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Web Pioneer Lynne d. Johnson

Photo credit: Cecily Walker

“It’s difficult for me to imagine the web without Lynne,” said black gay blogger J. Brotherlove of Lynne d. Johnson. He echoes the sentiment of many folks of all colors who have been movers and shakers online since the first website went online in 1991.

Johnson, who is currently editor and community director at FastCompany.com, is an out African-American technology expert with a hip-hop sensibility, an encyclopedic knowledge of music, killer fashion sense and an afro-futuristic outlook. It is no wonder that A-list bloggers have no qualms showering her with well-earned accolades.

“When I think about black females on the web with technology, Lynne’s name easily comes to mind,” said Karsh, founder of the Black Weblog Awards and blackgayblogger.com. “She has masterfully been able to understand and bridge the gap between online and print media in a major way, from her work with Vibe magazine to her current work at FastCompany.”

Born in the late 1960s, Johnson grew up in the birthplace of hip-hop, the Boogie Down Bronx. That music, she wrote on her blog in 2002, “is woven into the fabric of her existence. … There she Patty Duked and Smurfed to whatever the DJ scratched scientific, while the MC waxed poetic.”

But don’t be fooled into thinking that her old head hip-hop outlook confines her musical sensibilities. Along the way Johnson has also developed a deep appreciation for “underground punkdafiednewavism” and an eclectic array of other types of music that she parlayed into becoming a respected music reviewer.

Her love affair with technology began when she was a high school student in the mid-1980s and began programming on a Commodore 64. Being a computer geek in hip-hop’s epicenter had a profound effect on Johnson.

“Hip-hop was all around me,” she said. During that period she began hanging out with rappers, sometimes spitting her own rhymes, and eventually becoming a respected spoken-word artist, performing at such hallowed venues as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Her poem “The Flow,” a tight piece evoking the history and rhythms of hip-hop, was published in Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam alongside heavy hitters June Jordan and Amiri Baraka.

As a young adult weaving in and out of the world of rap, Johnson was not open about her sexuality with her peers, who were mostly young black and Latino men with whom she forged strong bonds – her running buddies. She was accepted as one of the crew. She was the cool little sister or the girl you had a crush on but knew you didn’t have a chance of dating. Later on, after she came out, many of her old male friends in the hip-hop world told her they knew about her all along.

“But they were like, you’re still Lynne,” she recalled. “We love you. You’re mad cool. I knew, but I still had a crush on you.”

After receiving a degree in journalism at SUNY New Paltz, Johnson did a lot of freelance writing as a cultural critic of hip-hop and black feminism, penning essays and reviews for publications such as New York Press, ColorLines, Paper and even the Wall Street Journal.

It was the mid-1990s, and the web was about to explode. Those early years were exciting for black techies. Digital spaces sprouted like weeds, and Johnson seemed to be involved in almost all of the most popular ones, from the pioneering internet community New York Online to the offline outposts of the tech world like the Brooklyn cybercafé Kokobar.

Johnson was an editor at the now-defunct Digital New York magazine and working in the trenches of blackplanet.com as a writer and editor, which by the late ’90s was the top website aimed at creating community among African Americans. During those years, Johnson began to hone her knowledge as an online social networking expert. She took those skills with her when she was hired to be the online editor for Vibe magazine’s website in June 2002.

And that’s when her star began to rise in the intertwining worlds of the World Wide Web and music. At Vibe, she was not afraid to step out on a limb, and she often took a lot of heat while testing out tools and applications with the aim of creating online community. One of her projects, tying user-submitted comments to the magazine’s online articles, was met with derision by those above and below her on the masthead. Nowadays, that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow, but back then, it was still a new idea.

“Some people hated it,” she said. “Some of them worked for me.” But she was undaunted: “I thought it was a great idea.”

She introduced mobile text message voting back in the late 1990s, a feature that fans of American Idol probably take for granted, for Vibe‘s extremely popular televised awards show. Her risks in the uncharted territories of social networking – before MySpace.com and Facebook.com – garnered her respect among her former peers at Vibe.com, who only realized her vision after she left.

“The ad sales guy said he misses me because I got it,” she said. “We were the profit center of the company at the time,” she explained, referring to the Vibe/Spin ventures. “The magazine was flat, but [online] ad sales were growing.”

