Re: [Air-l] viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
Maybe this has already been said, but I find the framing by class problematic on a basic level--we are already focusing only on a certain "level" of class we we look at Facebook and MySpace users. On 6/29/07, Lois Ann Scheidt <lscheidt@indiana.edu> wrote: "Will the divide hold true now that Facebook allows access to anyone with an email address?" Yes, anyone with an e-mail can have access, but remember that only a certain "level" of class has an e-mail, and has/feels the desire to devote time to play via Facebook and MySpace. (Lois, pardon my lifting of your quote. I know that it was not pertinent for your discussion. It seemed like a good jumping off point for my thoughts.) I'm not statistically sure of this, but I would imagine that there are class distinctions (more inclusive, maybe) between cell phone users (more lower socio-economic groups included) and webpage users. This may seem like a trite over already explored discussion of class and the internet, but I think it still needs to frame the overall discussion of class. That's why Bourdieu's discussion of class and distinction might bear some fruit. Facebook and MySpace class differences are more like differences within a class grouping that already exist "above" other socio-economic distinctions. Again, maybe this is plain to see, but it is worhy of acknowledging if we want to untangle class on the internet. -robert
Robert, I have no doubt that there are class distinctions between teens with and without email addresses. However, I can tell you for personal experience that the number of teens without email addresses is closing quickly, specifically in English speaking countries. When I began "studying" teens online in the late 1990's, I would tell anyone who asked me questions about my work, that I did not study average teens. I was, then, studying upper middle and upper class teens whose families had the resources for home computers and broadband or at least a dedicated phone line to support the computer. While this class distinction didn't hold true in all individual cases it was it was true often enough. Now I would have to say I study "average teens" in that most teens, in developed countries, have at least some access to the internet on a weekly basis (see PEW studies for U.S. stats and Sonia Livingstone - and colleagues - work for U.K. stats). With the move from public synchronous environments (chatrooms) to public asynchronous ones (blogs, and SNS - Web 2.0) many more teens have enough access to update their sites regularly, if not daily. As for untangling class on the internet, I think in looking at distinctions between MySpace and Facebook one must filter the class issues eyond who has access to the internet. If access to Facebook were still limited to college/university email address holders then the question of class and ethnic distinctions between the sites would be rhetorical at best. The real issue is access to higher education...Facebook would then, and possibly still is, only be reflective of a larger societal issue. Would it be useful, overall, to compare membership of say a major U.S. university fraternity and the Moose or Elks Clubs in the U.S.? Possibly but the larger question would be, what does the distinction tell us...is access to the organizations limited by design (as Facebook was for several years) or are other factors limiting access? I don't have a problem with the line of thought or of the questions I see being used in this thread. My concern is again that we don't draw "net" distinctions as though they are independent of terrestrial world variables. Utopians and dystopians can be fun...but only for a little while. As a side note, I recently finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." In it Gladwell gives an interesting and relevant example of the unseen limitations that kept women out of, or kept the numbers of women low in, major orchestras. The limitation was not the quality of women's musicianship, though some said that initially, nor was it a series of "women need not apply" rules, though those implications existed as well. Rather it was the existence of biases within the orchestra community that were put into play unconsciously when conductors saw a woman play, the visual of a woman playing her musical instrument drew out unconscious biases that then framed the review of the audition. When audition processes were changed and applicants played from behind an opaque screen, more women were hired and now gender breakdown is nearly 50/50. Lois Ann Scheidt Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington IN USA Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and IUPUC, Columbus IN USA Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com Quoting nativebuddha <nativebuddha@gmail.com>:
Maybe this has already been said, but I find the framing by class problematic on a basic level--we are already focusing only on a certain "level" of class we we look at Facebook and MySpace users.
On 6/29/07, Lois Ann Scheidt <lscheidt@indiana.edu> wrote:
"Will the divide hold true now that Facebook allows access to anyone with an email address?"
