This link has been bookmarked by 74 people . It was first bookmarked on 30 Jun 2009, by Settlement AtWork.
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22 Nov 09
Allison Kipta"For decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions. This is most salient in the States which is intentionally the focus of my talk here today. "
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28 Oct 09
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21 Oct 09
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Rather than staying in land of abstract, let's go concrete.
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Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible.
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Social media does not magically eradicate inequality
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the pattern of adoption and development that emerged as people embraced them.
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People connect to people who think like them and they think like the people with whom they are connected. The digital publics that unfold highlight and reinforce structural divisions.
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The key to developing a social media strategy is to understand who you're reaching and who you're not and make certain that your perspective is accounting for said choices. Understand your biases and work to counter them.
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we also need to re-engage around broader issues of inequality, intolerance, and social divisions.
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echnology isn't the savior, but it sure can highlight the work we need to do. We have some serious work to do, work that goes beyond technology. We can use technology as a tool to connect with people, but we can't assume that it will eliminate all of the serious issues we have to face in this country.
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16 Oct 09
Anthony McNeillTalk given at the Personal Democracy Forum.
facebook politics class race ethnography myspace inequality boyd
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22 Sep 09
Jessica StaffHere is an up to date study dealing with some things similar to the Frontline episode. Also, it starts to address some of the issues we noticed with the sample the producers chose to use.
p.s. I saw this because someone had posted it to their Facebook page...social media irony? -
16 Sep 09
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In fact, if we want to get to the crux of what unfolded, we might as well face an uncomfortable reality... What happened was modern day "white flight." Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those who deserted MySpace did so by "choice" but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.
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we tend to believe that these technologies are the great equalizers,
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You need to understand the sticking points in order to move the needle in the right direction.
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has everything to do with "access"
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Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways.
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where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions.
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I suspect that, more often than not, what we're dismissing are the values and cultures of people who are different.
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Fear of the "other" is core to white flight; it is core to suburban attitudes about urban life.
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moral panics around MySpace and online sexual predators. The data has consistently shown that MySpace is not a site of increased risk for youth and that risky behavior is more likely to occur in chatrooms than on MySpace.
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Are you scared of the display of sexuality or just the display of working class sexuality?
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So why am I telling you that Facebook and MySpace are divided by race, class, education, and other factors? Because it matters.
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when people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another and they do not communicate with one another.
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The #1 predictor for how someone will side in issues of gay rights is whether or not they know someone who is gay.
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Although most of you call these sites "social networking sites," there's almost no networking going on
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People use these sites to connect to the people they know
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In many ways, the Internet is providing a next generation public sphere.
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Unfortunately, it's also bringing with it next generation divides.
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he scholar Habermas talked about it as the bourgeois public sphere.
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Where you and your colleagues hang out matters.
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14 Sep 09
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27 Aug 09
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24 Aug 09
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09 Aug 09
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For decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways.
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And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions.
- 6 more annotations...
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there's plenty of documentation about how teenagers from wealthier, more educated backgrounds are more willing to participate in environments alongside adults than those from poorer backgrounds
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It wasn't just anyone who left MySpace to go to Facebook. In fact, if we want to get to the crux of what unfolded, we might as well face an uncomfortable reality... What happened was modern day "white flight." Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to leave or choose Facebook.
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even schools that are "integrated" show racial rifts through Friending practices. You can see homophily online and you can see the ways in which people who share physical space do not share emotional connections.
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But here's the main issue with social divisions. We can accept when people choose to connect to people who are like them and not friend different others. But can we accept when institutions and services only support a portion of the network? When politicians only address half of their constituency? When educators and policy makers engage with people only through the tools of the privileged? When we start leveraging technology to meet specific goals, we may reinforce the divisions that we're trying to address.
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Most of you in this room learned to use Twitter and Facebook through your friends. Collectively, you set the norms for what is appropriate among your network. If you aren't part of these networks, these technologies may feel very foreign.
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If you choose to make Facebook your platform for civic activity, you are implicitly suggesting that a specific class of people is more worth your time and attention than others.
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05 Aug 09
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03 Aug 09
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Given what we've experienced and what we witness today, we tend to believe that these technologies are the great equalizers, that they can help ANYONE participate, that the technologies in and of themselves can revitalize democracy. In other words, we tend to believe in a certain utopian myth of the internet as the savior. What if this weren't true?
