Tag Archives: race

Why America is Self-Segregating

The United States has always been a diverse but segregated country. This has shaped American politics profoundly. Yet, throughout history, Americans have had to grapple with divergent views and opinions, political ideologies, and experiences in order to function as a country. Many of the institutions that underpin American democracy force people in the United States to encounter difference. This does not inherently produce tolerance or result in healthy resolution. Hell, the history of the United States is fraught with countless examples of people enslaving and oppressing other people on the basis of difference. This isn’t about our past; this is about our present. And today’s battles over laws and culture are nothing new.

Ironically, in a world in which we have countless tools to connect, we are also watching fragmentation, polarization, and de-diversification happen en masse. The American public is self-segregating, and this is tearing at the social fabric of the country.

CC BY 2.0-licensed image by Manel Torralba.

Many in the tech world imagined that the Internet would connect people in unprecedented ways, allow for divisions to be bridged and wounds to heal.It was the kumbaya dream. Today, those same dreamers find it quite unsettling to watch as the tools that were designed to bring people together are used by people to magnify divisions and undermine social solidarity. These tools were built in a bubble, and that bubble has burst.

Nowhere is this more acute than with Facebook. Naive as hell, Mark Zuckerberg dreamed he could build the tools that would connect people at unprecedented scale, both domestically and internationally. I actually feel bad for him as he clings to that hope while facing increasing attacks from people around the world about the role that Facebook is playing in magnifying social divisions. Although critics love to paint him as only motivated by money, he genuinely wants to make the world a better place and sees Facebook as a tool to connect people, not empower them to self-segregate.

The problem is not simply the “filter bubble,” Eli Pariser’s notion that personalization-driven algorithmic systems help silo people into segregated content streams. Facebook’s claim that content personalization plays a small role in shaping what people see compared to their own choices is accurate.And they have every right to be annoyed. I couldn’t imagine TimeWarner being blamed for who watches Duck Dynasty vs. Modern Family. And yet, what Facebook does do is mirror and magnify a trend that’s been unfolding in the United States for the last twenty years, a trend of self-segregation that is enabled by technology in all sorts of complicated ways.

The United States can only function as a healthy democracy if we find a healthy way to diversify our social connections, if we find a way to weave together a strong social fabric that bridges ties across difference.

Yet, we are moving in the opposite direction with serious consequences. To understand this, let’s talk about two contemporary trend lines and then think about the implications going forward.

Privatizing the Military

The voluntary US military is, in many ways, a social engineering project. The public understands the military as a service organization, dedicated to protecting the country’s interests. Yet, when recruits sign up, they are promised training and job opportunities. Individual motivations vary tremendously, but many are enticed by the opportunity to travel the world, participate in a cause with a purpose, and get the heck out of dodge. Everyone expects basic training to be physically hard, but few recognize that some of the most grueling aspects of signing up have to do with the diversification project that is central to the formation of the American military.

When a soldier is in combat, she must trust her fellow soldiers with her life. And she must be willing to do what it takes to protect the rest of her unit. In order to make that possible, the military must wage war on prejudice. This is not an easy task. Plenty of generals fought hard to fight racial desegregation and to limit the role of women in combat. Yet, the US military was desegregated in 1948, six years before Brown v. Board forced desegregation of schools. And the Supreme Court ruled that LGB individuals could openly serve in the military before they could legally marry.

CC BY 2.0-licensed photo by The U.S. Army.

Morale is often raised as the main reason that soldiers should not be forced to entrust their lives to people who are different than them. Yet, time and again, this justification collapses under broader interests to grow the military. As a result, commanders are forced to find ways to build up morale across difference, to actively and intentionally seek to break down barriers to teamwork, and to find a way to gel a group of people whose demographics, values, politics, and ideologies are as varied as the country’s.

In the process, they build one of the most crucial social infrastructures of the country. They build the diverse social fabric that underpins democracy.