Yes, anyone with an e-mail can have access, but remember that only a certain "level" of class has an e-mail, and has/feels the desire to devote time to play via Facebook and MySpace. (Lois, pardon my lifting of your quote. I know that it was not pertinent for your discussion. It seemed like a good jumping off point for my thoughts.)
I'm not statistically sure of this, but I would imagine that there are class distinctions (more inclusive, maybe) between cell phone users (more lower socio-economic groups included) and webpage users.
This may seem like a trite over already explored discussion of class and the internet, but I think it still needs to frame the overall discussion of class. That's why Bourdieu's discussion of class and distinction might bear some fruit. Facebook and MySpace class differences are more like differences within a class grouping that already exist "above" other socio-economic distinctions. Again, maybe this is plain to see, but it is worhy of acknowledging if we want to untangle class on the internet.
-robert _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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This is a really interesting topic and discussion, and I hate to put my $0.02 because I' I really see two distinct threads. 1.) Class/race divisions are (somewhat/arguably/qualifiiably) replicated in the MySpace/Facebook divide. 2.) The politics of aesthetics between MySpace and Facebook. I think the combination of the two has complicated the situation and made it harder to pull apart. Of course the two discussions are eventually linked, but argued and approached much differently. Now I'm going to qualify my statements (and admit that my "middle class" "suburban" aesthetics are also leading me to want this discussion cleaner, despite growing up working class suburban, turned academic, which is obviously not "working" class any more) and say that I absolutely abhor MySpace. I quite like Facebook and enjoy playing with it when I ought to be writing my dissertation. This has had more to do with MySpace's CPU usage than anything else, though aesthetics do enter into it. But, I think the original article was focused more on how class has been reified (and perhaps also complicated) in the MySpace/Facebook demographic split. This is very interesting, and I don't doubt it. I'm also keenly interested in how the military has chosen to block one and not the other. There are many interesting pieces of that. I see the politics of aesthetics as connected, but not at the core of the argument of the original article/essay. Simultaneously I'd be careful about the aesthetic argument, because it can quickly get you into trouble, "This group of people tends to be/like..." Then there are other technological issues or political economic. I have yet to receive a Facebook "friend" request from someone posing as a front for porn sites, yet my MySpace account gets nearly 20 a week. Interesting stuff. Cheers. Casey
Anyone who is fluent in German - and English, since I'm unilingual - and has some knowledge of the German language in the late 1800's, please contact me off-list. I have a couple of questions to ask...totally non-internet of course. Thanks Lois Ann Scheidt Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington IN USA Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and IUPUC, Columbus IN USA Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com
I just saw this post on ValleyWag, though I'd toss it in for discussion. If we're discussing social networks revealing class divisions, we're rather limiting the discussion by only addressing MySpace and Facebook, aren't we? http://valleywag.com/tech/data-junkie/the-world-map-of-social-networks-27320... Casey O'Donnell wrote:
This is a really interesting topic and discussion, and I hate to put my $0.02 because I'
I really see two distinct threads.
1.) Class/race divisions are (somewhat/arguably/qualifiiably) replicated in the MySpace/Facebook divide.
2.) The politics of aesthetics between MySpace and Facebook.
I think the combination of the two has complicated the situation and made it harder to pull apart. Of course the two discussions are eventually linked, but argued and approached much differently. Now I'm going to qualify my statements (and admit that my "middle class" "suburban" aesthetics are also leading me to want this discussion cleaner, despite growing up working class suburban, turned academic, which is obviously not "working" class any more) and say that I absolutely abhor MySpace. I quite like Facebook and enjoy playing with it when I ought to be writing my dissertation. This has had more to do with MySpace's CPU usage than anything else, though aesthetics do enter into it.
But, I think the original article was focused more on how class has been reified (and perhaps also complicated) in the MySpace/Facebook demographic split. This is very interesting, and I don't doubt it. I'm also keenly interested in how the military has chosen to block one and not the other. There are many interesting pieces of that.
I see the politics of aesthetics as connected, but not at the core of the argument of the original article/essay. Simultaneously I'd be careful about the aesthetic argument, because it can quickly get you into trouble, "This group of people tends to be/like..."
