Equality Is Regarding Different Things Differently
June 25th, 2007
This morning my husband sent me a link to this paper on class division in MySpace and Facebook. It wasn’t a bad read and held my attention, but about halfway through I started to wonder, “What exactly is the point, here?”
The paper is a bit disorganized and haphazard, and granted it isn’t intended to be a scholarly work–it’s just a blog post, essentially. But the part that compelled me to sit in my chair and have my say was this line, found in her blog: “What I lay out in this essay is rather disconcerting. Hegemonic American teens (i.e. middle/upper class, college bound teens from upwards mobile or well off families) are all on or switching to Facebook. Marginalized teens, teens from poorer or less educated backgrounds, subculturally-identified teens, and other non-hegemonic teens continue to be drawn to MySpace. A class division has emerged and it is playing out in the aesthetics, the kinds of advertising, and the policy decisions being made.”
. . .So what?
This isn’t disconcerting in the slightest; in fact, I think it’s a good thing. One of my favorite quotes comes from Tom Robbins in his book Still Life With Woodpecker wherein he writes, “Equality is not regarding different things similarly; equality is regarding different things differently.” We know that people from different backgrounds, social circles, and socioeconomic levels shop differently, entertain differently, and enjoy different activities. The people who habitually shop at J. Crew are typically not the same people who habitually shop at Hot Topic. The people who drink Miller Lite are generally not the same people who own Espresso machines. And people who enjoy bluegrass bars are typically not the same people who send their daughters off to debutante balls. There isn’t anything wrong with this: different strokes for different folks.
If this paper were merely presenting an observation, or even better, presenting ideas on these respective communities could tailor themselves to best fit the needs of the people who seem to be utilizing the tools, I wouldn’t have a problem with the paper at all. And it isn’t so much that I have a problem with the paper so much as the implication that class differentiations are necessarily bad, especially when the author herself acknowledges that class differentiations in America are not necessarily based on income. If the hard-working migrant worker and the Engels-reading barista can be considered different classes even though they make the same money, what’s wrong with their class identifications determining how they spend their leisure time? It might be an issue if we were talking about people who were afforded different luxuries based on what their buying power, but we aren’t talking about that. Facebook and MySpace are available to the migrant worker and the barista. They have the ability to chose for themselves which social networking tool best suits their needs.
I admit that I chuckled a bit when the author bemoans the fact that though everyone knows about MySpace, not all the kids on MySpace know about Facebook, and therefore, due to class-induced ignorance, might not avail themselves to all that Facebook has to offer. Well, so what? Is the implication that Facebook is somehow better? The author doesn’t hide the fact that she deems Facebook more attractive, possibly a better fit for her own aesthetic and even social values, and I don’t have a problem with that. But her own personal bias is evident, and seems to undermine her argument.
More worrying, part of what bothered me is how much the tacit argument here reminds me of the pervasive liberal attitude of “color blindness”, one of many good intentions paving the road to Hell. It is the idea that we should see past a person’s ethnicity, ignoring it altogether, looking to their underlying character. And while it is certainly important to look deeper than ethnicity or color, it’s not advisable to ignore these things utterly. What we look like, the communities we belong to, the histories we have lived all shape who we are as people. As an attractive, light-skinned black woman frequently mistaken for Mexican, the way I am treated by others is different from the way a fat, white man is treated or the way a striking Filipino woman is treated, and different still from the way your average blonde, blue eyed housewife is treated. I’m lucky that I have not met much overt prejudice from people based on my appearance, but I’ve heard stories from overweight friends of being advised by total strangers not to eat ice cream, and stories from dark-skinned families who were run out of their neighborhoods by bigots. Anyone who thinks these experiences do not shape who we become is delusional.
These stories are tied to how we look. Our experience of the world is tied to how others treat us. To say that “color blindness” is an appropriate way to interact with other people is ridiculous. Our bodies are part of who we are.
Similarly, it seems silly to me that anyone would recommend ignoring class differences in creating social networks, or shops, or restaurants, or bars, or any number of commodities that involve actual humans. We’re not merely shining souls trapped by the surly bonds of earth; we are our bodies, our friends, our jobs, our hobbies, our families, our interests. And it’s okay to regard these different people differently, to advertise to them differently, to organize them differently.
Sure, it’s okay to treat different people differently. But people aren’t just any one thing–in some ways we’re all different from anyone else, and in some ways we all share something. So it’s always, and I think appropriately so, going to be the case that we tussle over when it’s okay to treat people differently and when people ought to be the same, as well as when we start treating people too differently.
