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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References continued

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