Then there are other technological issues or political economic. I have yet to receive a Facebook "friend" request from someone posing as a front for porn sites, yet my MySpace account gets nearly 20 a week.
Interesting stuff.
Cheers. Casey _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Thanks to all who volunteered, I have found someone to help. Lois Ann Scheidt Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington IN USA Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and IUPUC, Columbus IN USA Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com
i have read danah's article, found it interesting and like the conclusion that "myspace and facebook are new representations of the class divide in american youth". my comment goes into another direction than the discussion thus far. for me the important aspect of the paper is that class still counts. we should try to find ways of arguing which classes we find in contemporary informational capitalism and how class stratification has been changing in the age of the internet. as i am mainly interested in and am dealing with theoretical aspects, i have tried to tackle the issue of class in informational capitalism some months ago. i think if we speak about class, we need a clear definition of it that is theoreticall grounded. basically there are two possibilities: a marxist notion of class connects the concept to exploitation, a weberian notion to life-situation, life-style, etc. i find concepts of the first sort critical, of the second type affirmative and unsuitable (e.g. the class concepts of giddens, goldthorpe, etc). marx applied the class concept to the social relation constituting surplus value production, erik olin wright added the ideas of skills exploitation (cultural) and organizational exploitation (political), both within strictly economic relations; bourdieu has a more general class concept based on the idea of the asymmetric accumulation of economic, political, cultural, and symbolic capital. hardt and negri recently developed a nice idea of class relations constituted by exploitation of the production of the commons. if one can define reputation formation at the expense of others ("i am smart cause i am on facebook, you are dumb because you are on myspace", etc) as symbolic exploitation that reflects underlying forms of economic oppressions then i am in favour of speaking of cultural exploitation and class formation in the case that danah has been describing, if one can't define what the exploited surplus that is produced by the subaltern groups and transfered towards the hegemonic groups in such cases of non-economic exploitation, then i am in favour of speaking of political/organizational and cultural forms of oppression, but not of exploitation and class-formation in danah's example. i am actually arguing for several things: * class should be connected to the idea of exploitation. * we need a theory of class in the information age * class counts * we need neo-marxist theories of informational capitalism in order to come to grips with the theoretical underpinnings and concrete-real phenomena of today the basic theoretical question about youth and class in myspace and facebook then is: do the facebook-upper class kids exploit the lower class myspace kids? in which ways? (if so, we more go into a bourdieuian or wrightian sense of exploitation and class formation) if not, then it is a form of oppression or the division simply reflects that the parents of the facebook kids more tend to be economic exploiters and the parents of myspace kids more tend to be economic exploitees (which constitutes a class concept that stays within the more traditional economic concept of class). christian -- -- _____________________________ Univ.Ass. Dr. Christian Fuchs Assistant Professor for Internet and Society ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at University of Salzburg Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18 5020 Salzburg Austria christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at Phone +43 662 8044 4823 Fax +43 662 6389 4800 Information-Society-Technology: http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at/fuchs/ Managing Editor of tripleC - peer reviewed open access online journal for the foundations of information science: http://triplec.uti.at Forthcoming BOOK: Fuchs, Christian (2008) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge.
Hi all, I don't know if the book has been translated in other languages like English or Spanish but 'Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme' from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello tries -- among other things -- to theorize the concept of 'exploitation' in a connected world. Best Wishes Éric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Éric GEORGE, Professor, École des médias, Faculté de communication, UQAM (Montreal, Qc, Canada) Co Chair, Interdisciplinary Research Group on Communication, Information and Society (GRICIS) http://www.uqam.ca/gricis
i have read danah's article, found it interesting and like the conclusion that "myspace and facebook are new representations of the class divide in american youth".
my comment goes into another direction than the discussion thus far.
for me the important aspect of the paper is that class still counts. we should try to find ways of arguing which classes we find in contemporary informational capitalism and how class stratification has been changing in the age of the internet.
