Inequality… Analysis
In Inequality:
Can Social Media Resolve Social Devision? a chapter from Danah Boyd’s book
Boyd speaks about, well the title really is self-explanatory. Boyd creates an
argument that uses a ridiculous amount of logos taken from an even more
ridiculous amount of research. She does
extensive field research filling this chapter with interviews from teens of all
backgrounds from an inner city girl to a preppy rich girl. These interviews are done and recorded over
years and Boyd makes more and more conclusions to support her claim from them.
Most of her interviews are focused around a pivotal point, when teens started
to change from Myspace to Facebook. She points out what a few students said
about their classmates; many of them said that the classmates that “higher ups”
which more often than not turned out to be white people and one interviewee
came out and said that the biggest reason that she and her friends switched to
Facebook was to “and not to sound racist but” get away from the more ghetto
people. Boyd eventually comes to a final conclusion that social media cannot
fight segregation and that the race problem will be a problem for many years to
come. Although her fieldwork is the main examples she uses to come to her
conclusion it is apparent that she uses many secondary sources as well. Boyd
often times talks about the huge racial segregation on the internet between
teens. They will more often have friends of the same race commenting on their
posts than of other races Boyd says after careful observation of teens’ social
media pages. The more secondary research is really the meat of the argument.
From this research Boyd comes to more serious conclusions and even implements
it into her field work like when she pointed out to one of her interviewees
some of her findings and built upon how surprised the interviewee was. She also
makes many claims in the chapter and then puts a footnote on that claim to a
piece of secondary research that she found that supported that claim. It seemed
that every claim she made had some way to support it and made the chapter very convincing to the
reader.