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Kat (14, Mass.): I'm not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever, and Facebook is all... not all the people that have Facebook are mature, but its supposed to be like oh we're more mature. … MySpace is just old.
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Anastasia (17, New York): My school is divided into the 'honors kids,' (I think that is self-explanatory), the 'good not-so-honors kids,' 'wangstas,' (they pretend to be tough and black but when you live in a suburb in Westchester you can't claim much hood), the 'latinos/hispanics,' (they tend to band together even though they could fit into any other groups) and the 'emo kids' (whose lives are allllllways filled with woe). We were all in MySpace with our own little social networks but when Facebook opened its doors to high schoolers, guess who moved and guess who stayed behind… The first two groups were the first to go and then the 'wangstas' split with half of them on Facebook and the rest on MySpace... I shifted with the rest of my school to Facebook and it became the place where the 'honors kids' got together and discussed how they were procrastinating over their next AP English essay.
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Craig (17, California): The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook. It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace. Any high school student who has a Facebook will tell you that MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious. Like Peet’s is more cultured than Starbucks, and Jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop, and like Macs are more cultured than PC’s, Facebook is of a cooler caliber than MySpace.
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In looking through my data, I found that teens who prefer Facebook are far more likely to be condescending towards those who use MySpace than vice versa. Teens who use MySpace may lament teen Facebook users as "stuck-ups" or "goodie two-shoes" or the "good kids." But they're not nearly as harsh in their language as Facebook users are of those who use MySpace.
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One explanation comes from looking at the origin points. Early adopters matter - they shape services in the long-term. MySpace came out first and quickly attracted urban 20-somethings. It spread to teenagers through older siblings and cousins as well as those who were attracted to indie rock and hip hop music culture. Facebook started at Harvard and spread to the Ivy Leagues before spreading more broadly. The first teenagers to hear about Facebook were those connected to the early adopters of Facebook (i.e. the Ivy League bound types). The desirability of the site spread from those college-bound teens. As word of these sites spread, teens went to where their friends were. The origin points of these sites explain many of people's choices, especially when it comes to first adoption because people adopt the sites that their friends adopt. Yet, it doesn't explain why people some people left MySpace to join Facebook and others did not.
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Herein lies the reality that makes all of this quite messy to deal with. It wasn't just anyone who left MySpace to go to Facebook. In fact, if we want to get to the crux of what unfolded, we might as well face an uncomfortable reality... What happened was modern day "white flight." Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those who deserted MySpace did so by "choice" but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.
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The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to everyone out there. And if we think back to the language used by teens who use Facebook when talking about MySpace, we should be truly alarmed. Those who are from privileged backgrounds tend to be far more condescending towards those who are not than vice versa. Many of us in this room come from privileged worlds where we want to "help" those who are not well-off. Here is where a privilege-check is necessary. How often do our language and mannerisms reflect a problematic level of condescension? Perhaps we should look at our teens. They are certainly speaking in a manner that reveals distrust and condescension.
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In many ways, adult worlds are even more divided than teen worlds. Adults are less likely to know other adults who aren't like them than teens are. There's a concept in sociology called "homophily." It means birds of a feather stick together. Whites know whites. Democrats know Democrats. Urbanites know urbanites. Tech people know tech people. Rich people know rich people. And before you immediately start listing the people you know that aren't like you, realize that this is the auto-reaction to an uncomfortable reality (more colloquially noticeable when people refer to "my black friend..."). Structurally, social networks are driven by homophily even when there are individual exceptions. And sure enough, in the digital world, we see this manifested right before our eyes.
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All this said, people are already divided and we accept that people from different backgrounds inhabit different environments. We cannot expect technology to automatically integrate people and generate cultural harmony. Although most of you call these sites "social networking sites," there's almost no networking going on. People use these sites to connect to the people they know. In other words, even if they could talk across the divide, they might not anyhow. And even when people talk across differences, it doesn't automatically solve underlying tensions. Racial integration of schools was valuable for many reasons, but it didn't solve racism in this country.
