Deen, Thank you for this thoughtful reply. I just want to speak to a few of the issues you raise with the hopes of picking up more of them later. Check out this document for the source of some of the video: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dfnq2hd6_26cs5w6j If there was an "imaginary," "exemplary," or "quintessential" Web 2.0
student, an Everystudent of the future, what race/gender/sexual orientation would he/she be? I'd be surprised if no one out there has researched what online discussants tend to assume about their invisible interlocutors' real-life demographic characteristics.
Precisely. Screen names obscure some identity characeristics. Profile pictures offer a little more information. But my guess would be similar to yours, that there is an latent segregation occurring and a tendency to imagine the community to be either similar to yourself or similar to the cultural majority. We may well
imagine that most of the newsgroups/forums/comment areas we frequent look a lot like Wesch's classroom, at least ethnically speaking. In that scenario, inconvenient disparities in privilege and opportunity could be assumed away to ease the pursuit of less dissonant discussion topics.
And possibly sometimes that leads to people networking and communicating in ways (and with others) that they wouldn't in person. But judging from your comments below, you are also suggesting that that omission may be to the detriment of the community itself as de/illusion of homogeneity leads to unwelcoming comments. I too would be interested in relevant research in this area. As a member
of a racial minority myself, I feel that some new media outlets make me less likely to speak my mind online by bracketing ethnicity and disinhibiting conversation. The instances of casual racism I've encountered in several open forums I have observed closely but informally (e.g . political blog comments, newspaper comments, Youtube) effectively foreclose any substantive contribution I may have been interested in making. Not to jump too far off the deep end of casual social theorizing here, but perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of our society's failure to provide sufficient offline avenues for honest dialogue on race/SES/sexual orientation.
I would love to see some more writing about these issues, even ethnographic or first-person accounts of the ways these communities put up their cultural gates, if you will. It might help online communities start to think about ways to open themselves up. I think there is also an aspect of intimidation involved and that technological knowledge is one of the tools (though not in the case you relate about yourself). Getting back to the original
question, in examining whatever social benefits new media are supposed to provide, we should always slow down to ask ourselves: who's speaking and who's lurking? Whose views are represented and whose aren't? What can we do to make representation more equitable, more inviting, and more tolerant?
Absolutely, as we should with any discussion, academic or otherwise. I wonder if some technologies make this a bit more apparent. Have you seen the recent readers pictures on some blogs? Under the category: Look who else is reading this blog? But of course, when we such such information, instead of trying to network with our fellow blog-readers (adding them to our Facebook pages), we might ask who's not represented. Thank you, Deen, Mark