Jones' Self Segregation and boyd's White Flight in Networked Publics

Jones' Self Segregation: Why It's So Hard For Whites to Understand Ferguson 

This article talks about the divide between White and Black understanding of racial inequality. The problem, according to the author, is that Whites surround themselves primarily with other Whites:

In fact, fully three-quarters (75 percent) of whites have entirely white social networks without any minority presence. This level of social-network racial homogeneity among whites is significantly higher than among black Americans (65 percent) or Hispanic Americans (46 percent).

The author says that many Whites feel the issue of race has gotten too much attention. Also, he says that there are cultural values such as "law and order" versus "personal freedom" that cloud understanding and perception.

boyd's White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped 

American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook.  

Boyd determines that MySpace became known as a site for POC or people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and that Whites decided to leave MySpace and preferred Facebook as a platform. She describes what it means that MySpace is considered "ghetto":

On the other hand, being ghetto refers to a set of tastes that emerged as poor people of color developed fashion and cultural artifacts that proudly expressed their identity....Those who adopted MySpace were from different backgrounds and had different norms and values than those who adopted Facebook.

Regarding the Whites, then, in that space: if the space does not reflect their tastes or values, why would they stay? Is it really fear, anxiety, and racism, as boyd describes, or are they chosing a space where they fit in to the expected cultural values and norms? Is it necessarily racism, or is it teens, both Black and White, choosing spaces where their own values are reflected and celebrated? I agree wholeheartedly with boyd that the issues she's discussing "reflect broader narratives of race and class in American society," I'm not sure everything can always be chalked up to racism.

She describes MySpace as being built around urban and music culture while Facebook was based on college crowds. Therefore, would it be surprising that each group chose to affiliate themselves in a space that fit their social values and aspirations?

Subculturally identified teens appeared more frequently drawn to MySpace while more mainstream teens tended towards Facebook. Teens from less-privileged backgrounds seemed likely to be drawn to MySpace while those headed towards elite universities appeared to be head towards Facebook. Racial and ethnic divisions looked messier, tied strongly to socio-economic factors, but I observed that black and Latino teens appeared to preference MySpace while white and Asian teens seemed to privilege Facebook.

boyd talks about how Whites stick together. Much later in the article she concedes that so do Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Italians, Irish, etc, down to every last clan, group, and tribe on the planet. It seems silly that we need a researcher to tell us this. Yet when she published about the self-separation of teens on the two sites, it sparked "outrage."

boyd makes a dubious claim. She seems to have a preconceived notion of constant oppression and inequality perpetrated by the powerful on the downtrodden, and then seeks to prove it. She says,

Teens’ fear of MySpace as ‘unsafe’ undoubtedly stems from the image portrayed by the media, but it also suggests a fear of the ‘other.’

I wonder why she is certain that they are undoubtedly swayed by the media and not by what they see of their peers and experience on the site? And while it may suggest a "fear of the other" to her, it may be that it is an environment where the "mainstream" kids who are not espousing urban or music culture don't see themselves fitting in, or aren't interested in fitting in.

By far, the most prominent explanation teens gave for choosing one or the other is the presence of their friends. Teens choose to use the social network site that their friends use.

Yes, that sounds much more likely. Glad she brought it up.

the flashy style that is popular on MySpace is often marked in relation to “bling-bling,” a style of conspicuous consumption that is associated with urban black culture and hip-hop. To some, bling and flashy MySpace profiles are beautiful and creative; to others, these styles are garish. While style preference is not inherently about race and class, the specific styles referenced have racial overtones and socio-economic implications. In essence, although teens are talking about style, they are functionally navigating race and class. 

And regarding the hip-hop aspect of MySpace:

For some, participating in this taste culture is a point of pride; for others, this genre and the perceived attitudes that go with it are viewed as offensive. 

But are those who find it offensive expected to stay, because otherwise they will be labelled fearful, anxious, or racist? boyd mentions the presence of different moral codes and deviant practices. While it wasn't the norm on MySpace, acting out sexually was more prevalent there than on Facebook. boyd talks about kids "forced to leave" MySpace by their parents, but she cites not one teen talking about leaving by force. It was reported to be voluntary and self-driven by each individual teen and his or her friends.

The parallel boyd draws between "white flight" from urban areas and from MySpace is overwrought, but certainly serves to forward her arguement. Spammers took over MySpace like street gangs? What, in this instance, prevented non-Whites from moving to Facebook?  She goes on to say, "Needless to say, the frame of “white flight” only partially works..." That's one thing we can agree on.