Tons of money was poured into defense after 9/11, but the number of people serving in the US military today is far lower than it was throughout the 1980s. Why? Starting in the 1990s and accelerating after 9/11, the US privatized huge chunks of the military. This means that private contractors and their employees play critical roles in everything from providing food services to equipment maintenance to military housing. The impact of this on the role of the military in society is significant. For example, this undermine recruits’ ability to get training to develop critical skills that will be essential for them in civilian life. Instead, while serving on active duty, they spend a much higher amount of time on the front lines and in high-risk battle, increasing the likelihood that they will be physically or psychologically harmed. The impact on skills development and job opportunities is tremendous, but so is the impact on the diversification of the social fabric.

Private vendors are not engaged in the same social engineering project as the military and, as a result, tend to hire and fire people based on their ability to work effectively as a team. Like many companies, they have little incentive to invest in helping diverse teams learn to work together as effectively as possible. Building diverse teams — especially ones in which members depend on each other for their survival — is extremely hard, time-consuming, and emotionally exhausting. As a result, private companies focus on “culture fit,” emphasize teams that get along, and look for people who already have the necessary skills, all of which helps reinforce existing segregation patterns.

The end result is that, in the last 20 years, we’ve watched one of our major structures for diversification collapse without anyone taking notice. And because of how it’s happened, it’s also connected to job opportunities and economic opportunity for many working- and middle-class individuals, seeding resentment and hatred.

A Self-Segregated College Life

If you ask a college admissions officer at an elite institution to describe how they build a class of incoming freshman, you will quickly realize that the American college system is a diversification project. Unlike colleges in most parts of the world, the vast majority of freshman at top tier universities in the United States live on campus with roommates who are assigned to them. Colleges approach housing assignments as an opportunity to pair diverse strangers with one another to build social ties. This makes sense given how many friendships emerge out of freshman dorms. By pairing middle class kids with students from wealthier families, elite institutions help diversify the elites of the future.

This diversification project produces a tremendous amount of conflict. Although plenty of people adore their college roommates and relish the opportunity to get to know people from different walks of life as part of their college experience, there is an amazing amount of angst about dorm assignments and the troubles that brew once folks try to live together in close quarters. At many universities, residential life is often in the business of student therapy as students complain about their roommates and dormmates. Yet, just like in the military, learning how to negotiate conflict and diversity in close quarters can be tremendously effective in sewing the social fabric.

CC BY-NC-ND 2.0-licensed photo by Ilya Khurosvili.

In the springs of 2006, I was doing fieldwork with teenagers at a time when they had just received acceptances to college. I giggled at how many of them immediately wrote to the college in which they intended to enroll, begging for a campus email address so that they could join that school’s Facebook (before Facebook was broadly available). In the previous year, I had watched the previous class look up roommate assignments on MySpace so I was prepared for the fact that they’d use Facebook to do the same. What I wasn’t prepared for was how quickly they would all get on Facebook, map the incoming freshman class, and use this information to ask for a roommate switch. Before they even arrived on campus in August/September of 2006, they had self-segregated as much as possible.

A few years later, I watched another trend hit: cell phones. While these were touted as tools that allowed students to stay connected to parents (which prompted many faculty to complain about “helicopter parents” arriving on campus), they really ended up serving as a crutch to address homesickness, as incoming students focused on maintaining ties to high school friends rather than building new relationships.

Students go to elite universities to “get an education.” Few realize that the true quality product that elite colleges in the US have historically offered is social network diversification. Even when it comes to job acquisition, sociologists have long known that diverse social networks (“weak ties”) are what increase job prospects. By self-segregating on campus, students undermine their own potential while also helping fragment the diversity of the broader social fabric.

Diversity is Hard

Diversity is often touted as highly desirable. Indeed, in professional contexts, we know that more diverse teams often outperform homogeneous teams. Diversity also increases cognitive development, both intellectually and socially. And yet, actually encountering and working through diverse viewpoints, experiences, and perspectives is hard work. It’s uncomfortable. It’s emotionally exhausting. It can be downright frustrating.

