“Self-segregation”
While reading these statistics and polls, I am moderately
conflicted on what to say about this article. I’m a white girl who has (quite a
few) relatives actively serving in the police force. Based on that alone, my
opinion on this issue would seemingly be obvious…but my bigger issue here is
that I feel we are comparing apples to oranges? Just this chart alone says to
me that we’re (essentially) living in two completely different realities:
And isn’t truth relative? At the very least, truth has to be
something you believe—that why someone could be technically lying (like in a
lie detector test?) but the individual doesn’t think they’re lying, so to them
it is the truth. (Maybe that’s a little too philosophical/ abstract for this
particular context.) What I mean is, with such staggering social and cultural
differences, how can we not expect disagreements
to occur?
I am shocked –but also not shocked –about the whiteness of
the average white-person’s social circle. Personally, I think my social circle is
a bit more diverse than the article states, but at the same time, I see how
accurate it is based on the people I see in my town (predominately white, and
almost infamously so). But when I think about social circles I see at school, I
am inclined to think that this is not just a white tendency. Most groups I see
around campus, I think, are racially homogeneous.
"White Flight"
“digital ghetto” an interesting way to refer to the overall
attitude and aesthetic of a website. This idea of “white flight” from “ghetto”
environments makes me think of “Black English” (the vernacular used by Black people
is so different than that of the rest of the population, that it has essentially
become its own language). So far, I am thinking that these white teens moved
from MySpace to Facebook—“Not to be racist”—but because the commonality between
the users was lost. Even the origin of these sites seems to point towards a lack
of commonality.
I didn’t have MySpace as a kid, so this division between “safe”
and “unsafe” has a different connotation to me. I was unaware of the fact that
the user base of MySpace was primarily Black/ “urban.” My understanding was it
was unsafe because you didn’t know who you were talking to. The term for that now is “catfishing,” but back then, it
was this unnamed fear looming over all digital interactions. This is still kind
of the case, but we are so used to being distrusting of digital social worlds,
that the fear is less omnipresent. Or at the very least, less tangible. So to
me, it is kind of shocking to think that the unsafety factor of MySpace was
actually linked to race. In fact, I am surprised the “predator” factor wasn’t
mentioned until page 27. I actually didn’t think they were going to bring it up
at all.
The bit about Facebook being “safer” is actually kind of
laughable to me, since my parents were really strict growing up, and they were even
skeptical of Facebook.
I thought this article was interesting to a point—after a
while it felt a bit repetitive to me, and I think the message could have gotten
across in less time. I thought there would be more focus on the overarching
social connotations that the “digital white flight” insinuated rather than such
a heavy analysis of Facebook / MySpace users. My mind is honestly blown by how
racially diverse this problem was, because for me growing up, everybody had
both while I had neither. I didn’t get Facebook until high school, and even
then I was allowed on between the times when I finished my homework and before
9 or 10 PM. So a lot of the stuff discussed in this article went right over my
head. I guess even my own experiences cans serve as testimony to what Boyd was trying to prove.
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