She concludes with

The internet mirrors and magnifies everyday life, making visible many of the issues we hoped would disappear, including race and class-based social divisions in American society.

Is it race and class based, or behavior and taste based? Yes, our tools only help us live our everyday lives, they don't necessarily change our souls. Race and class based social divisions exist in every culture in every nation and group. Whether powerful or powerless, every color, gender, class, and creed, looks around themselves, affiliates themselves with likes, and calls "other". Why do we keep expecting this aspect of human nature to just disappear? When it unfairly restricts certain groups, it must be addressed and corrected. But to call for its disappearance is naive.

Selfie Pedagogy I - IV

Selfie I
Starting with the first link, it is evident that academics have begun to follow and study online culture, particularly the culture of selfies. I was surprised to find an entire syllabus surrounding selfies as a university course. I thought it might be by a bunch of Californians, but that's not the case. The people spearheading the project are from all over the globe. And I got to see their selfies.

One great thing about the selfie project is the sharing. If it's going to be considered scholarly, you have to convince skeptics. The way to do that is to share what you've learned.

 “I benefitted from their syllabuses and their scholarship,” Posner said. “I felt I was entering into a community that had done this for a long time, and they were generous enough to share what they had learned.”

Selfie II

Marwick wrote a paper on the "duck face."

Marwick, the Fordham professor who shared the Selfie Course, talks about how people are able to disseminate information to a much wider audience than ever. Before, only celebrities or politicians had access to the media that we all now have access to. Also, she tries to study what leads to popularity on sites such as Twitter and Instagram.

...she resigned herself to accepting that there might sometimes be “no reason,” because “popularity begets popularity.” 

  “Whenever you have a topic that is intrinsically sexy, it gets a lot of media attention. Social media scholars have been looking at this stuff for over a decade.” 


Interesting that she collaborated on the Selfie Course through Skype discussions and google docs. I think that's pretty mainstream now.

As an “old school web geek” with a “year 2000 understanding of HTML,” she liked having “more freedom to put up my own site. WordPress is relatively unfettered, and I was lucky to have the infrastructure, so I didn’t have to find space on a university server or a commercial site, where we might have been more regulated in what we can post.”

"Year 2000 understanding of HTML"--that's me. Seems it served her well today. I wonder if I should put my hybrid course up on Wordpress instead of NJIT site. It will be MY course, after all. I can put it where I want it, no? Need to think through the pros and cons.

Selfie III

The Association of Internet Researchers wanted to bring scholarship to the selfie phenomenon, and wanted to use the writing of young researchers and/or bloggers who hadn't been published yet, because the work was not considered scholarly.

“There’s not a thing called The Media. I’m part of it.”

Terri Senft of NYU discusses camgirls, slut shaming, and girls' need for self-expression. Then she addresses political and civic engagement. She says pictures of the dead put a human face on issues.

Selfie IV
Concerning digital pedagogy and teaching selfies in the college writing classroom:

National and international news organizations have been reporting on his recent work at the University of Southern California, but unfortunately this coverage has sometimes reinforced generalizations about the supposed superficiality, narcissism, and anti-intellectualism of young people, stereotypes that he had hoped to dispel.

Mark Marino says his students thought that selfies were about narcissistic young women, but instead, he teaches about all kinds of historic and modern modes of self-representation. The assignments he did with selfies, Facebook, and Vine all include critical thinking and reflection. Oh, and his classes did netprovs. Cool. He uses the topic of self-representation as a springboard to talk about privilege and access and inequality.

"Hour of Code" Results: Keeping My Day Job

Here are the results of my experience with the "Hour of Code" on Khan Academy. I thought I'd give it a go before we continued to discuss including it as an option for the final project. I'll walk you through my hour, and you can decide what you think.



Starting the Tutorial.



She wants to play, not code.



Got it right.

Having trouble.

I finished the hour. It took a whole hour. The thought process needed for coding is very mathematical. Not sure people will like it. Also, like math, it would take lots and lots of practice to get good at it. Here is the fabulous code I wrote to create my first solo masterpiece. It's a selfie:

 And here's the result! I decided to smile, because the code for duckface was beyond my capabilities.

Based on this experience, I think Dr. Zamora's idea of trying new software and documenting the process might be a good path to consider. Focusing on final product, mmmmaybe not. What do you think?

Thoughts on the Final Project (because I need to keep them somewhere, sorry, I wish all posts weren't syndicated)

Consider what we want to learn in this course as a way to envision our final projects.