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But here's the main issue with social divisions. We can accept when people choose to connect to people who are like them and not friend different others. But can we accept when institutions and services only support a portion of the network? When politicians only address half of their constituency? When educators and policy makers engage with people only through the tools of the privileged? When we start leveraging technology to meet specific goals, we may reinforce the divisions that we're trying to address.
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If you want people to connect around politics and democracy, information and ideas, you need to understand the divisions that exist. Many of us in this room see social network sites as a modern day incarnation of the public sphere. Politicians login to these sites to connect with constituents and hear their voices. Campaign managers and activists try to rally people through these sites. Market researchers try to get a sense of people's opinions through these sites. Educators try to connect with students and build knowledge sharing communities. This is fantastic. But there isn't one uniform public sphere. There are numerous publics (and counterpublics).
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In many ways, the Internet is providing a next generation public sphere. Unfortunately, it's also bringing with it next generation divides. The public sphere was never accessible to everyone. There's a reason than the scholar Habermas talked about it as the bourgeois public sphere. The public sphere was historically the domain of educated, wealthy, white, straight men. The digital public sphere may make certain aspects of public life more accessible to some, but this is not a given. And if the ways in which we construct the digital public sphere reinforce the divisions that we've been trying to break down, we've got a problem.
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In the US, we can talk about MySpace and Facebook, but the politics are different in every country. What divides people often differs as well, although "class" is still salient almost everywhere. For example, if you look at Indian use of social media, you'll see a divide between Orkut and Facebook that plays out along caste and professional lines. Even if you're not working in the States, you need to account for social divisions. You just might have to look in different places.
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Divides also play out inside sites. Consider everyone's beloved Twitter. For starters, who uses the site represents a small minority of American (let alone international) online participants. Teens, for example, are not using the site. But even among those who are, they aren't part of one gigantic public space. Consider the discussion of the Iranian election. If you were in certain cohorts, you couldn't miss the green-ification of people's profiles, the discussions of #iranelection. But, even though said conversations were massively prolific, only a small percentage of the user base was even aware of this beyond the trending topic. Those who were following 50cent and Miley Cyrus were oblivious to these conversations. And, in a matter of moments, this became visible when Michael Jackson died and captured the attention of a much broader swath of users, nearly taking Twitter down with it. In your world, Iran probably matters more than Michael Jackson. But don't for a second think that this is universal.
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MySpace vs. Facebook is not the only divide taking place online nor will it be the last. These divides are going to keep on happening as social media becomes increasingly prevalent and as features of social media are baked into every site on the web.
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4) The Internet has enabled many new voices to enter the political fray, but not everyone is sitting at the table. There's a terrible tendency in this country, and especially among politically minded folks, to interpret an advancement as a solution. We have not eradicated racism. We have not eradicated sexism. We have not eradicated inequality. While we've made tremendous strides in certain battles, the war is not over. The worst thing we can do is to walk away and congratulate ourselves for all of the good things that have happened. Such attitudes create new breeding grounds for increased stratification.
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27 Jul 09
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a rough unedited crib of the actual talk
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boyd, danah. 2009. "The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online." Personal Democracy Forum, New York, June 30.
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06 Jul 09
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Alejandro TortoliniConferencia de Danah Boyd: "La no tan oculta politica de clases en linea".
internet clases_sociales clases sociedad economia sociologia cultura danah_boyd conferencia lecture
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biases and work to counter them.4) The Internet has enabled many new voices to enter the political fray, but
not everyone is sitting at the table. There's a terrible tendency in this
country, and especially among politically minded folks, to interpret an
advancement as a solution. We have not eradicated racism. We have not eradicated
sexism. We have not eradicated inequality. While we've made tremendous strides
in certain battles, the war is not over. The worst thing we can do is to walk
away and congratulate ourselves for all of the good things that have happened.
Such attitudes create new breeding grounds for increased stratification. -
1) Social stratification is pervasive in American society (and around the
globe). Social media does not magically eradicate inequality. Rather, it mirrors
what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible. What we
see online is not the property of these specific sites, but the pattern of
adoption and development that emerged as people embraced them. People brought
their biases with them to these sites and they got baked in. - 3 more annotations...
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adoption and
development that emerged as people embraced them. People brought
their biases
with them to these sites and they got baked in.2) There is no universal public online. What we see as user "choice" in
social media often has to do with structural forces like homophily in people's
social networks. Social stratification in this country is not cleanly linked to
race or education or socio-economic factors, although all are certainly present.
