You know The Root, right? Editor in chief the now infamous Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, the online magazine launched by the Washington Post Company no-less, focusing on the many facets of black culture. Are you excited now?
<imagine crickets chirping>
Haven’t heard of The Root? Apparently most of my colleagues in Minnesota haven’t either, at least to judge from the politely blank stares I received after sharing my news. Which made me wonder – is cyberspace bridging our cultural divides, or adding more space to them?
Over the past year I’ve delved deeply into cyberspace with the launch of a website, blog, Facebook group and even Twitter account. What I’ve found is that cyberspace, like “reality space” is divided by class, race, gender, and other disparities.This is not what the marketing industry has sold us (you know the commercials –Tibetan monks with laptops, poor children in India with eyes aglow from their computer screens). We’ve been told that technology spells the 'end of geography' and promises universal, democratic entree to the electronic highways of the world economy and community.
In 2008 The Washington Post Company bought into that vision, hoping that The Root, despite its theme, would expand its online audience. If predominately white Minnesota is a litmus test, it hasn’t worked.
Flash forward to 2009, and you’ll find the Internet creates and reflects a distinct spatial structure interlaced with, and often reinforcing, existing separate spheres. Two weeks ago, CNN.Com/technology published a piece entitled, “Does your social class determine your online social network?”
A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found “friending” on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.
More specifically, almost 23 percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to slightly more than 16 percent of MySpace users. On the other end of the spectrum, 37 percent of MySpace members earn less than $50,000 annually, compared with about 28 percent of Facebook users.
MySpace users tend to be "in middle-class, blue-collar neighborhoods," said Mike Mancini, vice president of data product management for Nielsen, which used an online panel of more than 200,000 social media users in the United States in August. "They're on their way up, or perhaps not college educated."
By contrast, Mancini said, "Facebook [use] goes off the charts in the upscale suburbs," driven by a demographic that for Nielsen is represented by white or Asian married couples between the ages of 45-64 with kids and high levels of education.
Even more affluent are users of Twitter, the micro-blogging site, and LinkedIn, a networking site geared to white-collar professionals. Almost 38 percent of LinkedIn users earn more than $100,000 a year.
So who are we friending and linking with anyway? Are we just expanding our comfort zones of race/class folks, reinforcing our own ideas with people who think like us? How can we use this opportunity of “The Information Age” to actually, well, connect to different people?
I plead guilty to staying in my own circumference of the black academic life blogosphere, but I want to change that. I’m recommending The Root to my fellow Minnesotans – what blogs do you all think I should visit? Let’s swap our daily blog habits for a week –and then I’ll report back on what we find out about each other.
Who knows, maybe bridging the digital divide begins with us?
7 comments:
Very thoughtful and very insightful Professor. I'm looking forward to reading your results in a week.
Professor - You should read this blog. Why? I'll let Julie Z. tell you.
"As a teenage feminist, I get asked this one by my peers a lot and am always trying to think of more creative ways to answer: Why do we still need feminism?"
See the blog at www.fbomb.org.
I saw this article too and it confirmed what I knew from seeing who attends blog and twitter conferences: mostly affluent, non-people of color. I also think there is a distinction between using social media for just entertainment versus for strategically connecting your message with the people you want to hear it.
From what I observe, MySpace lends itself to fun, with its heavy graphical and audio components, thus it has less of a literary element than blogs, FB, or Twitter. The latter can quickly suss out holes in one's control over written language, so this may also contribute to the digital class divide.
I started the freshman year of my social networks education at about this time last year, with accounts on both MySpace and Facebook. My initial attraction to both sites is no surprise, really, as I am middle-class white woman with roots in a working class family of origin. Rue’s comment about the structural differences between the two sites reflects a small part of the reason I soon dropped MySpace in favor of Facebook. In terms of creative expression, I am a writer. Many of my non-writer, artist friends maintain pages on both sites.
More relevant to my decision, however, the fact that I jumped on the social network wagon primarily to get in a flow of local Twin Cities information and connectivity related to politics and social justice issues. It took only a minute to see that MySpace was not going to accomplish that objective.
