The arrival of the Internet and the wide dissemination of information that ensued has inspired the belief that technology may be able to break down hierarchies and allow for the equal access to and expression of information.
In “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online,” a speech written for Personal Democracy Forum, Danah Boyd cautions against trusting in technology as an equalizer. As an ethnographer, Boyd interviewed American teens about their use of MySpace vs. Facebook and noticed that the results reflected many of the social stratifications that make up the non-digital world.
Race and affluence and education all made their way into the supposedly “neutral” realm of digital interaction. Boyd likens the abandonment of MySpace for Facebook to “white flight” where certain social groups leave an area to escape what they see as the riff-raff. As social categories become more defined and divided in the digital realm, people communicate less and less between each other and intolerance burgeons. Boyd urges his listeners to realize that current “social media networks” actually refer to spaces where people with similarities interact with people they already know, and that the utopic idea of a universal public online is a myth.