More than anything, social stratification is a social networks issue. People
connect to people who think like them and they think like the people with whom
they are connected. The digital publics that unfold highlight and reinforce
structural divisions. -
connected. The
digital publics that unfold highlight and reinforce
structural divisions.
3) If you are trying to connect with the public, where you go online matters.
If you choose to make Facebook your platform for civic activity, you are
implicitly suggesting that a specific class of people is more worth your time
and attention than others. Of course, splitting your attention can also be
costly and doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be reaching everyone anyhow.
You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. The key to developing a social
media strategy is to understand who you're reaching and who you're not and make
certain that your perspective is accounting for said choices. Understand your
biases and work to counter them. -
We can use technology as a tool to connect with people, but we can't assume that
it will eliminate all of the serious issues we have to face in this country.
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04 Jul 09
Nate Ottodetails a digital migration (myspace to facebook) that mirrors "white flight"..
facebook myspace politics class race ethnography social_networking
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03 Jul 09
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02 Jul 09
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Karl FischI'm worried about the rhetoric we use when we talk about technology. Given what we've experienced and what we witness today, we tend to believe that these technologies are the great equalizers, that they can help ANYONE participate, that the technologies in and of themselves can revitalize democracy. In other words, we tend to believe in a certain utopian myth of the internet as the savior. What if this weren't true?
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Facebook is less competitive than MySpace. It doesn’t have the Top 8 thing or anything like that, or the background thing
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01 Jul 09
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Carleen Huxley"In many ways, the Internet is providing a next generation public sphere. Unfortunately, it's also bringing with it next generation divides"
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For decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions.
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As is the case in many situations, teenagers are a darn good indicator of broader trends. I'm an ethnographer. For the last four years, I've been traveling the United States, talking to American teenagers about their use of social media. During the 2006-2007 school year, I started noticing a trend. In each school, in each part of the country, there were teens who opted for MySpace and teens who opted for Facebook. (There were also plenty of teens who used both.) At the beginning of the school year, teens were asking "Are you on MySpace? Yes or No?" At the end of the school year, the question had transformed to "MySpace or Facebook?"
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Kat (14, Mass.): I'm not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever, and Facebook is all... not all the people that have Facebook are mature, but its supposed to be like oh we're more mature. … MySpace is just old.
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Teens - and adults - use social categories and labels to identify people with values, tastes, and social positions. As teens chose between MySpace and Facebook, these sites took on the frames of those social categories. Nowhere is this more visible than in the language that those who explicitly chose Facebook over MySpace.
Craig (17, California): The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook. It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace.
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Early adopters matter - they shape services in the long-term. MySpace came out first and quickly attracted urban 20-somethings. It spread to teenagers through older siblings and cousins as well as those who were attracted to indie rock and hip hop music culture. Facebook started at Harvard and spread to the Ivy Leagues before spreading more broadly. The first teenagers to hear about Facebook were those connected to the early adopters of Facebook (i.e. the Ivy League bound types). The desirability of the site spread from those college-bound teens. As word of these sites spread, teens went to where their friends were. The origin points of these sites explain many of people's choices, especially when it comes to first adoption because people adopt the sites that their friends adopt. Yet, it doesn't explain why people some people left MySpace to join Facebook and others did not.
-
Herein lies the reality that makes all of this quite messy to deal with. It wasn't just anyone who left MySpace to go to Facebook. In fact, if we want to get to the crux of what unfolded, we might as well face an uncomfortable reality... What happened was modern day "white flight."
-
Those who deserted MySpace did so by "choice" but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.
-
The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to everyone out there. And if we think back to the language used by teens who use Facebook when talking about MySpace, we should be truly alarmed. Those who are from privileged backgrounds tend to be far more condescending towards those who are not than vice versa. Many of us in this room come from privileged worlds where we want to "help" those who are not well-off.
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Unlike teens who are often straddling MySpace and Facebook, most adults are active on one or the other unless they have a specific professional or hobby-based reason to be on both. Many of you know people who joined Facebook in the last year. Well, numerous adults have also joined MySpace in the last year. My guess is that no many of you know adults who have recently created accounts on MySpace. Why? Because they probably aren't like you.
