social media inequality
TRANSCRIPT
Inequality: Can Social Media
Resolve Social Divisions?
Chapter 6, It’s Complicated, danah boyd
Theresa Ragonese
Almost sixty years have passed since the US Supreme Court ruled the
segregation of public high schools unconstitutional, yet many
American high schools still organize around race and class through
a variety of forces: social, cultural, economic, and political
Friend groups are often economically and racially homogenous, translating into
segregated lunch rooms and online communities
Classrooms may look diverse on the inside, but outside of the classroom segregation
reoccurs
People feel powerless against the racial dynamics that segregate the population
Students of different races may be polite to each other in the classroom but that does not
always translate over to social media
“Although many teens connect to everyone they know on sites like Facebook, this doesn’t
mean that they cross unspoken cultural boundaries. Communities where race is fraught
maintain the same systems of segregation online and off” (boyd, 2014, p. 155)
After the election of President Barack Obama, some argued that we were entering a post
racial society and “that technology would bring people together, eradicate social
divisions in the United States, and allow democracy to flourish around the world” (boyd,
2014, p. 156)
Diversity in
Schools
• DiversityData
• National Center for
Education Statistics
“…the mere existence of new technology neither
creates nor magically solves cultural problems” (boyd, 2014, p.156)
Society often heralds technology as a tool to end social divisions
1858: Atlantic Telegraph Company installs first transatlantic cable
Charles Briggs and Augustus Maverick argued that “this binds together by a
vital cord all the nations of the earth. It is impossible that old prejudices and
hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for an
exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth” (boyd, 2014, p. 156)
While new communication media brings hope for bridging cultural divides, “this
hope [is] projected onto new technologies in ways that suggest that technology
itself does the work of addressing cultural divisions” (boyd, 2014, p. 156)
People believed the internet would be an equalizer- where race and class
wouldn’t matter- because of the lack of visual cues
Transatlantic Cable Map
Evolution of cell phones
Evolution of Writing Devices
“Inadvertently…creators fail to realize how their biases inform their
design decisions or when the broader structural ecosystem in which a
designer innovates has restrictions that produce bias as a byproduct”
(boyd, 2014, p. 156). Often, only after an item hits the marketplace is
the bias that disproportionately affects certain users realized
Microsoft Kinect, an image capturing,
facial recognition gaming device, “often
fails to recognize dark-skinned users. In
choosing to use image capture to do
face recognition, the Kinect engineers
built a system that is technically-and
socially- biased in implementation”
(boyd, 2014, p. 158)
Kinect has problems recognizing dark-
skinned users?
The voice recognition software
developed by Apple, called Siri, has had
trouble recognizing certain accents such
as Southern US, Scottish, and Indian. This
difficulty was recognized during the
testing phase as Siri was tested primarily
in-house, where the most common
accents were American English.
iPhone 4S's Siri Is Lost in Translation With
Heavy Accents
“Race matters in cyberspace precisely because all of us who spend
time online are already shaped by the ways in which race matters
offline and we can’t help but bring our own knowledge, experiences,
and values with us when we log on” (Race in Cyberspace, Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, Gilbert Rodman)
The same biases that affect non-computer mediated aspects of life also shape
computer mediated experiences on the internet
The social divisions that exist in the real world are replicated and sometimes
amplified online
“When teens are online they bring their experiences with them. They make visible
their values and attitudes, hopes and prejudices. Through their experiences living
in a mediated world in which social divisions remain salient, we can see and deal realistically with their more harmful assumptions and prejudices” (boyd, 2014, p.
160)
Racism, intolerance, and prejudice are pervasive online and offline
Social Networking Site Users Demographics
Percentage of Teens on Social Networking Sites
In 1993, The New Yorker, published the cartoon below. “One interpretation of this cartoon is that embodied and experienced social
factors- race, gender, class, ethnicity- do not necessarily transfer into
the mediated world” (boyd, 2014, p. 160)
“Teens reinforce social divisions through their use of
and attitudes towards social media” (boyd, 2014, p.
