“It’s like hug me and poke me…what does that even mean?” – Connor

Oh, Connor, how right you are! (A Google image search for "connor white atlanta"produced the following picture.) Unfortunately, Connor White doesn't live in Atlanta! (No clue why Atlanta showed up however. He lives in Jersey and his baseball profile describes him as "Good catch and throw guy behind plate, strong arm, quick actions, throws online, solid receiver."

While I doubt no one would say something like that today about the poke or the SuperPoke!, Connor--in a typical adolescent colloquial manner--makes an astute observation and judgement about a specific digital/online/social networking practice, in this case Facebook. 


It is youth's ability to make these observations and judgements that is at the center of danah boyd's piece, "White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook"

The discourse on talking about race and ethnicity radically shifted after the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States. Supposedly, we live in a post-racial America. However, anyone who allows himself to look at society critically knows that how we form our networks and our communities of practice has little to do with a historical event that, while definitely signifying that America is more open to racial and ethnic inclusivity, doesn't immediately affect the lives of our youth and their digital and physical spaces. 

The image on the right is visual representation of a School Friendship Network created by James Moody in 2001. The following text describes what Mr. Moody was trying to accomplish in this project. 


Friendship network of children in a US school. Friendships are determined by asking the participants, and hence are directed, since A may say that B is their friend but not vice versa. Vertices are color coded according to race, as marked, and the split from left to right in the figure is clearly primarily along lines of race. The split from top to bottom is between middle school and high school, i.e., between younger and older children.
Races: Yellow - White Race; Green - Black Race; Pink - Other 


Reading danah boyd's article, I couldn't help but think about this image. While the above network plot was created by asking students to label classmates as a friend or not, it is eerily representative of the network construction occurring in "White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook". The following is a list of questions that arise as I read and reread danah boyd's paper.

• How do we forge friendships? 
• How is what manifests in "real-time" indicative of the spaces we create (and maintain) online? 
• What assumptions and judgements are we making as we choose, maintain and assert our digital identity? 
• (Who gets to assert their digital identity? And if we think about the digital world as a racialized space--which it certainly must be if the space mimics real physical places--then there certainly must be a dominant-minority group paradigm that disproportionately affects the lives of those who are minority group members of the digital world. [See Racialized Boundaries for a real good overview of the concept of racialization.]) 

I don't have the answers to these questions. And even if I did, the answers would be liable to change as technology changes, how we interact with technology changes us, and how the economical and governmental factors concerning the internet (i.e., the media, profitability, censorship) develop in the coming years, months, days! But what is clear is that there seems to be a networking issue, a classification and categorization issue, and a digital social reality issue that arise in our online spaces. 

boyd writes that "Online, status markers take on new form but in ways that are reminiscent of offline practices. For example, the public articulation of connections on social network sites is a way of visibly marking oneself in relation to others and their status (Donath and boyd, 2004)." This seems to be one of the places where she is speaking to the notion of a networking and  classification and categorization. Online networks seem to develop clearly along the lines of "status" markers, in this case along the lines of Myspace (eeew, ghetto!) or Facebook (ahh! I get to write on my brother's Yale classmate; he's so dreamy!) The system of stratification occurring is akin to the ones created by "status markers" in the physical world. (Take your pick: money, gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.) But even more so, this speaks to the necessity of people to classify the data in their life (in this case, who's who"). 



Hello, David Weinberger! Thank you for your Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. I don't think you make a connection to this issue, but I think it's there.


Youth (and perhaps adults as well!) are being deliberate in the classification systems they are employing when they assign labels to who utilizes which social networking platform. Are these labels implicitly racist or discriminatory? 


As is the case in our physical spaces, not necessarily. boyd adresses this when she writes, "While style preference is not inherently about race and class, the specific styles referenced have racial overtones and socioeconomic they are functionally navigating race and class."


However, it is important to think about because are there certain choices being made that have consequences. The social networks we form and the communities of practice we belong to (or try to belong to) can greatly impact future outcomes. And the relegation of groups to a status of otherness has historically never been a good thing in the United States. 


This idea of otherness: how is this connected to composition? The field of composition itself is relegated to otherness. English departments fractured  along the lines of the Ph.D in Lit (totally smart), Ph.D or Ed.D. or D.A in comp (somewhat smart: but barely having the educational requirements for tenure), MFA (artsy: it's ok if you bring in the students) and MA (inferior: but someone's got to teach comp!).  


Maybe if students learn to recognize their online and physical spaces, spaces with consequences, then perhaps they might see what is happening around them--and what they are deliberately doing or not doing--and possibly utilize the internet as the great equalizer it was once touted as. 


Or perhaps not.


I'm left wondering.

Are the links we are creating--both physical and online--when we create labels for people and the technology we use, giving in to our natural human tendency to classify, categorize and give order to the randomness in our lives, radically transforming us? Are we evolving?