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In many ways, adult worlds are even more divided than teen worlds. Adults are less likely to know other adults who aren't like them than teens are. There's a concept in sociology called "homophily." It means birds of a feather stick together.
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One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics. And it makes many different realities much more visible than ever before. Racial divisions in American society should not shock anyone in this room, but the explicit-ness of them online can be quite startling.
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First off, when people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another and they do not communicate with one another. This can and does breed intolerance. Sociologists are obsessed with homophily because of the social and economic implications for such divisions. If you don't know people who are different than you, you don't trust them. Think about this in the context of the politics around gay rights. The #1 predictor for how someone will side in issues of gay rights is whether or not they know someone who is gay.
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When you choose MySpace or Facebook, you can't send messages to people on the other site. You can't Friend people on the other site. There's a cultural wall between users. And if there's no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.
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people are already divided and we accept that people from different backgrounds inhabit different environments. We cannot expect technology to automatically integrate people and generate cultural harmony. Although most of you call these sites "social networking sites," there's almost no networking going on.
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In many ways, the Internet is providing a next generation public sphere. Unfortunately, it's also bringing with it next generation divides. The public sphere was never accessible to everyone. There's a reason than the scholar Habermas talked about it as the bourgeois public sphere. The public sphere was historically the domain of educated, wealthy, white, straight men. The digital public sphere may make certain aspects of public life more accessible to some, but this is not a given.
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I recommend each and every one of you to login to MySpace and try to make sense of it today. It will feel foreign to you because it's not your community, it's not your friends. Now imagine how people who aren't like you feel when they walk into Facebook or Twitter.
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if you look at Indian use of social media, you'll see a divide between Orkut and Facebook that plays out along caste and professional lines. Even if you're not working in the States, you need to account for social divisions. You just might have to look in different places.
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Divides also play out inside sites. Consider everyone's beloved Twitter. For starters, who uses the site represents a small minority of American (let alone international) online participants. Teens, for example, are not using the site. But even among those who are, they aren't part of one gigantic public space. Consider the discussion of the Iranian election. If you were in certain cohorts, you couldn't miss the green-ification of people's profiles, the discussions of #iranelection. But, even though said conversations were massively prolific, only a small percentage of the user base was even aware of this beyond the trending topic. Those who were following 50cent and Miley Cyrus were oblivious to these conversations. And, in a matter of moments, this became visible when Michael Jackson died and captured the attention of a much broader swath of users, nearly taking Twitter down with it. In your world, Iran probably matters more than Michael Jackson. But don't for a second think that this is universal.
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1) Social stratification is pervasive in American society (and around the globe). Social media does not magically eradicate inequality. Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible. What we see online is not the property of these specific sites, but the pattern of adoption and development that emerged as people embraced them. People brought their biases with them to these sites and they got baked in.
-
2) There is no universal public online. What we see as user "choice" in social media often has to do with structural forces like homophily in people's social networks. Social stratification in this country is not cleanly linked to race or education or socio-economic factors, although all are certainly present. More than anything, social stratification is a social networks issue. People connect to people who think like them and they think like the people with whom they are connected. The digital publics that unfold highlight and reinforce structural divisions.
-
3) If you are trying to connect with the public, where you go online matters. If you choose to make Facebook your platform for civic activity, you are implicitly suggesting that a specific class of people is more worth your time and attention than others. Of course, splitting your attention can also be costly and doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be reaching everyone anyhow.
-
The key to developing a social media strategy is to understand who you're reaching and who you're not and make certain that your perspective is accounting for said choices. Understand your biases and work to counter them.
-
The more that we rely on certain kinds of social media as the solution, the more we define a modern day "second class citizenship." We desperately need to address issues of access and media literacy to combat this, but we also need to re-engage around broader issues of inequality, intolerance, and social divisions. Technology isn't the savior, but it sure can highlight the work we need to do.
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Rem PalpittFor decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions. This is most salient in the States which is intentionally the focus of my talk here today.
-
For decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions. This is most salient in the States which is intentionally the focus of my talk here today.
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Todd Suomeladanah boyd updates her work on class/race divisions between users of Facebook and MySpace
facebook myspace class online culture race ethnography social-computing social software
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Given what we've experienced and what we witness today, we tend to believe that these technologies are the great equalizers, that they can help ANYONE participate, that the technologies in and of themselves can revitalize democracy. In other words, we tend to believe in a certain utopian myth of the internet as the savior. What if this weren't true?