Thus, given the opportunity, people typically revert to situations where they can be in homogeneous environments. They look for “safe spaces” and “culture fit.” And systems that are “personalized” are highly desirable. Most people aren’t looking to self-segregate, but they do it anyway. And, increasingly, the technologies and tools around us allow us to self-segregate with ease. Is your uncle annoying you with his political rants? Mute him. Tired of getting ads for irrelevant products? Reveal your preferences. Want your search engine to remember the things that matter to you? Let it capture data. Want to watch a TV show that appeals to your senses? Here are some recommendations.

Any company whose business model is based on advertising revenue and attention is incentivized to engage you by giving you what you want. And what you want in theory is different than what you want in practice.

Consider, for example, what Netflix encountered when it started its streaming offer. Users didn’t watch the movies that they had placed into their queue. Those movies were the movies they thought they wanted, movies that reflected their ideal self — 12 Years a Slave, for example. What they watched when they could stream whatever they were in the mood for at that moment was the equivalent of junk food — reruns of Friends, for example. (This completely undid Netflix’s recommendation infrastructure, which had been trained on people’s idealistic self-images.)

The divisions are not just happening through commercialism though. School choice has led people to self-segregate from childhood on up. The structures of American work life mean that fewer people work alongside others from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Our contemporary culture of retail and service labor means that there’s a huge cultural gap between workers and customers with little opportunity to truly get to know one another. Even many religious institutions are increasingly fragmented such that people have fewer interactions across diverse lines. (Just think about how there are now “family services” and “traditional services” which age-segregate.) In so many parts of public, civic, and professional life, we are self-segregating and the opportunities for doing so are increasing every day.

By and large, the American public wants to have strong connections across divisions. They see the value politically and socially. But they’re not going to work for it. And given the option, they’re going to renew their license remotely, try to get out of jury duty, and use available data to seek out housing and schools that are filled with people like them. This is the conundrum we now face.

Many pundits remarked that, during the 2016 election season, very few Americans were regularly exposed to people whose political ideology conflicted with their own. This is true. But it cannot be fixed by Facebook or news media. Exposing people to content that challenges their perspective doesn’t actually make them more empathetic to those values and perspectives. To the contrary, it polarizes them. What makes people willing to hear difference is knowing and trusting people whose worldview differs from their own. Exposure to content cannot make up for self-segregation.

If we want to develop a healthy democracy, we need a diverse and highly connected social fabric. This requires creating contexts in which the American public voluntarily struggles with the challenges of diversity to build bonds that will last a lifetime. We have been systematically undoing this, and the public has used new technological advances to make their lives easier by self-segregating. This has increased polarization, and we’re going to pay a heavy price for this going forward. Rather than focusing on what media enterprises can and should do, we need to focus instead on building new infrastructures for connection where people have a purpose for coming together across divisions. We need that social infrastructure just as much as we need bridges and roads.

This piece was originally published as part of a series on media, accountability, and the public sphere. See also:

What World Are We Building?

This morning, I had the honor and pleasure of giving the Everett C. Parker Lecture in celebration of the amazing work he did to fight for media justice. The talk that I gave weaved together some of my work with youth (on racial framing of technology) and my more recent thoughts on the challenges presented by data analytics. I also pulled on work of Latanya Sweeney and Eric Horvitz and argued that those of us who were shaping social media systems “didn’t architect for prejudice, but we didn’t design systems to combat it either.” More than anything, I used this lecture to argue that “we need those who are thinking about social justice to understand technology and those who understand technology to commit to social justice.”

My full remarks are available here: “What World Are We Building?” Please let me know what you think!

thoughts on Pew’s latest report: notable findings on race and privacy

Yesterday, Pew Internet and American Life Project (in collaboration with Berkman) unveiled a brilliant report about “Teens, Social Media, and Privacy.” As a researcher who’s been in the trenches on these topics for a long time now, none of their finding surprised me but it still gives me absolute delight when our data is so beautifully in synch. I want to quickly discuss two important issues that this report raise.

Race is a factor in explaining differences in teen social media use.

