Author Archives: zephoria

Empowering Parents & Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape

The FCC published a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) on the important topic of empowering parents and protecting youth in an era of an evolving media landscape.  John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and I took the opportunity to respond to the NOI on behalf of the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative at the Berkman Center. What we wrote should not surprise any of you who are following our work, but our research-grounded response may be of great value for those of you who are interested in this topic.  For this reason – and because we all believe in transparency – we have decided to publicly share the document that we crafted.

Empowering Parents & Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape

We welcome all feedback and thoughts!!

ChatRoulette, from my perspective

I’ve been following ChatRoulette for a while now but haven’t been comfortable talking about it publicly. For one, it’s a hugely controversial site, one that is prompting yet-another moral panic about youth engagement online. And I hate having the role of respondent to public uproar. (I know I know…) More importantly though, I find it difficult to respond to the fears because I find it endearing. ChatRoulette reminds me a lot of the quirkiness of the Internet that I grew up with. Like when I was a teen trolling through chatrooms, ChatRoulette is filled with all sorts of weird people. And most users ignore most other users until they find someone they find interesting or compelling. While the site was designed by a teen, minors do not dominate there (although there are plenty of young adults there). And, not surprisingly, teens on the site have ZERO interest in talking to older folks – even old folks like me. It’s the strangest pairing dynamic… You can click Next and they can click Next until something gels. And even though I might want to talk to teens on the site, they have no desire to talk to me. Imagine if I was a sketchy guy. Right: no interest. Likewise, the people who most want to talk to me – a young woman – are the people that I don’t want to talk to. So on and on and on we go clicking next until there’s a possible spark. It’s a game played by flaneurs walking the digital streets.

What I like most about the site is the fact that there’s only so much you can hide. This isn’t a place where police officers can pretend to be teen girls. This isn’t a place where you feel forced to stick around; you can move on and no one will know the difference. If someone doesn’t strike your fancy, move on. And on. And on.

I love the way that it mixes things up. For most users of all ages – but especially teens – the Internet today is about socializing with people you already know. But I used to love the randomness of the Internet. I can’t tell you how formative it was for me to grow up talking to all sorts of random people online. So I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc. So I hate how we vilify all strangers as inherently bad. Did I meet some sketchballs on the Internet when I was a teen? DEFINITELY. They were weird; I moved on. And it used to be a lot harder to move on when everything was attached to an email that was paid for. So I actually think that the ChatRoulette version allows you to move on with greater ease, less guilt, and far more comfortably. Ironically – given the recent media coverage – it feels a lot safer than any site that I’ve seen that’s attached to a name or profile with connections to people or identifying information. Can youth get themselves into trouble here? Sure… like in most public places. And there are definitely youth who are playing with fire. But, once again, why go after the technology when the underlying issues should be the ones we address? Le sigh.

Anyhow, I was hemming and hawing about what to say about this and I’m still not sure what to say because, truthfully, I like the reminder of ye-olde-Internet culture. I like the fact that there are still a small percentage of folks out there looking for some amusement because they’re bored and they want to connect with randomness, folks who recognize the joy of meeting strangers in a safer space than most physical spaces where that’s possible. I realize that this creates the potential for seeing some pretty gross and/or problematic things and I certainly don’t want to dismiss that, but I’m pretty certain that teens are responding the same way that I’m responding – by clicking Next. Is that ideal? Probably not. And I’d certainly love a filter – not just for teens but for my own eyes. (Then again, I’d also like a spam filter too… Especially here on my blog. Cuz really, who of you who are reading this want to get porn ads here either?) I’m not sure that immature folks of any age (or the easily grossed out) should be on this site. But I do hope that we can create a space where teens and young adults and the rest of us can actually interact with randomness again. There’s a cost to our social isolation and I fear that we’re going to be paying it for generations to come.

So I’m still not sure what to say except that I feel this weighted sense of Le Sigh. The same mix of depression and exhaustion I felt this morning when I was playing peek-a-boo with a smily child in an airport and her parents whisked her away, glaring at me as though I was the devil incarnate. I realize that many parents think that they’re doing good by their kids when they choose to limit their exposure to the randomness of the world, but it just makes me deeply deeply sad. And so I simultaneously am amused by ChatRoulette and depressed because I realize that so many folks would prefer to keep themselves and their teens/college-aged-kids sheltered rather than giving them a way of thinking about systems like this and teaching them to walk away when things get weird. And this deserves a Le Sigh Royale.