as i am mainly interested in and am dealing with theoretical aspects, i have tried to tackle the issue of class in informational capitalism some months ago.
i think if we speak about class, we need a clear definition of it that is theoreticall grounded.
basically there are two possibilities: a marxist notion of class connects the concept to exploitation, a weberian notion to life-situation, life-style, etc.
i find concepts of the first sort critical, of the second type affirmative and unsuitable (e.g. the class concepts of giddens, goldthorpe, etc).
marx applied the class concept to the social relation constituting surplus value production, erik olin wright added the ideas of skills exploitation (cultural) and organizational exploitation (political), both within strictly economic relations; bourdieu has a more general class concept based on the idea of the asymmetric accumulation of economic, political, cultural, and symbolic capital. hardt and negri recently developed a nice idea of class relations constituted by exploitation of the production of the commons.
if one can define reputation formation at the expense of others ("i am smart cause i am on facebook, you are dumb because you are on myspace", etc) as symbolic exploitation that reflects underlying forms of economic oppressions then i am in favour of speaking of cultural exploitation and class formation in the case that danah has been describing, if one can't define what the exploited surplus that is produced by the subaltern groups and transfered towards the hegemonic groups in such cases of non-economic exploitation, then i am in favour of speaking of political/organizational and cultural forms of oppression, but not of exploitation and class-formation in danah's example.
i am actually arguing for several things: * class should be connected to the idea of exploitation. * we need a theory of class in the information age * class counts * we need neo-marxist theories of informational capitalism in order to come to grips with the theoretical underpinnings and concrete-real phenomena of today
the basic theoretical question about youth and class in myspace and facebook then is:
do the facebook-upper class kids exploit the lower class myspace kids? in which ways? (if so, we more go into a bourdieuian or wrightian sense of exploitation and class formation) if not, then it is a form of oppression or the division simply reflects that the parents of the facebook kids more tend to be economic exploiters and the parents of myspace kids more tend to be economic exploitees (which constitutes a class concept that stays within the more traditional economic concept of class).
christian
--
--
_____________________________
Univ.Ass. Dr. Christian Fuchs
Assistant Professor for Internet and Society
ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research
in Information and Communication Technologies & Society
http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at
University of Salzburg
Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18
5020 Salzburg
Austria
christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at
Phone +43 662 8044 4823
Fax +43 662 6389 4800
Information-Society-Technology:
http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at/fuchs/
Managing Editor of tripleC - peer reviewed open access
online journal for the foundations of information science:
Forthcoming BOOK:
Fuchs, Christian (2008) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge.
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Éric GEORGE Conference Co-Chair, CCA 2007 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Professeur, École des médias, Faculté de communication, UQAM Codirecteur, Groupe de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la communication, l'information et la société (GRICIS) / http://www.uqam.ca/gricis
FYI RE Éric GEORGE's post I am at a bilingual university and found the translation Author Boltanski, Luc. Title The new spirit of capitalism / Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello ; translated by Gregory Elliott. Publisher London ; New York : Verso, 2005. Location Call # Status MRT General HB 501 .B71313 2005 Description xlvii, 601 p. ; 25 cm. Note Traduction de: Nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Translated from the French. Subject Capitalism -- Social aspects. Additional Author Chiapello, Eve. ISBN 1859845541 (hardback : alk. paper) Peter Timusk, B.Math statistics (2002), B.A. legal studies (2006) Carleton University Systems Science Graduate student, University of Ottawa (2006-2007). just trying to stay linear. Read by hundreds of lurkers every week. On 2-Jul-07, at 3:33 AM, Éric GEORGE wrote:
Hi all,
I don't know if the book has been translated in other languages like English or Spanish but 'Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme' from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello tries -- among other things -- to theorize the concept of 'exploitation' in a connected world.