Pew provides important measures on shifts in social media, including the continued saturation of Facebook, the decline of MySpace, and the rise of other social media sites (e.g., Twitter, Instagram). When they drill down on race, they find notable differences in adoption. For example, they highlight data that is the source of “black Twitter” narratives: 39% of African-American teens use Twitter compared to 23% of white teens.

Most of the report is dedicated to the increase in teen sharing, but once again, we start to see some race differences. For example, 95% of white social media-using teens share their “real name” on at least one service while 77% of African-American teens do. And while 39% of African-American teens on social media say that they post fake information, only 21% of white teens say they do this.

Teens’ practices on social media also differ by race. For example, on Facebook, 48% of African-American teens befriend celebrities, athletes, or musicians while one 25% of white teen users do.

While media and policy discussions of teens tend to narrate them as an homogenous group, there are serious and significant differences in practices and attitudes among teens. Race is not the only factor, but it is a factor. And Pew’s data on the differences across race highlight this.

Of course, race isn’t actually what’s driving what we see as race differences. The world in which teens live is segregated and shaped by race. Teens are more likely to interact with people of the same race and their norms, practices, and values are shaped by the people around them. So what we’re actually seeing is a manifestation of network effects. And the differences in the Pew report point to black youth’s increased interest in being a part of public life, their heightened distrust of those who hold power over them, and their notable appreciation for pop culture. These differences are by no means new, but what we’re seeing is that social media is reflecting back at us cultural differences shaped by race that are pervasive across America.

Teens are sharing a lot of content, but they’re also quite savvy.

Pew’s report shows an increase in teens’ willingness to share all sorts of demographic, contact, and location data. This is precisely the data that makes privacy advocates anxious. At the same time, their data show that teens are well-aware of privacy settings and have changed the defaults even if they don’t choose to manage the accessibility of each content piece they share. They’re also deleting friends (74%), deleting previous posts (59%), blocking people (58%), deleting comments (53%), detagging themselves (45%), and providing fake info (26%).

My favorite finding of Pew’s is that 58% of teens cloak their messages either through inside jokes or other obscure references, with more older teens (62%) engaging in this practice than younger teens (46%). This is the practice that I’ve seen significantly rise since I first started doing work on teens’ engagement with social media. It’s the source of what Alice Marwick and I describe as “social steganography” in our paper on teen privacy practices.

While adults are often anxious about shared data that might be used by government agencies, advertisers, or evil older men, teens are much more attentive to those who hold immediate power over them – parents, teachers, college admissions officers, army recruiters, etc. To adults, services like Facebook that may seem “private” because you can use privacy tools, but they don’t feel that way to youth who feel like their privacy is invaded on a daily basis. (This, btw, is part of why teens feel like Twitter is more intimate than Facebook. And why you see data like Pew’s that show that teens on Facebook have, on average 300 friends while, on Twitter, they have 79 friends.) Most teens aren’t worried about strangers; they’re worried about getting in trouble.

Over the last few years, I’ve watched as teens have given up on controlling access to content. It’s too hard, too frustrating, and technology simply can’t fix the power issues. Instead, what they’ve been doing is focusing on controlling access to meaning. A comment might look like it means one thing, when in fact it means something quite different. By cloaking their accessible content, teens reclaim power over those who they know who are surveilling them. This practice is still only really emerging en masse, so I was delighted that Pew could put numbers to it. I should note that, as Instagram grows, I’m seeing more and more of this. A picture of a donut may not be about a donut. While adults worry about how teens’ demographic data might be used, teens are becoming much more savvy at finding ways to encode their content and achieve privacy in public.

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Anyhow, I have much more to say about Pew’s awesome report, but I wanted to provide a few thoughts and invite y’all to read it. If there is data that you’re curious about or would love me to analyze more explicitly, leave a comment or drop me a note. I’m happy to dive in more deeply on their findings.

MySpace and Facebook: How Racist Language Frames Social Media (and Why You Should Care)

(This post was written for Blogher and originally posted there.)