171)
Racism, bigotry, and hate are especially visible online
Hate is spread by those who agree with it and those who critique it
“Some people use social media to express insensitive and hateful
views, but others use the same technologies to publicly shame, and
in some cases threaten, people who they feel are violating social
decorum” (boyd, 2014, p. 163)
Calling attention to messages of hate and shame
only “incites a new type of hate, which continues to
reinforce structural divides” (boyd, 2014, p. 162)
UCLA student Alexandra Wallace
“posted a racist tirade on YouTube
mocking students of Asian descent…in March 2011” (boyd,
2014, p. 162)
( Alexandra Wallace Racist Tirade )
Singer-songwriter Jimmy Wong
posted a response video
( Jimmy Wong Response Video )
A college lifestyle blog posted bikini
photos of Alexandra Wallace in a post
titled “Alexandra Wallace: Racist UCLA
Student’s Bikini Photos Revealed” (boyd,
2014, p. 163)
Wallace and her family received death
threats which prompted Wallace to drop
out of school and seek police protection
From a UCLA newspaper: “What Wallace
did was hurtful and inexcusable, but the
response has been far more egregious.
She made a big mistake and she knows it,
but they responded with greater levels of
intolerance” (boyd, 2014, p. 163)
“Teens are acutely aware of the power of race and class in
shaping their lives…[but it] doesn’t mean they understand
how to deal with its complexities or recognize its more
subtle effects” (boyd, 2014, p. 163)
Even where teens pride themselves as open-minded, they ignorantly reproduce racial divisions
Examples:
boyd encountered students from more privileged backgrounds who publicized “having friends of different races as “proof” of their openness” (2014, p. 164)
Kath, a white seventeen-year-old, believes in her head that “race didn’t matter at her school” (boyd, 2014, p. 164) but her Facebook profile proved otherwise
Teens explain the divisions boyd is seeing as a result of “who was in what classes or who played what sport” (2014, p. 163)
Homophily: the practice of connecting with
like-minded individuals (boyd, 2014, p. 166)
Homophily can be accounted for by gender and sex, religion, education level, age, occupation, and social class
Reasons for homophily are rooted in bigotry, inequality, structural constraints, and
oppression in American life
“For teens who are facing cultural oppression and inequality, connecting along lines of race and ethnicity can help teens feel a sense of belonging, enhance identity
development, and help them navigate systematic racism” (boyd, 2014, p. 166)
“When teens go online to hang out with their friends, and are given the segregation
of American society, their friends are likely to be of the same race, class, and cultural
background” (boyd, 2014, p. 171)
In principle, technology makes it possible to socialize with anyone online; in practice,
teens connect to who they know and have the most common with
MySpace vs. Facebook:
“In differentiating Facebook and MySpace through taste, teens inadvertently
embraced and reinforced a host of cultural factors that are rooted in the history
of race and class” (boyd, 2014, p. 169)
2006-2007: MySpace was at it’s peak while Facebook was gaining
traction
Some people were joining Facebook and not MySpace, some were switching
to Facebook from MySpace, some were staying with MySpace
“teens focused their attention on the site where their friends were socializing. In doing so these choices reified the race and class divisions that exist” (boyd,
2014, p. 168) outside of the internet
“Although the underlying segregation of friendship networks defined
who chose what site, most teens didn’t used the language of race and
class to describe their social network site preference. Some may have
recognized that this was what was happening, but most described
division in terms of personal preference” (boyd, 2014, p. 168)
MySpace Users:
Ability to “pimp out” profiles with
“glitter”
View Facebook as lame, boring,
sterile, elitist
Facebook Users:
View MySpace’s “pimped out” profiles as
tacky, gaudy, and cluttered
Relish aesthetic minimalism
MySpace profile example Facebook profile example
“The internet can serve as a great equalizer. By providing people with
access to knowledge and potential markets, networks can create
opportunity where none exists…Information networks have become a
great leveler, and we should use them to help lift people out of poverty”
(boyd, 2014, p. 172)- Hillary Clinton, 2010
This creates the assumption that “because the internet makes information more
readily available to more people than ever before, access to the internet will
address historical informational social inequalities. Yet just because people have
access to the internet does not mean they have equal access to information”
(boyd, 2014, p. 172)
Further reading:
The Information Age by Manuel Castells discusses “what economic and
cultural shifts are possible because of technology and why not everyone will
benefit equally from these shifts” (boyd, 2014, p. 173)
“We don’t live in a post racial society,
and social media is not the cultural
remedy that some people hoped it
would become” (boyd, 2014, p. 175)
References
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Asians in the Library: UCLA Rant (Original Uncut Video) and Apology. (2011, March 13). YouTube. Retrieved July 14, 2014, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQR01qltgo8
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References continued
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