Dayna Carney

Online culture encourages young people to turn themselves into a product at an age when they’re only starting to discover who they are.   When an audience becomes emotionally invested in a version of you that you outgrow, keeping the product you’ve made aligned with yourself becomes an impossible   dilemma.

Nielsen  reported  that Black consumers are in a “remarkable period of influence,” with the “highest smartphone ownership and usage of any demographic group and an unyielding desire for self-expression and image control.” 

Black teenage girls are the invisible tastemakers creating and popularizing some of the biggest trends simply by being their authentic selves. It’s the everyday Black girl, without a platform or the machine of capitalism behind her, who exudes cool without having to try.

" As a designer I make these kinds of choices all the time. I make them very quickly because I am so familiar with them. I do it so naturally that I forget how many choices there are. I have never worked quite like this before and certainly wouldn’t do it for another client. This was different."

Because that’s what it was like before the Internet. You made your own fun.

YouTube soon became a game of “What’s the craziest thing you’d do for attention?”

My answer? Legally marry my sister’s boyfriend.   (It was meant to be a lighthearted joke. Our union has since been annulled.)

Nearly three million people have watched that video; by the numbers, I should consider it and others like it as successes. But there’s an

This element of neighbourly communication is hugely important for early warning systems, says Jennifer Trivedi, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center.

"Often, when I ask people in the field where they heard about an incoming hurricane, or changing floodwaters, they talk about hearing it from