Best Wishes Éric
---------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------- Éric GEORGE, Professor, École des médias, Faculté de communication, UQAM (Montreal, Qc, Canada) Co Chair, Interdisciplinary Research Group on Communication, Information and Society (GRICIS) http://www.uqam.ca/gricis
i have read danah's article, found it interesting and like the conclusion that "myspace and facebook are new representations of the class divide in american youth".
my comment goes into another direction than the discussion thus far.
for me the important aspect of the paper is that class still counts. we should try to find ways of arguing which classes we find in contemporary informational capitalism and how class stratification has been changing in the age of the internet.
as i am mainly interested in and am dealing with theoretical aspects, i have tried to tackle the issue of class in informational capitalism some months ago.
i think if we speak about class, we need a clear definition of it that is theoreticall grounded.
basically there are two possibilities: a marxist notion of class connects the concept to exploitation, a weberian notion to life-situation, life-style, etc.
i find concepts of the first sort critical, of the second type affirmative and unsuitable (e.g. the class concepts of giddens, goldthorpe, etc).
marx applied the class concept to the social relation constituting surplus value production, erik olin wright added the ideas of skills exploitation (cultural) and organizational exploitation (political), both within strictly economic relations; bourdieu has a more general class concept based on the idea of the asymmetric accumulation of economic, political, cultural, and symbolic capital. hardt and negri recently developed a nice idea of class relations constituted by exploitation of the production of the commons.
if one can define reputation formation at the expense of others ("i am smart cause i am on facebook, you are dumb because you are on myspace", etc) as symbolic exploitation that reflects underlying forms of economic oppressions then i am in favour of speaking of cultural exploitation and class formation in the case that danah has been describing, if one can't define what the exploited surplus that is produced by the subaltern groups and transfered towards the hegemonic groups in such cases of non-economic exploitation, then i am in favour of speaking of political/organizational and cultural forms of oppression, but not of exploitation and class-formation in danah's example.
i am actually arguing for several things: * class should be connected to the idea of exploitation. * we need a theory of class in the information age * class counts * we need neo-marxist theories of informational capitalism in order to come to grips with the theoretical underpinnings and concrete-real phenomena of today
the basic theoretical question about youth and class in myspace and facebook then is:
do the facebook-upper class kids exploit the lower class myspace kids? in which ways? (if so, we more go into a bourdieuian or wrightian sense of exploitation and class formation) if not, then it is a form of oppression or the division simply reflects that the parents of the facebook kids more tend to be economic exploiters and the parents of myspace kids more tend to be economic exploitees (which constitutes a class concept that stays within the more traditional economic concept of class).
christian
--
--
_____________________________
Univ.Ass. Dr. Christian Fuchs
Assistant Professor for Internet and Society
ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research
in Information and Communication Technologies & Society
http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at
University of Salzburg
Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18
5020 Salzburg
Austria
christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at
Phone +43 662 8044 4823
Fax +43 662 6389 4800
Information-Society-Technology:
http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at/fuchs/
Managing Editor of tripleC - peer reviewed open access
online journal for the foundations of information science:
Forthcoming BOOK:
Fuchs, Christian (2008) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge.
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http:// aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------
Éric GEORGE Conference Co-Chair, CCA 2007 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------- Professeur, École des médias, Faculté de communication, UQAM Codirecteur, Groupe de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la communication, l'information et la société (GRICIS) / http://www.uqam.ca/gricis _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
Yes, maybe to some degree class differentials have lessened. However, if we look at just the PEW Parents & Teens 2004 survey, we find that, indeed, 87% (N=1,100) of teens sampled are online. 89% of those online use e-mail, and 84% use the web to look at movie, music, etc. type pop cult stuff. However, 63% are more likely to use a phone to communicate with their friends, 24% IM and 5% e-mail (That would mean 5% of the 87% who use e-mail). As for demographics--economics is not covered. PEW looks at sex, age, education, race, Hispanic origin, marital status, and geographic region (Northeast, Midwest, West and South). There's nothing in there to evenly remotely account for class divisions (not even salary of parents). So, while a lot of teens may have tried e-mail, we still have no clear picture of class. We need more data. My point is in the Facebook v. MySpace comparision, are we seeing an intra- or inter-class difference. -robert On 6/29/07, Lois Ann Scheidt <lscheidt@indiana.edu> wrote:
Robert, I have no doubt that there are class distinctions between teens with and without email addresses. However, I can tell you for personal experience that the number of teens without email addresses is closing quickly, specifically in English speaking countries.