Social networking seems like a new twist on the problem. (I should confess here that I don’t use Facebook or MySpace, but I have my own online social networks that are definitely coded middle or uppper class and professional/white collar.) To take a very pragmatic (possibly crass example), our social networks (on and off line) open us to job opportunities. If online communities become highly class-stratified, that’s probably going to be an additional leg up for college-educated folk–a leg up they already have in many situations.
I think there’s also a concern of civil society and democracy. The more we self-segregate, the less we’re able to come together within civil society and create cross-cultural dialogue. If the internet is all about communication, then surely stratification and segregation is a problem.
Of course, simple difference in choice of networking tools may not entail those sorts of problems. Contact between networks can (I assume) occur, and there may be plenty of other channels.
>>To take a very pragmatic (possibly crass example), our social networks (on and off line) open us to job opportunities. If online communities become highly class-stratified, that’s probably going to be an additional leg up for college-educated folk–a leg up they already have in many situations.
Sure, and I don’t deny that. Thing is, this stratification isn’t limited to online organizations. The virtual world is merely mimicking the reality we’ve created. If the problem were *unique* to online systems, this would be something worth investigating. But it isn’t.
The internet does provide additional avenues for communication, but consider too that ideas, values, messages etc are not necessarily portable across different communities. That’s why we have teen pregnancy awareness ad campaigns that look and feel different in suburban white communities than they do in the ghetto. Words, images, and messages are all weighted differently across communities. Each community has its own vernacular and chosen way of speaking. If you don’t speak that language, you don’t get anywhere.
So it makes sense to communicate with people in their chosen lanugages, visually and semantically.
That said, I’m all for some sort of cross-cultural dialogue. But I’m not sure the way to go about that is to encourage some sort of “neutral” platform where images and symbols mean nothing. Better to give people the tools to communicate with the other on and off their own turf.
>The virtual world is merely mimicking the reality we’ve created.
I don’t think that’s necessarily given, and to the extent that’s true or not true seems like a worthy thing to study. I am not a hardcore internet guy, but it seems to me that the ideology of the web has long been open access and unfettered communication between any and all people. I don’t mean to endorse that as right or good, but my impression is that’s the story people on the internet have long told about themselves. Not that the web is a neutralized place of non-culture, but that it’s a new place and kind of culture, with different, non-hierarchical rules. (Again, this is my understanding of the story web people tell, or used to tell, about themselves.)
From within that worldview, I think it’s a little more understandable how a person could see all those hierarchies, stratifications, and segregations “out in the world” replicating themselves online is a bad thing.
Reading around your other posts (here, particularly), I think I might see a little more where you’re coming from. For me, that ideology of neutrality has value as an ideal, and as a way to allow civic engagement. For you, it sounds like, talk of neutrality is (somewhat paradoxically) maybe more a way of preserving a single culture, rather than making space for all cultures.
>>I am not a hardcore internet guy, but it seems to me that the ideology of the web has long been open access and unfettered communication between any and all people. I don’t mean to endorse that as right or good, but my impression is that’s the story people on the internet have long told about themselves.
And undoubtedly, Web 2.0 as an ideology, is certainly about that! And I’m a pretty hardcore internet girl :) But the thing is, “the web”, outside of any philosophy, technology, or ideology, is made up of *people*. And it is those people who drive the nature of the web and its development. As long as people want to divide themselves into groups, the vehicles that we use to engage with other people will reflect those divisions, those different values, and differing messages.
So, Web 2.0 allows places like Facebook and MySpace and YouTube and LiveJournal to exist, and the inclusive ideology you speak of is alive and well, doing precisely what it was intended to do: encourage interaction, create community, and let consumers become co-creators. But what Web 2.0 isn’t and doesn’t pretend to be is a kind of utopia where all people can come together in one place and share a similar experience. Web 2.0 allows people to divide themselves up however they like and create grassroots community and content from there.
I think it’s a mistake to consider the web itself a kind of culture. Web 2.0 breeds a new kind of culture *creation*, but what we create and how we create it is completely up to us as a society. so its not surprising to me, or noteworthy, that class distinctions are visible online.
Our watch replica price is cheaper than other website, and the watch replica is the good watch. you can choose any watch replica to placed order, Once we receive your payment, we will handle the watch replica shipment.