I am guilty, to some degree, of staying within the circumference of a comfort zone, as is evident by the overwhelming majority of fb friends who identify politically as democrats, progressives, left-of-Wellstone, greens, and a few anarchists. This is not the end of the story, though. I am a 50-ish American lesbian who now corresponds regularly with a twenty-something year old straight Moroccan man because we share a passion for racial justice and a love of music (our common friend connection is Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam). The limitations of geography do indeed collapse, in some cases.
What has surprised and delighted me this past year has to do with a dynamic flow between online social networking and my skin-and-bones life. In addition to achieving the political and justice connectivity that I sought, I have also met some cyber-friends who are now significant in my real-world life.
I am recommending two blogs, both written by people I met on Facebook. First, Verse-Chorus-Verse, written by PC Munoz, a producer/writer/musician in San Francisco. As his page indicates, PC “…mines for gems and grills the greats, five questions at a time.” http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/112927-verse-chorus-verse-rosanne-cash/
My second offering is High Impact Papa, written by Dave Snyder, a Jewish friend who lives in the Twin Cities and writes with eloquence and humor about being a father. http://highimpactpapa.blogspot.com/
The new White House Council for Women & Girls is designed to help government agencies become better models for more progressive workplace policies. They also have a informative blog at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/03/11/Opportunities-their-mothers-and-grandmothers-and-great-grandmothers-never-dreamed-of/Read More
Blog That!
The Urban Book Source.com is internet site for writers and readers who are interested in urban literature. The site provides news and information, and industry trends, and related articles. As an aspiring author, it’s a great resource on the industry and source of inspiration for me personally.
Ironically, the current blog being discussed is my #1 pet peeve; no other topic even comes close. The current blog is entitled, “A Critical Look at Street Lit.” Let me say without apology, I hate the street lit genre. Street Lit, is described as street literature often about African American lives usually within an urban setting. Think of it as gansta rap, only in literature form. Fortunately, I’m not the only one who hates the genre, hence the smokin’ hot debate currently being blogged.
One of the leading voices against Street Lit is author Nick Chiles who is considered the poster child for dissenting voices against the genre. In 2006, Chiles wrote a now infamous op-ed that appeared in the New York Times entitled, “Their Eyes Were Reading Smut.” Yes, I said back in 2006! January 4, 2006 to be exact, it’s still available to read at nytimes.com.
When asked on the blog what he thinks the difference is between African-American Literature and Street Literature? Here’s what he said, “I think African-American literature concerns itself with trying to explore, explain, reveal the true nature of the African-American soul, with asking and answering questions about what it means to be black in America at a time when so many others are trying to tell us it has so much less meaning than it used to. Street literature is too often about the glorification and exploitation of sex, violence, greed—the worst aspects of our nature, the things that we all must fight to tame, rather than to celebrate. “
Oh, it gets better. When asked about the African-American Literature section in commercial bookstores, Chiles says, “I still feel it every time I walk into Borders. It’s a sense of that shame that this is what our community feels about itself, our importance to the world, our contribution to the exploration of the human condition. It’s like the gifted, talented, brilliant woman who decides that she should use just her looks and sexuality to get ahead, rather than developing and using her mind and her talent. We’re like that woman—unbelievably talented and complex, but ignoring it all to make a buck. Fifty years from now, what will be said about our generation? I fear history will not be kind to us at all. And that saddens and shames me.”
You should read this blog because you are an author, who happens to be African American.
Go to: http//www.urbanbooksource.com/interview/nick-chiles.
I have to admit, I'd never heard of The Root until you mentioned it once before. I don't think that many people go online to Social Networking sites to expand their demographics. They do it to get in touch with people they know or knew more easily.
I am a person that seeks out people that are not like me at parties and things like that. In particular, I am very prone to seek out the foreigners and talk with them. I am fascinated by other countries and cultures. So, it does not surprise me that people divide along these lines online. Why should it be any different than a high school cafeteria or the work place? Life offers you choices. A different medium isn't going to change those choices all of a sudden..
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