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ChatRoulette by Sarita Yardi

Sarita Yardi has been doing a lot of thinking about ChatRoulette these days and I wanted to share a short essay she wrote to explain ChatRoulette to the uninitiated. I think that this is a fantastic introduction for those who aren’t familiar with the site. (And I’ll follow up with my own thoughts in the next post.)

BY SARITA YARDI

ChatRoulette is a new website that connects you face to face with Internet users around the world. When you go to the site and hit Play your webcam turns on and you’re connected to another person. Most times you’ll hit Next within a few seconds and be connected to someone else. Sometimes people stop to chat. Basically, instead of surfing the web, you’re surfing people.

ChatRoulette evokes patterns of behavior that are as old as the Internet. Our fascination with spontaneous and random forays into anonymous online interactions echo those of early text-based chatrooms and bulletin board systems in the 1990s and even earlier. Shock, boredom, play, and voyeurism characterized these early online environments as much as they do now. In ChatRoulette, there is no registration or login; staring into the bedroom of a complete stranger is fascinating and completely disconcerting.

ChatRoulette reminds me of when people said blogging was like making a private diary public. The idea of sitting in your bedroom showing your face to anyone in the world is simultaneously anonymous yet deeply revealing. This violates almost all social norms of the offline world. If someone walked up to you at a cocktail party, stared at you intensely, then simply walked away, you would feel confused and probably offended.

I was recently asked, “If a parent wanted to know if their kid should be on ChatRoulette, what would you tell them?” My experience on ChatRoulette has been about 10% sexual voyeurs, about 10% performance art (people dressed in cat costumes), and about 10% signs (show me your [x]!). There are a few older people, but the remaining majority is young people (high school and college kids) mostly just hanging out, some giggling, some looking vaguely bored. Like with anything their kids do online or offline, I would advise parents to reflect on what they consider to be socially appropriate material for their own child and to teach their kids how to weigh the costs and benefits—and risks and rewards—of any site that they decide to hang out on online.

There are a couple of quickly emerging norms on ChatRoulette:

  • Clicking Next is not only socially acceptable, but it is expected.
  • Flashing signs or stuffed animals—unless they’re particularly amusing or clever—is considered trolling. People want to be face to face with other people.
  • People wouldn’t want to see people they know.
  • It’s like window-shopping where real people are behind the window. You can look, but you can’t touch, and you can move on if you’re not interested.

There are a number of fascinating things about ChatRoulette. One is that it was written by a 17 year-old boy (Andrey Ternovskiy) who likes socializing with his friends and learned to code when he was 11. He also has an entrepreneurial spirit; he rewrote the code a few times for it to scale and he got his extended family to invest in the site so he could get more servers. In an interview with Russia Today, he says he built it so he and his friends could start doing things together online like watching movies or making things. In most contexts, we would love to hear stories of kids making cool stuff online.

Another spin is that video chat could enable kids to be more in control of their own safety than text chat. If most teens are in fact looking to chat with other teens, it is much easier for them to screen out older adults and anyone who’s doing explicitly sexual things. Imagine if we’d started with video chat 20 years ago and now, all of a sudden, we had this new “text-based chat”. We would be far more concerned because it’s so easy to deceive with text. What’s interesting is that the pervasive fears that arise with anonymous and ephemeral online interactions are actually mitigated in ChatRoulette. It’s actually *harder* to lie—it’s more difficult to lie about your age, gender, or physical features when the camera is focused directly on you.

With that said, it’s like an online Lord of the Flies, and it probably won’t last the way it is currently. There are too many unacceptable cultural and moral boundaries that are crossed—like random and unpredictable exposure to nakedness—for it to persist in its present state. This brings up interesting questions of governance. Wikipedia’s governance structure didn’t emerge in a day, nor did those of Usenet or IRC chatrooms. If ChatRoulette is more than a fad—and I suspect it is—one direction it might take is to grow and split out into categories where communities can develop roles and social norms for self-governance, like on Craigslist.