-
Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions.
- 17 more annotations...
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Rather than staying in land of abstract
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The numbers show that MySpace has neither grown nor faded in the last year while Facebook has expanded rapidly and has finally reached the same size
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Even if you think that Facebook is winning the game, we need to account for the fact that *70 million* people in the US visited MySpace. That's not small potatoes.
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Rather than staying in land of abstrac
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This quote provides the key to understanding the distinction between MySpace and Facebook. Choice isn't about features of functionality. It's about the social categories in which we live. It's about choosing sites online that reflect "people like me." And it's about seeing the "other" site as the place where the "other" people go
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Early adopters matter - they shape services in the long-term
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What happened was modern day "white flight." Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those who deserted MySpace did so by "choice" but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.
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MySpace has become the "ghetto" of the digital landscape.
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Structurally, social networks are driven by homophily even when there are individual exceptions
-
One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics. And it makes many different realities much more visible than ever before.
-
when people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another and they do not communicate with one another. This can and does breed intolerance.
-
When you choose MySpace or Facebook, you can't send messages to people on the other site. You can't Friend people on the other site. There's a cultural wall between users. And if there's no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.
-
We can accept when people choose to connect to people who are like them and not friend different others. But can we accept when institutions and services only support a portion of the network?
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If you want people to connect around politics and democracy, information and ideas, you need to understand the divisions that exist. Many of us in this room see social network sites as a modern day incarnation of the public sphere. Politicians login to these sites to connect with constituents and hear their voices. Campaign managers and activists try to rally people through these sites. Market researchers try to get a sense of people's opinions through these sites. Educators try to connect with students and build knowledge sharing communities. This is fantastic. But there isn't one uniform public sphere. There are numerous publics (and counterpublics).
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So as we think about creating public spaces, what's the meeting point for our conversations? Is it MySpace or Facebook? Twitter or IRC? What you choose matters. Where you and your colleagues hang out matters. The "voices" of the Internet that you get are biased by the people who are in the places that you hang out. But do you know this? Do you account for it? Are you working to represent all people or just the people that you can see and hear? When you're trying to reach out to people, are you trying to reach out to all people or just the people in the environments that you understand? Are you embracing difference or are you only taking into account that with which you are comfortable?
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MySpace vs. Facebook is not the only divide taking place online nor will it be the last. These divides are going to keep on happening as social media becomes increasingly prevalent and as features of social media are baked into every site on the web.
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The key to developing a social media strategy is to understand who you're reaching and who you're not and make certain that your perspective is accounting for said choices. Understand your biases and work to counter them.
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Social network sites complicate this even further. Social network sites are not like email where it doesn't matter if you're on Hotmail or Yahoo. When you choose MySpace or Facebook, you can't send messages to people on the other site. You can't Friend people on the other site. There's a cultural wall between users. And if there's no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.
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30 Jun 09
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I'm worried about the rhetoric we use when we talk about technology
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In other words, we tend to believe in a certain utopian myth of the internet as the savior
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I want you to think about the ways in which technology is not equally available or equally transformative
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And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions
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In a business environment where monetization is shaky, the only definition of success is "growth."
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I'm an ethnographer
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All of this would be fine and dandy if friendships and aesthetics and values weren't inherently intertwined with issues of race, socio-economic status, education, and other factors that usually make up our understanding of "class." But they are. And the further into the analysis you go, the more uncomfortable the data might make you feel.
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Facebook started at Harvard and spread to the Ivy Leagues before spreading more broadly. The first teenagers to hear about Facebook were those connected to the early adopters of Facebook
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What happened was modern day "white flight." Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook
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And if we think back to the language used by teens who use Facebook when talking about MySpace, we should be truly alarmed.
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How often do our language and mannerisms reflect a problematic level of condescension? Perhaps we should look at our teens.
