8 PROVOKING DIGITAL COMMON SENSE Reddit, Racialized Language, and the Final Vocabulary of Race Bryan Smith In his piece on the old struggles that inhere in new forms of media, Francis Njubi (2001) assesses the potential of digital spaces as a site of anti-racism struggle. For him, despite technology’s tremendous potential to enact violence against margin- alized groups, “these technologies can be turned into instruments of liberation” (Njubi, 2001, p. 117). As with any media outlet however, questions of power and access ultimately frame how it is that the language of struggle and liberation gets articulated (van Dijk, 1996). Indeed, the representation of categories such as race in the digital space is complex—some laud the potential of this space while oth- ers point to problematics (Gasser, 2008; Nakamura & Chow-White, 2012; Tynes, Reynolds, & Greenfield, 2004). It would appear from this that the digital space and the media that facilitate the flow of discourses are complex and contingent on the user(s) and the space being created. Here, Richard Rorty’s (1989) work might provide some insights into how it is that we can better understand how people use and reflect on par- ticular language practices to (re-)produce or resist racialized language. One con- cern for Rorty is the troubling notion of any “final vocabulary,” a language of the world that refuses to acknowledge the contingency of meaning. The persistence of racializations in digital media, I argue, reflects a “final vocabulary of race,” one which spurns any semblance of contingency. The converse, a strong poetic response, speaks against the grains of any final vocabulary. Rorty (1989) suggests that strong poets engage in a refusal of “somebody else’s description of oneself” and refuse to “execute a previously prepared program” (p. 28). The use of digital media to engender a strong poetry can be seen as an attempt to use these tools as, to borrow Njubi’s verbiage, an “instrument of liberation,” a process that rejects the final vocabularies that inhere in popular conceptions of the world.