What I want to learn in this class

• discover, tinker with, and create using new (to me) digital tools
• create a digital written and/or spoken piece that can be used for instruction or play (or both)
• get user feedback from participants (or classmates)

What I want to avoid in this class

• work in a large group of 6+ people
• work on a project that doesn't inspire me personally or professionally

Considered the Course Objectives from the syllabus:

A. Review history of writing in terms of composition practices and changing technologies

B. Recognize distinctive features of composition theory derived from digital technologies

C. Explore shifts in the conceptions within composition studies as "writing" moves from the page to the screen

D. Re-conceptualize writing practice and ethics in terms of multimedia composing

E. Analyze and compose multimedia texts in a range of genres

F. Create a literacy philosophy consistent with 21st century composing practices

G. Create a writing studies course or multimedia site with a keen design focus on the new affordances of multimedia text

H. Create a strategy to include multimedia composing in future work

Initial final project ideas from what I want to learn matched with course objectives:

1. Take videos from Youtube and remix them for instructional purposes. For example, take someone's video but swap out the audio track. (C, D, E, H)  Fooled with something like that last week. It was fun and it'll be useful. It was way more work than it seemed, though, and required lots of technology. Not sure the juice is worth the squeeze.

2. Embed other people's videos into a learning object made by me.  (C, D, E, H) Yeah, but I already did something similar for my discussion lead.

3. Create a book in Moodle using video, audio, and quizzes. That's advanced Moodle, I've never made one and don't know anyone who has. Not entirely sure what it would entail. (C, D, E, F, G, H)

Net Smart: Chapters 5-6

Chapter 5 starts by talking about small world networks and 6 degrees of separation. He went on to explain the bell curve and the 80/20 rule. Then he explains how social networks are changing society and analyzes different types of social network positions.

Rheingold insists that online networks are as robust as real life networks. Probably so, for him. Rheingold is online for a living. Therefore, he is going to get out of his networks exactly what he puts in. I suspect his online ties are stronger than most people's.

In this chapter, when he discusses Granovetter, he also outlines specifically how he goes about finding and interviewing people. I think we can therefore cross that question off our class list of what to ask during our Skype meeting with Rheingold.

Mozilla's White Paper and More

Mozilla's white paper gives a great introduction and overview of the purpose of Mozilla. (Why don't more organizations write white papers? Is that an "old" form of introduction? Or do we call it an "about" page now?) The Mozilla founders want to keep the web "knowable, interoperable, and ours." They are against silos and pages that don't share the source code. Established in 1998. That rang a bell for me. That was the year the department head at my multinational corporation thought the web was the wave of the future for communication and decided he needed someone on his personal staff who could read HTML code. So despite that I was pregnant and exhausted, he sent me during work hours to two courses at NYU: HTML Coding and Designing WWW. The classes were pretty much only geeks and computer nerds (and one pregnant lady who took a corporate limo in from Jersey and power napped at every break.) I had almost forgotten all about that experience until reading Mozilla's page. The design software we used then would be primitive now. I seem to remember Photoshop being cutting edge. Not sure what the point of all that was, but yeah, I can read a little bit of code. And the web and its users and makers were different in 1998.

Exploring, Building, Connecting. Mozilla's idea of web literacy is different from our idea of digital literacy at the college level, and what we've been focusing on in class and at the NJIT library. Digital literacy so far has meant knowing how to use and evaluate sources on the web. Mozilla goes much further than knowing and evaluating. That is captured in the "explore" section of their web literacy initiative. They move on to building, or writing for the web, and then connecting, or participating on the web. This pushes the boundaries of our digital literacy ideas.

Mozilla has tools that might be relevant. I need to check out popcorn (would that be better than Camtasia?), goggles (might be neat to fool around with code again), and the web literacy teaching kit on the teaching activities page (is there anything of value that I could bring to my classroom, or assign for homework?). Looking forward to Laura's discussion lead.

Net Smart: Chapter 4

Chapter 4, Digital Know-how: The Arts and Sciences of Collective Intelligence, was an engaging chapter. Touching on many of the same topics as Clay Shirky did in his book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations" (which I thoroughly enjoyed), Rheingold discusses collaboration from the theoretical to the real life use of wikis. I was expecting to see a quote or two from Shirky, but there were none. Hmm...

The section about mass collaboration explained that as humans, we are wired to collaborate. He reviews self-interest vs. collective good and the tragedy of the commons. Elinor Ostrom's work on "institutions of collective action" was particularly interesting, in that she figured out what rules need to be in place for the collective governance and use of shared resources to succeed.

Himmelman's schema was well explained: Networking has low risk; coordination means that everyone must share info for mutual benefit; cooperation means sharing info and resources, and modifying activities; an collaboration means sharing responsibility and resources to take collective action towards a common goal.