Every time I dare to talk about race or class and MySpace & Facebook in the same breath, a public explosion happens. This is the current state of things.  Unfortunately, most folks who enter the fray prefer to reject the notion that race/class shape social media or that social media reflects bigoted attitudes than seriously address what’s at stake.  Yet, look around. Twitter is flush with racist language in response to the active participation of blacks on the site. Comments on YouTube expose deep-seated bigotry in uncountable ways. The n-word is everyday vernacular in MMORPGs. In short, racism and classism permeates every genre of social media out there, reflecting the everyday attitudes of people that go well beyond social media. So why can’t we talk about it?

Let me back up and explain the context for this piece … three years ago, I wrote a controversial blog post highlighting the cultural division taking shape.  Since then, I’ve worked diligently to try to make sense of what I first observed and ground it in empirical data.  In 2009, I built on my analysis in  “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”, a talk I gave at the Personal Democracy Forum.  Slowly, I worked to write an academic article called “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook” (to be published in a book called Digital Race Anthology, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White).  I published a draft of this article on my website in December.  Then, on July 14, Christoper Mims posted a guest blog post at Technology Review entitled “Did Whites Flee the ‘Digital Ghetto’ of MySpace?” using my article as his hook.  I’m not sure why Mims wrote this piece now or why he didn’t contact me, but so it goes.

Mims’ blog post prompted a new wave of discussion about whether or not there’s a race-based (or class-based) division between MySpace and Facebook today. My article does not address this topic. My article is a discussion of a phenomenon that happened from 2006-2007 using data collected during that period. The point of my article is not to discuss whether or not there was a division — quantitative data shows this better. My goal was to analyze American teenagers’ language when talking about Facebook and MySpace. The argument that I make is that the language used by teens has racialized overtones that harken back to the language used around “white flight.” In other words, what American teens are reflecting in their discussion of MySpace and Facebook shows just how deeply racial narratives are embedded in everyday life.

So, can we please dial the needle forward? Regardless of whether or not there’s still a race and class-based division in the U.S. between MySpace and Facebook, the language that people use to describe MySpace is still deeply racist and classist. Hell, we see that in the comments of every blog post that describes my analysis. And I’m sure we’ll get some here, since online forums somehow invite people to unapologetically make racist comments that they would never say aloud. And as much as those make me shudder, they’re also a reminder that the civil rights movement has a long way to go.

Race and class shape contemporary life in fundamental ways. People of color and the working poor live the experiences of racism and classism, but how this plays out is often not nearly as overt as it was in the 1960s. But that doesn’t mean that it has gone away.

There is still bigotry, and the divisions run deep in the U.S. We often talk about the Internet as the great equalizer, the space where we can be free of all of the weights of inequality. And yet, what we find online is often a reproduction of all of the issues present in everyday life. The Internet does not magically heal old wounds or repair broken bonds between people. More often, it shows just how deep those wounds go and how structurally broken many relationships are.

In this way, the Internet is often a mirror of the ugliest sides of our society, the aspects of our society that we so badly need to address. What the Internet does — for better or worse — is make visible aspects of society that have been delicately swept under the rug and ignored. We could keep on sweeping, or we could take the moment to rise up and develop new strategies for addressing the core issues that we’re seeing. Bigotry doesn’t go away by eliminating only what’s visible. It is eradicated by getting at the core underlying issues. What we’re seeing online allows us to see how much work there’s left to do.

In writing “White Flight in Networked Publics?”, I wanted to expose one aspect of how race and class shape how people see social media. My goal in doing so was to push back at the utopian rhetorics that frame the Internet as a kumbaya movement so that we can focus on addressing the major social issues that exist everywhere and are exposed in new ways via social media. When it comes to eradicating bigotry, I can’t say that I have the answers. But I know that we need to start a conversation. And my hope — from the moment that I first highlighted the divisions taking place in 2007 — is that we can use social media as both a lens into and a platform for discussing cultural inequality.

So how do we get started?

