Reality Has Landed: Exposing Divisions on the Web

Much of the time when you here people speak about Web 2.0 technologies or the internet in general they speak as if these spheres of communication are uninhabited spaces where humans are left only to roam without the constrictures of corporate capitalism. This in the face of omnipresent advertisements in every aspect of their lives: that flowing ad while traveling on the PATH train from NJ to New York City still gets me. A cry of just leave me alone is thought a thousand times over but never uttered.

But just as everyone was rejoicing (we are speaking about circa 2006) reality came to the world wide web when MySpace was bought by Fox and YouTube was swallowed by Google. Why oh why so many decried and this is plainly stated in the articles we read this week about the participation divide in web technology and culture.

Danah Boyd's blog essay, "Viewing American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace," although introductory to this topic and subject is a provocative but poignant distillation of who is participating in these Social Networking Sites (SNS). By no coincidence should most readers, however find that Facebook users are from most affluent portions of society since it was born on the Ivory Pillars of the Ivy leagues.

The illusions of an egalitarian Internet have of course been smashed by now but how could so many be convinced that the Internet wouldn’t have the profit-systems strings attached? Maybe in the postmodern moment we would tended to fragmentize our social relations to the extent that you could disconnect the Internet from the rest of society. Remember how they broke down the Rodney King beating incident frame by frame until the defense convince 12 people that Rodney King the victim was the victimizer.

Oh let’s not dig up old bones. It’s unavoidable isn’t it? We still can’t escape the constraints that have existed for the last 500 years.

I do believe their will always be a division on the web because some people have and other do not. This is all based on class and wealth (not boyd’s model). In 1999, when the idea of building an independent media site for working class people developed we still had to consider that the majority of working class people around the world who did have internet at the time where still bound by a 56k modem. From a design perspective this limits us to build stuff that is basic and can load easily and quickly enough so that everyone who has access can get.

But then again there are still millions out there who are miles (kilometers) away from an Internet café. Left in the dark of the locomotive of post-industrial nations that will probably use this opportunity once again of “cultured” vis á vis “uncultured” to gain an upper hand once again.

It’s not that dismal. If you think this sounds cynical. What do you think the oppress will do when they do get their hands on technology. The mind of the colonized is not static who locked into a previous kind. It just develops in another time for the same purpose.

boyd, danah. (2007). "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace ." Apophenia Blog Essay. June 24 . http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html Jenkins, H. (2006). "Taking the You Out Of You Tube." Convergence Culture Consortium Blog Post. November 2. http://www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2006/11/taking_the_you_out_of_youtube.php McMurria, J. (2006). "The You Tube Community." Flow TV Blog Essay. October 20.http://flowtv.org/?p=48