The Racial Politics of Web 2.0

The recent uprisings in Iran may prove that social media sites have changed the way we communicate for good. But while many laud Facebook and Twitter for giving a voice to citizen journalists around the world, one expert has voiced her reservations.

Danah Boyd, social media researcher for Microsoft and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, challenged the notion that social media sites are a "great equalizer." At this past weekend's Personal Democracy Forum in New York, Boyd cited her own research in arguing that demographics of site users often follow racial and socio-economic lines.

Boyd gave the example of the "white flight" from MySpace in recent years — comparing the high percentage of whites abandoning their MySpace accounts to the white migration from urban areas in the latter part of the 20th century. According to Boyd, the media is in part to blame for the attitude among white and educated people that MySpace is "cheesy" and filled with riff-raff and pedophiles.

Boyd stressed that this so called cyber-segregation should be a matter of urgent concern to all of us. "When people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another, they do not communicate with one another; this can and does breed intolerance."

New York Observer: In the Battle Between Facebook and MySpace, A Digital 'White Flight'