I’m not convinced that ChatRoulette is truly anonymous. The plethora of screenshots of the most outrageous (read: NSFW) and amusing webcam matchups make it possible to reveal people’s identities using facial matching algorithms or IP addresses or visual search. That’s not a criticism of ChatRoulette or a call for policing the Internet. As my adviser says “In 20 years, no one will be eligible to be president.” We’re still searching for the right balance between protecting our own privacy and being able to live out our social lives online without feeling that the rest of the world is out to get us.

Upcoming Mary Gray talk on on “Out in the Country: Youth, Media & Queer Visibility in Rural America”

It used to be the case that all of the queer youth living in rural America ran away to the city to find others like them. The Internet has dramatically changed this. More and more, rural queer youth are building out networks of other queer rural youth, helping generate a rural queer identity. Think about what this means for the health and safety of queer youth. Think about what this means for the future of tolerance.

It is with great pleasure that I will be hosting Mary Gray at Microsoft Research on February 10 to discuss her latest book: “Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America.” Mary is going to talk about her findings so that we can get into a fun conversation. This will also be a great opportunity to connect with queer scholars and activists throughout New England so please join us for an evening of fun!

OUT IN THE COUNTRY: YOUTH, MEDIA & QUEER VISIBILITY IN RURAL AMERICA
February 10, 2010 from 6:30-9:00PM
Microsoft Research, Cambridge, MA
http://marygray.eventbrite.com/

Talk Description:

Join acclaimed author, Mary Gray as she discusses her latest book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press), which examines how young people in rural parts of the United States fashion queer senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media–particularly the internet–play in their lives and political work.

Drawing on her experiences working for close to 2 years in rural parts of Kentucky and in small towns along its borders, Mary will map out how lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and questioning (LGBTQ) youth and their allies make use of social media and local resources to combat the marginalization they contend with in their own communities as well as the erasure they face in popular representations of gay and lesbian life and the agendas of national gay and lesbian advocacy groups.

Against a backdrop of an increasingly impoverished and privatized rural America LGBTQ youth and their allies visibly—and often vibrantly—work the boundaries of the public and media spaces available to them. This talk will explore how youth suture together high schools, public libraries, town hall meetings, churches, and the web that construct spaces for fashioning their emerging queer identities. Their triumphs and travails defy clear distinctions often drawn between online and offline or rural and urban experiences of identity, fundamentally redefining our understanding of the term ‘queer visibility’ and its political stakes.

Register today to join the discussion! After the presentation, Mary will be available for book signings. http://marygray.eventbrite.com/

About Mary Gray:

Mary L. Gray is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research looks at how everyday uses of media shape people’s understandings and expressions of their social identities. She is the author of In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (1999). Her most recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press) examines how young people in rural parts of the United States fashion queer senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media–particularly the internet–play in their lives and political work.

Public by Default, Private when Necessary

This post was originally written for the DML Central Blog. If you’re interested in Digital Media and Learning, you definitely want to check this blog out.

With Facebook systematically dismantling its revered privacy infrastructure, I think it’s important to drill down on the issue of privacy as it relates to teens. There’s an assumption that teens don’t care about privacy but this is completely inaccurate. Teens care deeply about privacy, but their conceptualization of what this means may not make sense in a setting where privacy settings are a binary. What teens care about is the ability to control information as it flows and to have the information necessary to adjust to a situation when information flows too far or in unexpected ways. When teens argue that they produce content that is “public by default, private when necessary,” they aren’t arguing that privacy is disappearing. Instead, they are highlighting that both privacy AND publicity have value. Privacy is important in certain situations – to not offend, to share something intimate, or to exclude certain people. Yet, publicity can also be super useful. It’s about being present in social situations, about chance encounters, about obtaining social status.

Once upon a time on Facebook, participants had to be a vetted member of a community to even have an account. Privacy was a deeply held value and many turned to Facebook because of the ways in which it protected them from making public mistakes. This was especially core to youth participation. Parents respected Facebook’s attitudes towards privacy and, in a shocking moment of agreement, teens did too.

Slowly, things have changed. Most recently, Facebook made it possible for users to make Facebook content public (presumably to compete with Twitter). When participants signed in, they were asked whether or not they wanted they wanted to change their privacy settings. Many were confused and just clicked through, not realizing that this made their content more public than it was before. This upset some legal types and Facebook was forced to retreat, making the status quo the default instead of tricking folks into being public.