Photo credit: Moyix on Flickr

Skin Whitening, Tanning, and Vaseline’s Controversial Facebook Ad Campaign

Growing up as a white girl in Pennsylvania, I was taught that being tan was beautiful. My wealthier classmates would go on vacations to Florida in the winter, coming back with the most glorious tans. And the moment that it started getting warm, everyone would spend excessive amounts of time outside in an effort to get as dark as possible. I hated this charade for completely banal reasons. There was no way to read a book when lying on my back (without limiting sun exposure) and I hated propping myself up on my elbows. I preferred to read indoors in chairs meant for reading. Needless to say, I didn’t get the point of tanning. Still, there were many summers when I tried. Status was just too important.

When I first went to Tokyo, I was shocked to find Shibuya covered in whitening ads. Talking to locals, I found that “white is beautiful” was a common refrain. As I traveled around Asia, I heard this echoed time and time again. I learned that those with Caucasian blood could get better acting and modeling jobs, that black Americans couldn’t teach English to Hong Kong kids (even though white Europeans who spoke English as a second language could). Whiteness (and blondness) was clearly an asset and I got used to people touching my hair with admiration. I was completely discomforted by this dynamic, uncertain of my own cultural position, and disgusted by the “white is beautiful” trope that was reproduced in so many ways. My American repulsion for the reproduction of racist, colonialist structures was outright horrified.

At some point, I went on a reading binge to understand more about whitening. It was just out of curiosity so I can’t remember what all I read but I remembered being startled by the class-based histories of artificial skin coloring, having expected it to be all about race. Apparently, tanning grew popular with white folks earlier in the 20th century to mark leisure and money. If you could be tan in winter, it showed that you had the resources to go to a warm climate. If you could be tan in summer, it showed that you weren’t stuck in the factories for work. (Needless to say, farmer tans are read in the same light.) Traipsing through the literature, I also learned that whitening had a similar history in Asia; being light meant that you didn’t have to work in the fields. Having always assumed that tanning was about looking healthy and whitening was about reproducing colonial structures, I found myself struggling to make sense of the class-based cultural dynamics implied. And uncertain of how to read them. Hell, I’m still not sure what to make of it all.

Of course, growing up in the States, I’ve seen a different version of light-skin fetishization. One that stems from our history of racism. One that is perpetuated in the black community with light skinned black folks being treated differently than dark skinned black folks by other black folks. So I don’t feel as though I have a good framework for making sense of how race is read in different countries. Or how it’s tied into the narratives of classism and colonialism. Or what it means for modifying skin tone. All that I know is that the marketing of skin coloring products is far more complex than I originally thought. That we can’t see it simply in light of race, but as a complex interplay between race, class, and geography. And that how we read these narratives is going to depend on our own cultural position.

So, moving forward to 2010, Vaseline puts out a Facebook App for virtual skin whitening targeted at Indian men. This virtual product is an ad for its whitening product, but it also serves to allow users to modify their skin tone in their pictures. Needless to say, the signaling issues here are intriguing. I can’t help but think back to Judith Donath’s classic Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. But there are also huge issues here about race and class and national identity. As people start finding out about this App, a huge uproar exploded. Only, to the best that I can tell, the uproar is entirely American. With Americans telling other Americans that Vaseline is being racist. But how are Indians reading the ads? And why aren’t Americans critical of the tanning products that Vaseline and related companies make? Frankly, I’m struggling to make sense of the complex narratives that are playing out right now.

What intrigues me the most about the anti-Vaseline discourse is that it seems to be Americans telling the global south (which is mostly in the northern hemisphere) that they’re being oppressed by American companies. The narrative is that Vaseline is selling whitening products to perpetuate colonial ideals of beauty. In the story that I’m reading, those seeking to consume whitening products are simply oppressed voiceless people who clearly can’t have any good reason for wanting to purchase these products other than their own self-hatred wrt race. (Again, no discussion of fake tanning products.) And in making Vaseline out as an evil company, there’s no room for an interpretation of Vaseline as a company selling a product to a market that has demanded it; they’re purely there to impose a different value set on a marginalized population. Don’t get me wrong – I think that our skin color narratives are wholly fucked up and deeply rooted in racism. But I’m not comfortable with how this discussion is playing out either. And I can’t help but wonder for how many people the Vaseline App controversy is the first time they’ve seen skin whitening products.

