danah boyd
The beginning of this article took me by surprise. I've openly admitted this before ,God only knows why, because I should probably be ashamed of my middle school self, but nevertheless, my entrance into the world of social media was widely influenced by MySpace. I was a huge fan of MySpace.com, and I never, not for a second, thought of it as being "ghetto." MySpace was the place where I and all my friends could set up our highly personalized profiles, upon which we would showcase our angle shots, poorly edited pictures, and unnecessarily emo music-- I don't know why 11 year old Marissa thought that My Chemical Romance "just got me" but oh man, she did.
So, for this reason, "ghetto" was a description I was surprised to hear coming from a kid who was the same age as I was at the time of the interview. Take into consideration, I've grown up in Elizabeth, NJ. The school I went to was by no means homogeneous in terms of race. The reason I moved on to Facebook my freshman year of high school, was because it was new and interesting. It was the next big thing.
boyd certainly put in the research to make a case for a more racially based view of things. I found what she had to say interesting, especially that digital environments are shaped by race and class in similar ways to physical spaces. I think this stands to reason, as ones digital life is typically spent with the same people they would spend time with in the real world. However, boyd also invokes the idea of "white flight," and draws parallels between the digital and the physical in order to show how "people's engagement with technology reveals social divisions and the persistence of racism" (4). This is where I jump ship on her argument. I think the concept of white flight certainly draws a provoking parallel, but it's going too far, and here's why:
People abandoned MySpace because it was no longer the new thing. People follow friends and fads and, on top of Facebook being the new kid on the block, MySpace was going downhill as a website. It didn't have a solid basis as a company, as it grew corporate issues arose and metastasized beyond control, it became too big and too bloated, along with several other death blows that are very well laid out in this article from The Guardian. MySpace was poorly handled and it fell out of favor because of that reason. People didn't drift away from it because of "white flight" to Facebook, they drifted away because Facebook had a future as a social networking site-- and this is coming from someone who, once again, would love to have her old MySpace profile back. MySpace was going downhill, and when Facebook became available to the public (aka anyone with an email address) in 2006, the site began to gain traction. Between 2009-2011, Facebook took off as the next big thing, and all others fell to the wayside.
That aside, boyd's research reveals that many different justifications were offered by the teens she interviewed, in order to explain their choice of one site over the other. Overwhelmingly, this had to do with preference in what the sites had to offer, usually based around where friend groups gravitated. It's an interesting thing to note that kids stay with kids who are like them or, as it's said, "birds of a feather flock together." This proves to be true in many realms and social circles, in school, and in life, it stands to reason that this would follow to the online sphere. boyd had the data to prove this, however, I don't think that noting this is admitting anything breakthrough. Of course people follow their friends, and they'll go to the site that is better suited to their needs and desires. The business failure of MySpace aside, if I had made my Facebook account in high school, and came to find that all the kids were on MySpace, I would have gone back to MySpace.
I think her article is well written and incredibly interesting, and it certainly made me consider racial implications. However, I don't think the case she makes holds water.
"Self- Segregation: Why It's So Hard for Whites to Understand Ferguson"
Robert P. Jones
This 2014 article takes us back to the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a case which caused racial tension to boil and underlying instabilities to rise to the surface. It serves as an interesting juxtaposition to the racial conversation in the previous article, regarding the nature of races to group together. Sadly, the line between white and black seems to be becoming all the more bold every day, and is aggravated by more and more instances that seem to drive a wedge between the groups.
The area of New Jersey we live in is, luckily, very diverse. However this is not the case in many areas, as exemplified in this quote from the article:
"The social networks of whites are a remarkable 91 percent white. White American social networks are only one percent black, one percent Hispanic, one percent Asian or Pacific Islander, one percent mixed race, and one percent other race. In fact, fully three-quarters (75 percent) of whites have entirely white social networks without any minority presence. This level of social-network racial homogeneity among whites is significantly higher than among black Americans (65 percent) or Hispanic Americans (46 percent)."It is important to expand beyond social circles to truly attempt to understand what the world is like beyond your proverbial front door. Every day there is a new news story that makes this case again and again. Much like the social circles of children, it would appear that adults don't tend to expand beyond the "birds of a feather" mindset. By acknowledging this mindset, we can attempt to work past it in all areas of life and see life through different eyes.
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