Recently, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg made comments that amount to “the age of privacy is over” as justification for why the company has decided to get with the times and make things more public. This prompted me to rant about Facebook’s decision.

Social media has enabled new forms of publicity, structures that allow people to connect as widely as they can build an audience. Teens are embracing this to do all sorts of powerful things. But they aren’t doing so to eschew privacy. They are still keeping intimate things close to their hearts or trying to share content with narrow groups of people. It’s just that, in many situations, there is more to be gained by accepting the public default than by going out of one’s way to keep things private. And here’s where we see the shift. It used to take effort to be public. Today, it often takes effort to be private.

While Facebook has justified its decisions by citing shifts in societal expectations, they are doing a disservice to those who value Facebook precisely because of its culture of keeping things more close. It’s not so much that posting things on Facebook was ever private; no teen sees the Wall as a private space. It’s that the default was not persistent, searchable, and scaled to a mass degree. Just because teens choose to share some content widely does not mean that they wish all content could be universally accessible. What they want is a sense of control. And what Facebook is doing is destabilizing the system in a way that complicates control, especially for teens who are most vulnerable of having content go down on their permanent record.

whose voice do you hear? gender issues and success

Growing up, I loved to debate. With anyone. My debating tone used to drive my mother batty because she thought I was yelling at her. Exasperated, I would often bark back that I was simply debating. Over the years, I realized that my debating tone is one of such confidence that people believe me to be stating facts, not opinions. My mother interpreted it as yelling; my classmates interpreted it as arrogance. I also began to realize that it was the same tone as that of my male peers. I never apologized for my opinions, never deflated them with “I may be wrong but I think…” I asserted. Confidently. And loudly.

Why am I telling you this? Clay Shirky’s “A Rant About Women” has provoked all sorts of conversations in the blogosphere and on Twitter. And Tom Coates rightfully pointed out that one interpretation of Shirky is the problematic encouragement of self-promotion and lies. While a lot has been said on this topic, I feel the need to speak up and say more. Because, as I said, I’m loud.

I’m terrible about self-promotion. I get all squeamish about the whole thing. I’m dreadful at throwing my name into the ring when there is an open call for something that I want. The idea of nominating myself for an award makes me want to vomit. And I’m TERRIBLE about taking compliments; I blush and run away. But there’s one thing that I’m damn good at that has gotten me pretty darn far in this lifetime: speaking confidently. I can walk into a room and be a ball full of butterflies and speak assertively. I sound like I know what I’m talking about even when the voice in my head is having a panic attack. And the weird thing is that, because I’m a woman, people read my assertiveness either as arrogance or expertise, even when I’m just stating my opinion. Why? Because women don’t do that. Women don’t talk like that.

There’s nothing that upsets me more than deception. As a teenager, I had my world spun apart by lies. So you’re not going to find me engaged in trickery. But what I’ve found is that people interpret my assertiveness as dishonesty and this still baffles me. It’s as though, because I’m a woman, if I don’t apologize for every thought I have and I’m proven wrong, I must’ve been lying because I convinced someone of an untruth. Confidence, when misinterpreted, can be interpreted all sorts of problematic ways.

Amidst the questions of women’s assertiveness, we must also call into questions our interpretations of the messages they put forward. Cuz many women are immediately labeled “bitch” the moment they speak with the kind of assertiveness that would be considered average for men. And that double standard also sucks. If I’m honest with myself, I’ve definitely gone out of my way to look young and cute and fuzzy and lovable in order to avoid that label. And to smile even when I don’t feel like smiling. Because, in many environments, if I look as serious as I feel, my message does not get across. Of course, this can also be a costly signal because plenty of other folks have dismissed me for being young. I’ve found that it’s a sin to be young in academia while it’s a sin to be a serious woman in the tech industry. Needless to say, my identity development is mighty confused.

As Tom rightfully pointed out, there are many layers on top of this. It’s easy to move into a binary of Men vs. Women, but race, ethnicity, nationality, accent, sexuality, religion, class, and any form of cultural background you can imagine play into this at every level. Just look at the biases you have when you’re interviewing someone of a different background… the expectations you have. And imagine what they’re experiencing trying to give the right impression when they know they’re being interpreted along a standard that they cannot possibly live up to. If you need to think about this issue a bit more and don’t want to read scholarly materials, there’s Gladwell. I have the privilege of being white, a native American English speaker, being able to speak geek and academic and street speak depending on context, being able-bodied, and relatively attractive in a heteronormative way without being too attractive. But I can imagine plenty of configurations and impressions that would automatically be rejected. We can’t forget about those folks.