This uproar is interesting to me because it highlights cultural collisions. These products are everywhere in Asia but they’re harder to find in the States. Yet, with social media, we get to see these cultural differences collide in novel ways. When we go to foreign countries and talk to people from different cultural backgrounds, we learn to read different value sets even if they bother us. We have room to do that in those contexts. But when we encounter the value sets online sitting behind our computers in our own turf without a cultural context, all sorts of misreadings can take place. I’m seeing this happen on Twitter all the time. Cultural narratives coming from South Africa that mean one thing when situated there but are completely misinterpreted when read from an American lens. I love Ethan Zuckerman’s amazing work on xenophilia. But I can’t help but be curious about all of the xeno-confusion that’s playing out because of the cultural collisions. And I worry that us Americans are just reading every global narrative on American terms. Like we always do. And while this might be great for challenging colonialism, I worry that it is mostly condescending and paternalistic.

And that leaves us with a difficult challenge: how do we combat racism and classism on a global scale when these issues are locally constructed? How do we move between different cultural frameworks and pay homage to the people while seeking to end colonialist oppression? I don’t have the answers. All I have is confusion and uncertainty. And confidence that projecting American civil rights narratives onto other populations is not going to be the solution.

Race and Social Network Sites: Putting Facebook’s Data in Context

A few weeks ago, Facebook’s data team released a set of data addressing a simple but complex question: How Diverse is Facebook? Given my own work over the last two years concerning the intersection of race/ethnicity/class and social network sites, I feel the need to respond. And, with pleasure, I’m going to respond by sharing a draft of a new paper.

But first, I want to begin by thanking the Facebook data team for actually making this data available for public dialogue. Far too few companies are willing to share their internal analyses, especially about topics that make people uncomfortable. I was disappointed that so many academics immediately began critiquing Facebook rather than appreciating the glimpse that we get into the data they get to see. So thank you Facebook data team!

There are many different ways to collect quantitative data involving categories like race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, etc. None of them are perfect. Even asking people to self-identify can be fraught, especially when someone is asked to place themselves into a box. Ask a self-identified queer boi to identity into the binaries of “female/male” and “gay/straight” and you’ll see nothing short of explosive anger. Race certainly isn’t any prettier, let alone ethnicity or class. The salience of these qualities also depends on what we’re trying to measure, what we’re trying to say. For example, if we’re talking about people who experience being targets of racism, should we concern ourselves more with self-identification or external labeling? At the coarsest level, we often assume race to boil down to skin color, meaning that we have to take into account how people read race, how they experience race, how they identify with race. We must always remember that race is a social construct and one’s experiences of race are shaped by how one perceives themselves in relation to others and how others perceive them. And the very notion of race differs across the globe.

Of course, this is bloody messy. And ethnicity and class are even harder to locate because self-identification isn’t always the best measure. Heck, while Americans have learned to self-identify with race (thanks to countless forms), we aren’t typically asked to self-identify with ethnicity or class. So these are pretty murky territories. As a result, scholars and demographers and marketers and many others have different ways of trying to measure these categories. None are perfect. We can debate endlessly about which is better but, personally, I think that does the conversation a disservice.

In trying to measure race (and, partially, ethnicity) of its users without having self-identification, Facebook decided to use a statistical technique known as mixture-modeling to make a best guess as to the racial makeup of its user base. They go to great lengths explaining what they did, but it is this graph that we should be attentive to:

This graph highlights that those American users most likely to be white were overrepresented on Facebook until last year while those most likely to be Asian have been overrepresented as far back as they are measuring. Yet, the two lines that should pique our interest are the blue and red lines, highlighting that those most likely to be black and Hispanic have been underrepresented until very recently. In other words, 2009 is the year in which Facebook went “mainstream” among all measured racial/ethnic groups in the U.S.

