What is a Boohab?
Well properly speaking, a boohabian is a prophet of phlow, but I borrowed the term from lyrics by a group called the Broun Fellinis, whom I estimate have created the greatest leap forward in the hiphop/acid jazz genre with thier album Afrokubist Improvisations. Their music represents to me, a post-racial ethics which is thoroughly and intelligently suffused with the best of American soulful traditions. I appropriated the name 'boohab' and called him an 'organic hiphop metaphysician'.
In cyberspace, I am known as boohab to hundreds of folks who act and react in webchat. There are several major fora, Cafe Utne, Slate Fray, Salon Table Talk, Electric Minds, SF Chronicle's Gate & Gravity. In these areas and others I have taken it upon myself to serve as a catalyst and facilitator of discussions of race. I've been doing so pretty much since their inception (with the exception of the Gate), and before them at The Well, Compuserv, Delphi and Usenet's S.C.A.A. Boohab is sort of the thinking person's Kibo of Race.
Here's something I wrote in 1994 it's probably the best way to describe what my orginal goals were with regard to black cultural production in cyberspace.
everything i do in cmc is an experiment in blackness as a post-modern concept. i am futzing with identity in cyberspace and trying to figure out what happens to your race when people cannot see you, hear you or smell you. (hee haw). everybody knows that you have some freedom in computer mediated communications (cmc) to choose who you be. if i choose to be black, how would i express it? if i choose to be white, how? why? what can i say in cmc that i would never say face to face? what silences are overcome w/ respect to racial issues, which are created?
i am extending the hiphop aesthetic to cmc and i propose bSpace as a black cultural exponent and concept in cmc. i am working with a few folks to create that space over time. some of that will happen in the cool zone. i have been reading all of the major literature (or so i think) about cmc and cyberspace and i must say that socially destructive white punk kids get about 3 orders of magnitude more press and critical attention than black folks. likely the best book on the subject is by howard rheingold, 'the virtual community - homesteading the electronic frontier' and we exist as blacks soley on page 144, in the same paragraph as ufo fanatics. also 'the metaphysics of virtual reality' by michael hiem inscribes the very ideas of *why* cyberspace in a 'eurocentric' framework.
as an organic intellectual, i challenge these as they relate to the possibilities of black identity in cmc. we all know who created it and we generally know why and what they had in mind when they did so. now that the i-way is opening up to the general yuppy public, what happens? what changes? when people bring their desires to cmc, it will be transformed but i investigate empirically what it is now and how that changes as black folks join up. i remain primarily focused here in usenet because it is open to the public, whereas i would find it much more enjoyable to hang out in more private areas. what do black folks say in private areas that they don't say here? what do they say here that they dont say privately? why are black people in cmc at all? what motivates them to use the technology? these are very important questions to me because i have been making a living doing computer work for many years and clocking big dollars in a culture that hardly expects me to...