and implementation of Hip Hop culture within technical and professional communication can help the field design and enact culturally sustaining socially-just methods for adapting and disseminating global information.
Implications:
Hip Hop practitioners have consistently remained at the forefront of new and developing mass media technologies. The early days of Hip Hop saw innovations in sound manipulation through practices like scratching, break- beat looping, and sampling. Since then, Hip Hop practitioners have found ways to consistently utilize emerging technology to stay connected to their audiences through new apps like Bun B’s “Trill Moji” (an emoji keyboard for smart phones) and open access mixtape repositories like Datpiff.com. Being able to communicate through practical, accessible, and localized means is vital to Hip Hop practitioners. As a culture that is known for not only being an outlet for disenfranchised youth, but also a place to tell stories from marginalized perspectives, what has sustained the growth of Hip Hop is the way the practices central to Hip Hop are transferred and localized both within and across communities.
Reading across Hip Hop texts with an attunement to community relationships helps us see how Hip Hop is shaped and designed to be supportive of the community it is situated within. In Hip Hop, we see an example of intentional accessibility with a potential for sustaining culture and building new meanings. The implications of this research are relevant to wider conversations in technical communication for broadening the scope of the field to more diverse populations.
Inherent in this work is not only the valuing of diverse populations, but also the valuing of communication design strategies that offer efficient uses of language with a long history connected to digital innovation in local and global discourses. “translocal styles” echo ongoing calls for a repositioning of technical communication histories and practices through social- justice frameworks (Jones, Moore, & Walton, 2016).
Hip Hop practitioners are constantly developing localization strategies with a conscious understanding of global discourses. The Screwed and Chopped style is an example of how localization by community members and DJs in close collaboration can balance accessibility, design, and content in Hip Hop use and dissemination. This relational act is what makes Hip Hop accessible across contexts and time. These outcomes are important practices and strategies to employ in our work as technical communicators and educators. By building accessible and localized relationships through culturally relevant and community-specific ideals, we have the potential to build better documents, systems, and general lines of communication with and for marginalized communities in local and global contexts.
The ability to layer meaning and communicate successfully within the community maximizes the use of texts. We can learn about the value of relationships among communicators for technical communication by utilizing the power that Hip Hop has in creating networks of communication and people because of the “universal language” that is built from the negotiation of mobile matrices of style known as translocal (localized, accessible, and inclusive communication) styles (Alim & Pennycook, 2007; Alim, 2009).
Based on authors analysis of DJ Screw and the community around Screw Tapes as examples of community driven communication design, offers the following suggestions and implications for including Hip Hop in technical communication:
• Hip Hop is an Important Site for Technical Communication Research and Practice.
• The Hip Hop DJ is a Community-Engaged Technical Communicator
• Community Should Play a Role in Designing Communication
Conclusion:
Imagining Hip Hop’s inclusion in technical communication means that we might pay attention to the important work that local Hip Hop communities are doing in social justice work. This practice of social justice is driven through community-building, commerce, and knowledge-making. Technical communicators can draw from a wide range of Hip Hop practitioners to solve emerging problems in increasingly complex globalized communication spaces. Further, acknowledging the ways in which Hip Hop is grounded in community can help technical communicators to continue highlighting and engaging with the communicative practices of underrepresented voices in and beyond our field.
Building from this work, technical communication can continue benefit from the advances that Hip Hop has already made, using ethical analyses of Hip Hop to understand social-justice, community- driven frameworks for globalizing information. Finally, technical communication scholars and practitioners can be important allies in promoting Hip Hop because they are uniquely situated to identify and study the complex ways communication impacts communities. As technical communication continues to acknowledge the value of diverse representation, incorporating Hip Hop communities in our field’s disciplinary understanding of communication design can help us continue to build and disseminate tools and technologies that are community-driven, localized, and accessible to a wide range of audiences.