Folks keep asking me if this surprises me. It does not. This very much matches what I’m seeing in the field. (It also confirms what I was seeing in 2006-2007.) But it also doesn’t tell the whole story. Numbers never do. MySpace has definitely declined among young users in the U.S., especially in the last 12 months, but race – and ethnicity and socio-economic status – still inflect people’s experiences with these technologies. Just because Facebook has become broadly adopted does not mean that what everyone experiences on Facebook is the same. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see Facebook data that broke down app usage by demographic data (age, location, gender, and their measure of race). Given what I’m seeing in the field, I’d expect you’d see variation. I’d also expect to see variation in terms of how the service is accessed – via mobile, web, 3rd party APIs, etc. As young people tour me through their Facebook experience, I’m regularly reminded that different groups have wholly different experiences with the same service. As Facebook has become a platform, it is no longer reasonable to simply think about access. There’s also a different issue at play… perception. People perceive certain practices to be universal because “everyone they know” is doing it that way. One of the hardest parts of my job is to explain to people that what they are seeing, what they are experiencing, is not the same as what others are. Even if they’re using the same tools.

When the “digital divide” conversations started up, folks boiled down the discussion to being one of access. If only everyone had access, everything would be hunky dory. We’re closer to universal access today than ever before, but access is not bringing us the magical utopian panacea that we all dreamed of. Henry Jenkins has rightly pointed out that we see the emergence of a “participation gap” in that people’s participation is of different quantity and quality depending on many other factors. Social media takes all of this to a new level. It’s not just a question of what you get to experience with your access, but what you get to experience with your friend group with access. In other words, if you’re friends with 24/7 always-on geeks, what you’re experiencing with social media is very different than if you’re experiencing social media in a community where your friends all spend 12+ hours a day doing a form of labor that doesn’t allow access to internet technologies. Facebook’s data provides a glimpse into how Facebook access has become mainstream. It is the modern day portal. But I would argue that what people experience with this tool – and with the other social media assets they use – looks very different based on their experience.

Many folks think that I care about access. Don’t get me wrong – access is important. But I’m much more concerned about how racist and classist attitudes are shaping digital media, how technology reinforces inequality, and how our habit of assuming that everyone uses social media just like we do reinforces social divisions that we prefer to ignore. This issue became apparent to me when doing fieldwork because of the language that young people were using to differentiate MySpace and Facebook. Adoption differences alone were never the whole story. Ever since I released my controversial blog essay 2.5 years ago, I have been working to write up my data and analysis in a meaningful way. Doing so has not been easy. I’ve been very uncomfortable handling my own data, trying to treat it in a manner that is respectful of the teens that I interviewed and the dynamics that I witnessed. Thankfully, Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White gave me the space to work out these issues. The fruit of my labor will be published in an upcoming Routledge anthology edited by them called Digital Race Anthology. With their permission, I am sharing with you a working draft of the article that I have struggled to produce:

“White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook”

In this article, I explore the themes I’ve been discussing for years but focus specifically on the language that young people used to differentiate MySpace and Facebook and how that language can be understood through the historical dynamics of segregation in the U.S. My decision to use the “white flight” frame is meant to be provocative, to encourage the reader to think about the rhetoric that we’re currently using and its parallels to earlier times. For example, how we employ “safety” as a way of marking turf and segmenting populations.

Given the conversations prompted by Facebook’s data, I felt the need to share this work-in-progress. Please feel free to comment or share your thoughts in whatever format makes sense to you.

PDF Talk: “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”

Two years ago this week, I wrote a controversial essay in an attempt to locate divisions that I was seeing play out between MySpace and Facebook. This week, at the Personal Democracy Forum, I revisited these ideas in a new talk:

The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online

Needless to say, this talk provoked some discussion which is why I thought it might be helpful to share it. What you have here is the crib from the talk. Comments are VERY much welcome!