Austin's Internet Culture Blog

The article “White Flight in Networked Publics?” takes an interesting view on the divisions between users of MySpace and users of Facebook. It was written by Dr. Danah Boyd, who is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, among other places, and her work focuses on the merger of society, technology, and policy. Specifically, she is interested in how teenagers use social media in their day to day lives and how they operate in these mediated environments.

The article looks at the distinctions between users of MySpace vs. users of Facebook, and takes several perspectives into consideration: ethnicity, education levels, personal aesthetics, how real world relationships are organized and safety. The main findings of the study are that MySpace is seen as the “ghetto” version of Facebook, and several reasons are given for this assertion. Of the reasons she offers, one that I find particularly interesting is the evolution of both sites, and how this helped to create the divide. While MySpace has always been accessible to the general public, Facebook started out as an exclusive website.

Originally, access to Facebook was intentionally limited. Facebook started out as a Harvard-only social network site before expanding to support all Ivy League schools and then top-tier colleges and then a wider array of colleges. Because of it’s background, some saw Facebook as an “elite” social network site.

While Facebook is now open to the general public, the image of it being more “professional” than MySpace still remains. This image reflects social issues, as the article mentions that “Black and Latino teens appeared to preference MySpace while white and Asian teens seemed to privilege Facebook.” The racial divide here is rather interesting, because Black and Latino families are more likely to be of lower class status than white or Asian families. The choice of social network that teens make seems to implicate not only what their economic status is, but also what ethnic groups they are likely to affiliate with. This also ties into a second cause of the divide between the two social networking sites. Facebook, for the most part, is very uniform in how each page is displayed, a stark contrast to MySpace, where your page can be as diverse and individualized as you are. According to the article, this factor was influential in a teenager making a choice between which of the two sites to join.

What seems readily apparent is that these sites target different groups of the teenage population. Facebook seems to be the go-to network for students who are high-achieving, where MySpace seems to be a much more welcome place for the misfits and/or lower-income class. While the article does not supply any actual numbers to back up these apparent trends in usage, it does help to provide an explanation as to how these sites are utilized by teenagers, and which groups are using which site. But when all the factors, are looked at, regardless of which site teens prefer, they are going to use the one that all of their friends are using.

I had never really thought about how pervasive social media has become in life until I read the excerpt from Andrew Keen’s Digital Vertigo.  In it, he discusses the evolution of a completely socialized society and how it continuously affects day to day life. While I was surprised to learn that the idea of a socialized society where everything was transparent originated as early as 1787, the fact that the concept had evolved from one of the physical realm to one of the digital realm were already readily apparent to me. Keen touches on an issue that I think is critical to the continual evolution of the social aspect of the internet:

All we, as individuals, want to do on the network, it seems is share our reputations, our travel itineraries, our war plans, our professional credentials, our illnesses, our confessions, photographs of our latest meal, our sexual habits of course, even our exact whereabouts with our thousands of online friends. Network society has become a transparent love-in, an orgy of oversharing, and endless digital Summer of Love.

This idea is both intriguing and frightening at the same time. Despite all of the warnings to be careful as to what you share and don’t share on social media, our society is addicted to the idea that we need to constantly share our lives with others. While this may be great for staying in touch with friends or even reconnecting with people from your past, it also has it’s darker side. With the amount of information that we freely give about ourselves and our lives, it’s becoming easier and easier for any company, or even any other person, to know what we like, what we dislike, essentially to know everything about us. One of the more unsavory concepts that arises from this is the ease with which the individual can be stalked. Not just stalking performed by a stranger or an unrequited love, but by government agencies as well.

Facebook is where we go to reveal everything about ourselves. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the satirical website The Onion, confirming Julian Assange’s remark about Facebook as history’s “most appalling spying machine,” presents Mark Zuckerberg’s creation as a CIA conspiracy.

What makes this so dangerous is that the information posted to Facebook is out there forever, and the fact that we, because we love to share so much, simply volunteer it. We never think about the long term consequences of the revealing this information in such a public manner, and as a result, it’s become fairly easy for complete strangers to be able to know everything about you. This massive amount of sharing and social networking reminds me of a television series called Person of Interest. The basic plot of it is that a retired special ops member and a computer genius work together to help prevent crime to the everyday citizen using a machine that compiles all the information stored on social media, and integrates that with real time camera feeds as well as stored videos in order to predict crime and acts of terrorism. While this is (I hope) just a very good television show, the implications of it are very real and frightening. This reading only reaffirms my belief that we, as a society, must be ever more careful about not only what we share, but also the medium that we use to share it.

The first chapter from An Introduction to Cybercultures and New Media, by Pramod K. Nayar gives an excellent overview of how cybercultures are defined how they function in terms of the real and virtual worlds. Because it is an introductory chapter, there is a lot of general information covering a large range of topics.While some of the arguments presented were obvious to me, there were some concepts that made me take a step back and think.

One of these concepts is the idea of transcendence that the digital world provides. It not only allows us to access and explore the entire world without us ever having to leave our chairs, but it also gives us the ability to join and explore worlds that exist purely in a digital sense (World of Warcraft, Google Earth).

The body’s limitations – disease, degeneration, aging – can be overcome through technological prosthesis. what we have is an augmented body: the posthuman.

For people with these issues, the digital world can be a great resource, where they have the freedom to overcome their disadvantages and feel like the rest of society. However, this is not to say that the digital world is the solution. Nayar clearly recognizes the issues with using the virtual world to escape the real world: suffering politics and emancipation continue to be embodied. At the end of the day, regardless of how many orcs your avatar may have killed, you still have to deal with the limitations of the physical world once you unplug from the digital one.

A second concept that I found engaging was the digital divide. When I have a question about something, I google it. Sometimes from a personal computer, sometimes from my cell phone, occasionally from my mom’s Kindle Fire, but regardless of the device I use, I have the answer instantly. As technology increasingly becomes integrated with my everyday life, I rarely stop to think about what I would do should I suddenly not have access to digital information. Granted, I live in a rural area, so I know what it’s like to have a slow connection; I had dial up until 2004. I’ve never stopped to think about what I would do if I were completely cut off from the internet. Here are some of the statistics:

– Africa has 14.7 percent of the world’s population and constitutes 3.5 percent of the world’s total internet use (though it shows the largest expansion of Internet use – 874.6 percent between 2000 and 2007).

-Europe has 12.3 percent of the world’s population and constitutes 27.7 percent of the world internet use.

– North America has 69 percent internet penetration, even though it has only 5.1 percent of the world’s population.

– Within Asia, Afghanistan constitutes 0.1 percent of total users in Asian, and has 2.0 percent of its population wired. India constitutes 13.1 percent of total internet users in Asia and has 5.3 percent of its population wired. Hong Kong has 68.2 percent of its population wired, and Japan 68 percent.

What these numbers tell me is that we should all be a little more appreciative of how accessable the internet is to us. Our culture is one that tends to take basic needs for granted (food, water, air) and whether it be good or bad, it seems as if someday soon the internet will be joining that list.

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