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Our love affair with technology is matched only by our fear of it. Nowhere is this more obvious than in our relationship to that multitentacled yet intangible beast known as the interweb.
Yes, if this forum wasn't generating enough anxiety, parental and otherwise, along comes social media researcher and Harvard Law School fellow Danah Boyd with news of the latest online threat: bad (virtual) neighbourhoods.
What does an online ghetto look like, you may wonder. Are there graffiti and broken windows? Drug deals and sexual predators?
Well, sort of. According to Ms. Boyd, it's a community 58 million members strong and it's called MySpace. No broken windows, but broken links. No graffiti, but plenty of visual spam. No drug dealers, but, arguably, sexual predators (more on this later).
This thesis, which she first presented at the Personal Democracy Forum this summer, has only continued to gather steam since. Most recently, she gave an interview to The Root , a black-culture online magazine, that sparked a furor among its readers.
Last year, Facebook overtook MySpace in numbers of members. If you are like me, you made the switch because information was better organized on Facebook, and the layout was more conducive to clear communication. The fact that you were leaving behind a berserker aesthetic – cursors shaped like flames or hearts, layouts that take forever to load (and by forever, I mean, oh, one or two minutes), and messages wRiTtEn liKe ThIs – was a bonus. But according to Ms. Boyd, something more nefarious was going on, and that something was “white flight.”
Ms. Boyd came to her conclusions about MySpace – that MySpace is a digital “ghetto” populated by less-educated, lower-income non-whites – after months of research and interviews with teens across the United States. She seems to have gained inspiration particularly from this comment by some 14-year-old from Massachusetts: “I'm not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever.” Yet last year, marketers Rapleaf found that while some websites have clear racial correlations – Friendster is used primarily by Asians, while Latinos proliferate on Hi5 – MySpace has no clear affiliation.
That puts into question the whole “white flight” angle. But let’s say her other assumptions about class, about the social-underdog status of the site’s users, are correct. After all, she’s smart enough to know which hot-button issues will light a fire under worried parents and media alike. (She brings up rumours of sexual predators on MySpace only to debunk them.) She’s also probably correct when she suggests that educators and politicos won’t bother reaching out to MySpacers, leaving them civically disengaged and less informed.
But the problem is, her analogy falls short when you try to follow it to its obvious conclusion. Making the switch from MySpace to Facebook is not like leaving the South Bronx for Connecticut.
How much money or education you have doesn’t determine which social network you can join. What makes MySpacers underprivileged children of the ghetto, exactly? (Besides the Cretaceous-era coding that allows for those unwieldy layouts.) Staying there is a choice, not an unhappy destiny, and leaving it is as simple as clicking on a new link. To suggest people can’t figure that out is as offensive as suggesting their self-selected community is a ghetto.