While I strongly support any and all efforts to get women to speak with confidence about what they do and who they are, assimilation won’t get us to be where we should be. Far too many academic women tried this, a practice that I always thought of as out-manning the men. It was a survival mechanism for them but dear god it’s terrifying. We don’t want that in other industries too. What we want is diversity.

Diversity is one of those sticky terms that people seem to boil down to creating a Benetton ad. Diversity isn’t about some magical collection of five differently colored skin tones. It’s about bringing different perspectives and backgrounds to the table and creating an environment that values what can be gained from different voices who’ve taken different paths. Skin color (or gender performance) is often interpreted as a reasonable substitute for this and, for many reasons, it has been historically. But bringing in a woman whose attitude and approach is just as masculine as the men isn’t going to help your team break outside of its current mindset. They key is to bring people who think differently than you. Of course, that’s darn tricky. Because you need need similarity AND diversity to be successful. But this is a rant for another post.

In thinking about creating parity, we all need to look around and account for our biases. Whose voices are you listening to because they’re the loudest or the most like yours? Are you going out of your way to seek out people who approach the world differently than you? Everyone needs to make an effort to make visible what has become invisible.

At the same time, I do think that we also all have a responsibility to make an effort to get our voices heard by people who are different than us. This is especially true for women and other marginalized populations. Sure, it’s a burden to have to speak back to power over and over and over and over again. But that’s also a valuable skill. Making a conscious decision to break expectations tingles at the soul, but the doors that are opened can be awe-some.

I would love to see more women stand up and say “me!” and I vow to continue to help younger women assert themselves. But let this not push the onus entirely to women. We need men as allies, men who both encourage women to speak up and who consciously choose to spotlight women who are talented. But, more importantly, we need men (and anyone with privilege) to consciously and conscientiously account for their own privilege and biases and to actively work to highlight and embrace diverse voices of all kinds. Your interpretation of others is just as (if not more) important in creating change as their efforts to impress you. The privileged cannot expect the disenfranchised to assimilate, as tempting as that may be. And even if that were possible, it wouldn’t give us the society we want anyhow.

“i am not an angry girl / but it seems like i’ve got everyone fooled / every time i say something they find hard to hear / they chalk it up to my anger / and never to their own fear” — Ani Difranco

Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms

When I learned that Mark Zuckerberg effectively argued that ‘the age of privacy is over’ (read: ReadWriteWeb), I wanted to scream. Actually, I did. And still am. The logic goes something like this:

  • People I knew didn’t used to like to be public.
  • Now “everyone” is being public.
  • Ergo, privacy is dead.

This isn’t new. This is the exact same logic that made me want to scream a decade ago when folks used David Brin to justify a transparent society. Privacy is dead, get over it. Right? Wrong!

Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me “public by default, private when necessary” but this doesn’t suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy. And thus, I would suspect, people are more conscious of privacy now than ever. Because not everyone wants to share everything to everyone else all the time.

Let’s take this scenario for a moment. Bob trust Alice. Bob tells Alice something that he doesn’t want anyone else to know and he tells her not to tell anyone. Alice tells everyone at school because she believes she can gain social stature from it. Bob is hurt and embarrassed. His trust in Alice diminishes. Bob now has two choices. He can break up with Alice, tell the world that Alice is evil, and be perpetually horribly hurt. Or he can take what he learned and manipulate Alice. Next time something bugs him, he’ll tell Alice precisely because he wants everyone to know. And if he wants to guarantee that it’ll spread, he’ll tell her not to tell anyone.

Facebook isn’t in the business of protecting Bob. Facebook is in the business of becoming Alice. Facebook is perfectly content to break Bob’s trust because it knows that Bob can’t totally run away from it. They’re still stuck in the same school together. But, more importantly, Facebook *WANTS* Bob to twist Facebook around and tell it stuff that it’ll spread to everyone. And it’s fine if Bob stops telling Facebook the most intimate stuff, as long as Bob keeps telling Facebook stuff that it can use to gain social stature.

