[I]t turns out that Twitter is not just a place where scholars take notes publicly at conferences, it’s a medium that does a better job than most of including the voices of African Americans, and that matters. To a large extent what has been happening in Ferguson is the result of white folks’ near-total deafness when it comes to the lived experience of being black in America. It’s where news breaks and is analyzed before the first news reporter is assigned. #Ferguson made the evening news almost before Ferguson did, because it trended on Twitter — Barbara Fister, @insidehighered.