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I highlight this because I think that we need to think twice when we dismiss or devalue popular "mainstream" trends and environments
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The data has consistently shown that MySpace is not a site of increased risk for youth and that risky behavior is more likely to occur in chatrooms than on MySpace
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Many of you know people who joined Facebook in the last year. Well, numerous adults have also joined MySpace in the last year
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One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics. And it makes many different realities much more visible than ever before
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First off, when people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another and they do not communicate with one another
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If you don't know people who are different than you, you don't trust them
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Social network sites are not like email where it doesn't matter if you're on Hotmail or Yahoo. When you choose MySpace or Facebook, you can't send messages to people on the other site.
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Although most of you call these sites "social networking sites," there's almost no networking going on
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If you want people to connect around politics and democracy, information and ideas, you need to understand the divisions that exist
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In many ways, the Internet is providing a next generation public sphere
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Habermas talked about it as the bourgeois public sphere. The public sphere was historically the domain of educated, wealthy, white, straight men
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If you aren't part of these networks, these technologies may feel very foreign.
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what's the meeting point for our conversations? Is it MySpace or Facebook? Twitter or IRC? What you choose matters
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Are you embracing difference or are you only taking into account that with which you are comfortable?
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What divides people often differs as well, although "class" is still salient almost everywhere
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MySpace vs. Facebook is not the only divide taking place online nor will it be the last. These divides are going to keep on happening as social media becomes increasingly prevalent and as features of social media are baked into every site on the web.
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If you choose to make Facebook your platform for civic activity, you are implicitly suggesting that a specific class of people is more worth your time and attention than others
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We desperately need to address issues of access and media literacy to combat this, but we also need to re-engage around broader issues of inequality, intolerance, and social divisions
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Julie EspinosaIn your world, Iran probably matters more than Michael Jackson. But don't for a second think that this is universal.
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Structurally, social networks are driven by homophily even when there are individual exceptions. And sure enough, in the digital world, we see this manifested right before our eyes.
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One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics.
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Although most of you call these sites "social networking sites," there's almost no networking going on. People use these sites to connect to the people they know.
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In many ways, the Internet is providing a next generation public sphere. Unfortunately, it's also bringing with it next generation divides. The public sphere was never accessible to everyone. There's a reason than the scholar Habermas talked about it as the bourgeois public sphere. The public sphere was historically the domain of educated, wealthy, white, straight men. The digital public sphere may make certain aspects of public life more accessible to some, but this is not a given. And if the ways in which we construct the digital public sphere reinforce the divisions that we've been trying to break down, we've got a problem.
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1) Social stratification is pervasive in American society (and around the globe). Social media does not magically eradicate inequality. Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible. What we see online is not the property of these specific sites, but the pattern of adoption and development that emerged as people embraced them. People brought their biases with them to these sites and they got baked in.
2) There is no universal public online. What we see as user "choice" in social media often has to do with structural forces like homophily in people's social networks. Social stratification in this country is not cleanly linked to race or education or socio-economic factors, although all are certainly present. More than anything, social stratification is a social networks issue. People connect to people who think like them and they think like the people with whom they are connected. The digital publics that unfold highlight and reinforce structural divisions.
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3) If you are trying to connect with the public, where you go online matters. If you choose to make Facebook your platform for civic activity, you are implicitly suggesting that a specific class of people is more worth your time and attention than others. Of course, splitting your attention can also be costly and doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be reaching everyone anyhow. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. The key to developing a social media strategy is to understand who you're reaching and who you're not and make certain that your perspective is accounting for said choices. Understand your biases and work to counter them.
4) The Internet has enabled many new voices to enter the political fray, but not everyone is sitting at the table. There's a terrible tendency in this country, and especially among politically minded folks, to interpret an advancement as a solution. We have not eradicated racism. We have not eradicated sexism. We have not eradicated inequality. While we've made tremendous strides in certain battles, the war is not over. The worst thing we can do is to walk away and congratulate ourselves for all of the good things that have happened. Such attitudes create new breeding grounds for increased stratification.
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Settlement AtWorkThis talk was written for a specific audience - the attendees of the Personal Democracy Forum. This audience is primarily American, primarily liberal-leaning, primarily white, and primarily involved professionally in politics in one way or another. Keep this audience in mind when I'm talking about "we" here.
I want to ask a favor here today. I want you to step away from the techno-hyperbole for just a moment and think about issues of inequality and social stratification with me. I want you to think about the ways in which technology is not equally available or equally transformative.
For decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions. This is most salient in the States which is intentionally the focus of my talk here today.
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