The Power of (In)Equality

The article “Inequality: Can Social Media Resolve Social Divisions?” by Danah Boyd is about the development of social media and how these websites have developed into everyday segregation. When the internet, and social media, started to become popular, most people in society believed that it would be the “end of social divisions.” She uses a lot stories from students in order to prove to the optimist who think that the internet is going to solve the cultural problems. By directly speaking to the main demographic that uses social media, the young high schoolers, Boyd is showing directly how there are social rifts being formed that even the users themselves don t realize. The author provides information on the topic using personal fieldwork, or information that she researched. She used a multitude of footnotes in order to establish her ethos in that she had a good understanding of the topic. After every topic, she has a self-reflection on what the problem at hand means, and how it relates to social issues present in the teenagers lives already. Instead of relying on interviews from students who use social media, Boyd also refers to aspects of everyday lives such as the iPhone software Siri. By demonstrating how everyday technology shows a bias towards race, she connects to a broader range of audience who might otherwise think that racism online is just a hoax. Her attempts to grapple with the complexity of this issue offer in depth analysis of the issue from all points of view. She uses a majority of her work to describe how the internet subtly promotes biasness, but concedes at the end of the story that in internet it also extremely beneficial to students. She adds to the complexity of the issue by stating how the connections that people build between each other through networking online is extremely valuable in helping you find opportunities later in life. The article reminded me a lot of the loneliness of the interconnected, but I found it more interesting because of the primary research she put into the work. However I didn’t like how her analysis were so complex that I found myself getting lost in her paper and many of the points seemed to overlap to me.