Why? No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of “free.” It’s in Facebook’s economic interest to force people into being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the process. Of course, it’s in Facebook’s interest to maintain some semblance of trust, some appearance of being a trustworthy enterprise. I mean, if they were total bastards, they would’ve just turned everyone’s content public automatically without asking. Instead, they asked in a way that no one would ever figure out what’s going on and voila, lots of folks are producing content that is more public than they even realize. Maybe then they’ll get used to it and accept it, right? Worked with the newsfeed, right? Of course, some legal folks got in the way and now they can’t be that forceful about making people public but, guess what, I can see a lot of people’s content out there who I’m pretty certain don’t think that I can.

Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we’ve changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn’t be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don’t have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they’d like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don’t think that this is truly what we want. The same Silicon Valley tycoons who want to push everyone into the public don’t want their kids to know that their teachers are sexual beings, even when their sexuality is as vanilla as it gets. Should we even begin to talk about the marginalized populations out there?

Recently, I gave a talk on the complications of visibility through social media. Power is critical in thinking through these issues. The privileged folks don’t have to worry so much about people who hold power over them observing them online. That’s the very definition of privilege. But most everyone else does. And forcing people into the public eye doesn’t dismantle the structures of privilege, the structures of power. What pisses me off is that it reinforces them. The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them. The teacher, the abused woman, the poor kid living in the ghetto and trying to get out. How do we take them into consideration when we build systems that expose people?

Don’t get me wrong – folks have the right to enter the public stage. As long as we realize that this ain’t always pretty. I will never forget the teen girl who thought that her only chance out was to put up mostly naked photos online in the hopes that some talent agency would find her. All I could think of was the pimp who would.

There isn’t some radical shift in norms taking place. What’s changing is the opportunity to be public and the potential gain from doing so. Reality TV anyone? People are willing to put themselves out there when they can gain from it. But this doesn’t mean that everyone suddenly wants to be always in public. And it doesn’t mean that folks who live their lives in public don’t value privacy. The best way to maintain privacy as a public figure is to give folks the impression that everything about you is in public.

If we’re building a public stage, we need to give people the ability to protect themselves, the ability to face the consequences honestly. We cannot hide behind rhetoric of how everyone is public just because everyone we know in our privileged circles is walking confidently into the public sphere and assuming no risk. And we can’t justify our decisions as being simply about changing norms when the economic incentives are all around. I’m with Marshall on this one: Facebook’s decision is an economic one, not a social norms one. And that scares the bejesus out of me.

People care deeply about privacy, especially those who are most at risk of the consequences of losing it. Let us not forget about them. It kills me when the bottom line justifies social oppression. Is that really what the social media industry is about?

….

Read also:

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.

“Do you See What I See?: Visibility of Practices through Social Media”

Knowing that I was going to speak at two different events within a week of one another to distinctly different audiences needing to hear a similar message, I decided to craft one talk for both Supernova and Le Web. This talk is one of my more serious talks, looking at problematic practices in social media and inviting the audience to do something about it. Fundamentally, it’s a talk about visibility… about our ability to see what’s happening in the world thanks to the Internet. And about our needs to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in.

As always, I’ve made my crib available:

“Do you See What I See?: Visibility of Practices through Social Media”

If you’d prefer to listen to what I actually said (since I’m terrible at sticking to the crib), you might want to check out the video from Le Web or the video from Supernova (with the beautifully complementary talk by Adam Greenfield). Enjoy!

Sociality Is Learning

This post was originally written for the DML Central Blog. If you’re interested in Digital Media and Learning, you definitely want to check this blog out.

As adults, we take social skills for granted… until we encounter someone who lacks them. Helping children develop social skills is viewed as a reasonable educational endeavor in elementary school, but by high school, educators switch to more “serious” subjects. Yet, youth aren’t done learning about the social world. Conversely, they are more driven to understand people and sociality during their tween and teen years than as small children. Perhaps its precisely their passion for learning sociality that devalues this as learning in the eyes of adults. For, if youth LIKE the subject matter, it must not be educational. Unfortunately, I fear that we are doing a disservice to youth by not acknowledging the social learning that takes place during this period. Worse, what if our efforts to curtail social interactions out of a preference for “real” learning have professional costs?

