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.