Testament to her pioneering leadership comes from Anil Dash, vice president of Six Apart, the company that owns some of the top properties in the blogosphere: Movable Type, Live Journal, Vox and Typepad. Dash said that one of Johnson’s greatest contributions in heightening the profile of people of color online is as “one of those rare examples of someone who leads by doing.”

He continued: “To be a pioneer, you inevitably have to suffer some arrows in your back. To be a prominent black journalist online, to be a prominent woman online, you have to put up with a disproportionate amount of obstacles. And just to be online at all as a person, you sometimes get caught up in situations that require a lot of patience.

“To be able to handle all of that with grace and still take the time to educate people, you have to have some perspective and be able to look at the big picture. That seems to come naturally to Lynne, and for someone like me that had to work for years to get better at that sort of thing, it’s been inspiring.”

Johnson’s blog has been online since July 2001, and through the years she has shared her views on not just technology and music but politics as well. When African-American teen lesbian Sakia Gunn was murdered in Newark, N.J., Johnson weighed in on the tragedy. When Africana.com sought out commentary from the community on 9/11, they included Johnson. Staying true to her style, her essay on the tragedy was actually a series of emails and listserv messages stitched together that captured a sense of profound loss and vulnerability.

When Princeton University held a panel moderated by Cornel West on homophobia and hip-hop, Johnson was asked to participate. Her love for the genre in no way comprises her view that homophobic lyrics “are just ignorant” in rap as well as dancehall reggae. In 2006, she won a Black Blogger Achievement Award from the Black Weblog Awards.

“Lynne is a magnet for black techies on the web,” said Angela Benton of Black Web 2.0. “Her wealth of knowledge and willingness to forge connections within the industry has made her the number one go-to person among black techies on the web.”

When Twanna Hines, a online dating columnist, needed advice on how to pitch a panel at SXSWi, she contacted Johnson. “Before proposing a panel, I made contact with Lynne because she was one of the original panelists on the early ‘Blogging While Black’ discussions,” said Hines.

“I was impressed with her career online, and she really inspired me to submit a panel idea of my own. Lynne is wonderfully talented and unbelievably approachable. She’s way too modest to speak about her own accomplishments, but her contributions to the online world do not go unrecognized.”

Johnson also sits on the board of directors of the Literary Freedom Project, a nonprofit arts organization that seeks to empower communities of color through literature, creative thinking and new media.

On a personal level, Johnson is in a relationship with her partner of several years, whom she does not identify. The couple co-parent a pre-teen and live in Brooklyn. “I’m a very private person,” she said.

Yet given the heft of the content on her blog, it is easy for readers to feel like they do know her on a personal level. But she maintains that once she starts talking about her girlfriend, she’s bringing someone else into the spotlight, and “that’s just not fair.”

Hines agrees: “The minute you link your real name to your online personality, you put your life, work, politics, family and other personal aspects on display, whether you like it or not.”

One thing Johnson does reveal: She is a die-hard L Word fan. “Sunday nights we have a ritual,” she said. “We have dinner, put the kid to bed, and then it’s our time. My girlfriend says I’m like Bette.”

Given her accomplishments, it’s not hard to view Johnson as an alpha female with high expectations for herself and those around her. But her refusal to settle for mediocrity in her professional life motivates others as well.

“There are a lot of ways to inspire people by offering a great narrative, and of course Lynne has always done that,” said Dash. “But she’s also put the ideas into practice, helping show by example how all of us can stay true to ourselves socially and culturally while making really smart use of new media. That’s a tough balance to strike, but it’s a really powerful demonstration, especially when there are still people out there saying that there’s a contradiction between being a digital native and being authentically ‘black.’ Or being authentically anything-non-dominant-culture.”

In short, Johnson’s view on life can be summed up by a popular black idiom: “Just do you boo.”

“I think that even if you view Lynne’s resume – which is deep and shows versatility fo’ sho’ – you still won’t see her coming until she is right in front of you,” said Clarence, of doyouknowclarence.com, who met Johnson at this year’s SXSWi. “She’s got that ‘do you’ flavor that garners respect from a number of circles, and that is the thing I respect the most about Lynne d. She is always Lynne d.”

For more about Lynne d. Johnson, visit her website.

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