Very few of us work in professions where we are forced to focus on one anti-social task all day, every day. Even academics, a notoriously hermitic bunch, have to interact with students, fellow faculty members, and perhaps grant makers at some point. Most of us are constantly relying on and honing our social skills, developing new techniques to communicate our message, navigate office politics, manage someone’s expectations, and keep the peace. Those in service jobs face this in an acute way, having to manage irate customers and balance many people at once. Social skills are the bread and butter of professional life. So how do we learn them?

It’s easy to point to middle school as ground zero of youth drama. The rise of status hierarchies combined with budding sexuality throws all sorts of relationships upside down. Bullying, social categories, and popularity are all there. But the key to “surviving” middle school is learning how to navigate these muddy waters with an intact self-esteem. It’s not that jealousy and other social dramas disappear after middle school; it’s that they get much more nuanced as people’s skills improve. But for people to improve their skills, they must learn how to manage unpredictable and uncomfortable social situations. These aren’t skills learned in abstract; they’re learned through practice.

Over the last three decades, youth lives have gotten increasingly structured. Many youth spend little to no time in unstructured social settings, otherwise known as “hanging out.” The practice of hanging out is consistently demonized by educationally-minded folks as a waste of time. Yet, it is in that space where youth learn to navigate social situations, make sense of impression management, and develop the social skills necessary to be productive adults.

Social media has created an interesting rupture in the landscape. Youth turn to it to reclaim unstructured social encounters, to create a public space that allows them to simply hang out with their friends, peers, and cohort. The flirting, gossiping, and joking around that takes place is not proof that social media is useless, but proof that it’s extremely valuable. Without other spaces in which to gather, youth have developed their own. They want to be social, but we also need them to develop social skills. What’s fascinating is that they’re learning to do so in a mediated landscape, developing norms that will persist through adulthood. It’s not like all social encounters between adults are face-to-face; learning how to interpret a Facebook post is a great skill to have when entering an email-centric corporation.

Rather than demonizing social media or dismissing its educational value, I believe that we need to embrace the environments that youth are using to gather and help them learn to navigate the murky waters of sociality. We cannot “fix” their social worlds, but we can provide the scaffolding that they need to help learn to make sense of sticky social situations. We can serve as listeners, guides, and cheerleaders. We can be there when they’re trying to make a decision about a best way to handle a situation and play devil’s advocate when they need to work through complicated dynamics. But to be there for youth, we have to treat them with respect and value what they’re learning. We have to value the importance of learning about sociality. And we need to be able to listen as confidants, not judges.

We can continue to demonize social spaces, dismiss hanging out, and overly regulate our kids. But I believe this does them a disservice. Being a successful adult in society requires social skills. And we desperately need to give youth space to learn them. They’re committed to learning; why aren’t we supporting them in doing so?

Originally posted here.

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French translation by Marie Helene Visconti:

La socialité est un apprentissage:

En tant qu’ adultes, nous considérons les compétences sociales comme données… jusqu’à ce que nous rencontrions quelqu’un qui en manque. Aider les enfants à développer des compétences sociales est vu comme un projet éducatif raisonnable en élémentaire, mais dans le secondaire, les éducateurs passent à des sujets plus sérieux. Cependant, les jeunes n’ont pas fini d’apprendre sur le monde social. Inversement, ils sont plus amenés à comprendre les gens et la socialisation pendant la préadolescence et l’adolescence que lorsqu’ils étaient petits enfants. Peut-être est-ce leur passion à apprendre la socialisation qui dévalue ceci comme apprentissage dans le regard des adultes. Parce que si les jeunes aiment le sujet, il ne doit pas être éducatif. Malheureusement, je crains que nous ne rendions pas service aux jeunes en ne reconnaissant pas l’apprentissage social qui se produit durant cette période. Pire, et si nos efforts pour réduire les interactions sociales à cause d’une préférence pour le « vrai » savoir avaient un coût professionnel.