When I began "studying" teens online in the late 1990's, I would tell anyone who asked me questions about my work, that I did not study average teens. I was, then, studying upper middle and upper class teens whose families had the resources for home computers and broadband or at least a dedicated phone line to support the computer. While this class distinction didn't hold true in all individual cases it was it was true often enough.
Now I would have to say I study "average teens" in that most teens, in developed countries, have at least some access to the internet on a weekly basis (see PEW studies for U.S. stats and Sonia Livingstone - and colleagues - work for U.K. stats). With the move from public synchronous environments (chatrooms) to public asynchronous ones (blogs, and SNS - Web 2.0) many more teens have enough access to update their sites regularly, if not daily.
As for untangling class on the internet, I think in looking at distinctions between MySpace and Facebook one must filter the class issues eyond who has access to the internet. If access to Facebook were still limited to college/university email address holders then the question of class and ethnic distinctions between the sites would be rhetorical at best. The real issue is access to higher education...Facebook would then, and possibly still is, only be reflective of a larger societal issue. Would it be useful, overall, to compare membership of say a major U.S. university fraternity and the Moose or Elks Clubs in the U.S.? Possibly but the larger question would be, what does the distinction tell us...is access to the organizations limited by design (as Facebook was for several years) or are other factors limiting access?
I don't have a problem with the line of thought or of the questions I see being used in this thread. My concern is again that we don't draw "net" distinctions as though they are independent of terrestrial world variables. Utopians and dystopians can be fun...but only for a little while.
As a side note, I recently finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's most recent book "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking." In it Gladwell gives an interesting and relevant example of the unseen limitations that kept women out of, or kept the numbers of women low in, major orchestras. The limitation was not the quality of women's musicianship, though some said that initially, nor was it a series of "women need not apply" rules, though those implications existed as well. Rather it was the existence of biases within the orchestra community that were put into play unconsciously when conductors saw a woman play, the visual of a woman playing her musical instrument drew out unconscious biases that then framed the review of the audition. When audition processes were changed and applicants played from behind an opaque screen, more women were hired and now gender breakdown is nearly 50/50.
Lois Ann Scheidt
Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington IN USA
Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and IUPUC, Columbus IN USA
Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com
Quoting nativebuddha <nativebuddha@gmail.com>:
Maybe this has already been said, but I find the framing by class problematic on a basic level--we are already focusing only on a certain "level" of class we we look at Facebook and MySpace users.
On 6/29/07, Lois Ann Scheidt <lscheidt@indiana.edu> wrote:
"Will the divide hold true now that Facebook allows access to anyone with an email address?"
Yes, anyone with an e-mail can have access, but remember that only a certain "level" of class has an e-mail, and has/feels the desire to devote time to play via Facebook and MySpace. (Lois, pardon my lifting of your quote. I know that it was not pertinent for your discussion. It seemed like a good jumping off point for my thoughts.)
I'm not statistically sure of this, but I would imagine that there are class distinctions (more inclusive, maybe) between cell phone users (more lower socio-economic groups included) and webpage users.
This may seem like a trite over already explored discussion of class and the internet, but I think it still needs to frame the overall discussion of class. That's why Bourdieu's discussion of class and distinction might bear some fruit. Facebook and MySpace class differences are more like differences within a class grouping that already exist "above" other socio-economic distinctions. Again, maybe this is plain to see, but it is worhy of acknowledging if we want to untangle class on the internet.
-robert _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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participants (7)
-
Casey O'Donnell -
Christian Fuchs -
Conor Schaefer -
Lois Ann Scheidt -
nativebuddha -
Peter Timusk -
Éric GEORGE