Bien peu d’entre nous travaillent dans des professions où nous sommes forcés de nous focaliser sur une tâche solitaire toute la journée, chaque jour. Même les universitaires, un groupe d’ermites notoires, doivent interagir avec les étudiants, leurs collègues et peut-être les donateurs à certains moments. La plupart d’entre nous nous appuyons constamment sur nos compétences sociales que nous aiguisons, développant de nouvelles techniques pour communiquer notre message, naviguer dans la politique d’entreprise, gérer les attentes de quelqu’un et maintenir la paix. Ceux qui sont dans le secteur des services sont confronté à celà de façon aigüe, ayant à gérer des consommateurs irrités et à s’occuper de plusieurs personnes en même temps. Les compétences sociales sont le pain et le beurre de notre vie professionnelle. Alors comment les apprenons nous ?

Il est facile de désigner le collège comme point de départ du drame de la jeunesse. La montée des hiérarchies de statuts combinée avec la sexualité bourgeonnante met sans dessus dessous toutes sortes de relations. Le harcèlement, les catégories sociales et la popularité sont pleinement là. Mais la clé pour « survivre » au collège est d’apprendre à naviguer dans ces eaux troubles en gardant l’estime de soi intacte. Ce n’est pas que la jalousie et les autres drames sociaux disparaissent après le collège ; c’est qu’ils deviennent plus nuancés à mesure que les gens amélioent leurs compétences. Mais pour que les gens améliorent leurs compétences, ils doivent apprendre à gérer les situations sociales imprévisibles et inconfortables. Ces compétences ne sont pas apprises en théorie ; elles sont apprises par la pratique.

Pendant les trois dernières décades, la vie des jeunes s’est structurée de façon croissante. Beaucoup de jeunes passent de peu à aucun temps dans des environnements non structurés socialement, autrement dit à « traîner ». La pratique de l’activité traîner est constamment diabolisée par les personnes à l’esprit éducatif en tant que perte de temps. Cependant, c’est dans cet espace que les jeunes apprennent à naviguer dans des situations sociales, à maîtriser la gestion de l’impression et à développer les capacités sociales nécessaires pour être des adultes protecteurs.

Les média sociaux ont créé une rupture intéressante dans ce paysage. Les jeunes se tournent vers eux pour retrouver des rencontres sociales non structurées, pour créer un espace public qui les autorisent à tout simplement traîner avec leurs amis, pairs et cohorte. Le flirt, les potins et les plaisanteries qui y prennent place ne sont pas la preuve que les médias sociaux sont inutiles, mais la preuve qu’ils ont une immense valeur. Sans d’autres espaces pour se rassembler, la jeunesse a développé les siens. Ils veulent être sociaux, mais nous avons aussi besoin qu’ils développent des capacités sociales. Ce qui est fascinant, c’est qu’ils sont en train d’apprendre à le faire dans un paysage médiatique, développant des normes qui persisteront à l’âge adulte. Ce n’est pas comme si toutes les rencontres sociales entre adultes se passaient en face à face ; apprendre à interpréter un post facebook est une compétence précieuse à posséder lorsqu’on entre dans une entrepise organisée autour du mail.

Plutôt que diaboliser les média sociaux ou nier leur valeur éducative, je crois que nous devons nous engager dans l’environnement que les jeunes utilisent pour se réunir et les aider à naviguer dans les eaux troubles de la sociabilité. Nous ne pouvons pas arranger leurs mondes sociaux, mais nous pouvons fournir les échafaudages dont ils ont besoin pour apprendre à se débrouiller des situations sociales délicates. Nous pouvons servir d’auditeurs, guides et cheerleaders. Nous pouvons être là quand ils sont en train d’essayer de décider de la meilleure façon de gérer une situation et jouer l’avocat du diable lorsqu’ils ont besoin d’évoluer à travers des dynamiques complexes. Mais pour être là pour les jeunes, nous devons les traiter avec respect et valoriser ce qu’ils sont en train d’apprendre. Nous devons reconnaître l’importance d’apprendre sur la sociabilité. Et nous devons être capables d’écouter en confidents, pas en juges.

Nous pouvons continuer à diaboliser les espaces sociaux, interdire l’activité « traîner » et excessivement réguler nos enfants. Mais je crois que nous leur rendons alors l’inverse d’un service. Etre un adulte qui réussit en société demande des compétences sociales. Et nous avons un besoin crucial de donner aux jeunes l’espace pour les apprendre. Ils sont motivés pour apprendre; pourquoi ne les soutenons nous pas?