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Originally I thought about this module as a time and space to think about our on-line lives, a particular part of our lives that tends to be highly racially segregated. Because this is a geography class, that requires us to think about how the internet is a space or a place (or a bunch of places). So think about that for class tomorrow. And then think about how your internet is or is not segregated and why.
Example: When I mentioned to one of my colleagues that I was going to teach a module on desegregating your internet, he said “I am so grateful for [former student X]” and I knew what he meant. She fills my Facebook feed with Black girl media too. She is my singular window into the experience of single twenty-something Black professional women. In general, my Facebook feed is pretty white, but not all white. I went to high school in New Mexico so I am Facebook friends with many Latinos and Latinas (some of whom I actually remember). I recently became Facebook friends with the only Black guy who went to my high school, but I haven’t yet Facebook told him that I tell stories about him being the only Black guy in our school. Ask me and I’ll tell you my favorite story about him and my best friend, Niki. I have a few Facebook friends who are old friends from college or graduate school who are not white. But my whole family is white (my daughter once asked me why that was. What a great question) and most of my former students are white and the way that Facebook works is that my Facebook reflects that.
I only recently got a Twitter account and that part of my internet is less white. Maybe Twitter (at least for this middle aged lady) is more political and less baby-picture-centric than Facebook. Certainly, you can “follow” people without “friending” them, which seems less intimate. Maybe it is because I got on Twitter for a digital pedagogy conference and the first people I followed were academics and I “know” more non-white academics. Definitely, I found more strangers to follow who study or engage in political action around things that interest me: prison and policing, race and media, etc. Plus I had heard about “Black Twitter” and could look for it. “Black Facebook” doesn’t often invite me in. So my Twitter “neighborhood” is less segregated than my Facebook “neighborhood” online. This is as much a function of the medium as it is a function of how I use it.
One way of writing a paper for this module is to look at your internet and figure out how to desegregate it. What parts of your internet are most segregated? How do different parts of the internet encourage segregation? Do you notice the segregation produced by the internet? Is it more or less noticeable than segregation in your neighborhoods, schools, or IRL social networks?
But recently I have thought of some other media that you could think about desegregating. When we went to see Moonlight we got there early and had a drink in the almost empty Richmond movie theater lobby. My (white) honey wondered how it was that some workplaces (like the movie theater) became places where just Black kids work. The next month we went to see La La Land and the movie theater lobby was packed and racially mixed (which is not often the case in public spaces in Richmond) and then we walked into La La Land and our theater was all white. Moonlight is an amazing movie, with an all Black cast, that I think is a universal coming of age story. Why is Moonlight not seen as a contemporary Catcher in the Rye? So another way of engaging with this module is to desegregate your media. What if you watched movies or bands or TV shows that were less racially homogenous than your usual fare? What does that teach you, how does that make you feel? (Really I want an excuse to get a babysitter to go see “Get Out” — can we make that homework?) Immerse your White self in Lemonade; immerse your Black self in The National or the Hold Steady or REM (three bands I love) or Celine Dion or some other super white band. Go watch Get Out! with a racially mixed group and then talk about it until everyone is either hugging or super uncomfortable and then read some of the great articles and interviews about the director and write about it. In other words, think about your media consumption and where it is racially homogenous and then go try something else.
Finally, you could also approach the issue of desegregating your media/internet in a more systematic and less personal way. Compare Brietbart and The Root for three weeks. How do they construct different understandings of race in America? Is there any common ground? What is one thing that you wish each would learn from each other.
I want the people who are signed up for the panel to do different kinds of assignments, so talk early and make sure you have some diversity on the panel.
After reading this blog post and the article I never realized how I too have the one friend on Facebook that fills my feed with Black girl media too. I am from Charlottesville, Virginia. Not the most diverse place, but I have never analyzed my website choices and what that says about me. My mostly viewed websites are nonracial, and I find other interesting articles and websites by links that are associated with the current website I’m browsing. This closes me into nonracial websites. I think that this topic is very interesting because I believe that I most commonly use nonracial websites, but how do you specifically identify between the two? I am having a hard time being able to draw the line between the two.
I agree with a lot of what Dr. Patterson has written above. I believe my internet is segregated, but not entirely so. Racially, my facebook is mostly white. I have black friends (that just sounds like the famous I’m not racist argument, but I swear I am not using it in that way) and friends of other races on my facebook. I also am facebook friends with people of color that went t my high school, but the majority I would say are white. I think it is interesting that you mentioned twitter because I would say that my twitter is also more racially diverse. My twitter is filled with politics and culture that I would not categorize as white. I think it is interesting that we see that trend. One quick note is that I purposefully keep my social media politically diverse. I heard that most people unfollow others with differing viewpoints and only receive views that reflect their own. To avoid this I have stopped myself from unfollowing or defriending certain individuals who make my blood boil in order to see what the other side sees.
I believe that the internet is segregated and I am not immune to this trend. The article we read stated that most cites are white oriented and one has to specifically search for racially motivated websites. I think that I, being white, have the luxury of not thinking about race. I mean by this, is that I am part of the majority online and therefore can just regularly search and sites are tailored to my needs. This is sort of similar to the real world. I don’t necessarily have to think about race because of my inherent privilege of being white. I do think about race and politics pertaining to it because that is important to me, but it is not necessary like it is for people of color.
After reading the above blog post and the article I am going to start attempting to immerse myself in other parts of the internet that I usually naturally don’t go to. I think it is important to experience different cultures on the internet in today’s world like it is to experience different cultures in the real world. The internet is a huge part of today’s world and I think desegregating it or just an individual’s choice to look into different culture’s media would do a lot of good
I’m a frequent user of Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and over this past year alone my social and racial awareness of my feeds have drastically changed. My Facebook was pretty homogenous, with only a couple non-white participants occupying my feed. I have since started Facebook friending members of the rugby team, which I recently joined. This team is more racially mixed than any other group I have participated in since I came to college. I also have become close friends and Facebook friends with people whose backgrounds are international and who post more racially centric media on their feeds. I have also muted a good number of relatives I do not have the heart to hear the opinions of, so most of my feed ends up being updates on old friends or videos/articles shared by college students. No racial group seems to have any discrepancy in sharing cute videos of dogs.
My Twitter account is much more racially diverse than any of my other media accounts. It seems to be a safer and more distant space for people of color to speak their minds – or I found a good collection of people to follow. Maybe a mixture of both. I pay close attention to the webcomic and indie comic scenes, specifically in terms of queer and minority publications. As a result, I follow a lot of comic artists and publishers who come from varying backgrounds, hailing from Chicago to Toronto to Santiago. This was where I realized how white and US-centric online media is. When I saw their opinions and sparse complaints regarding the lack of representation online, I started looking for it in the rest of the Internet. Then I started seeing how white everything was. Then I started paying more attention to what these specific people had to say and who they recommended I follow.
Tumblr (in my experience) is a shamelessly white space with a light, powdered-sugar coating of unintentional racism. Certain discussions, phrases, or even genuine beliefs can be off-putting, and the site has a history of chasing off people who have opinions that differ from the general consensus of the group. I have managed to break through this odd barrier of aesthetic, pastel posts featuring stick-thin white girls by way of following blogs dedicated to non-white actors like Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal. These blogs aren’t official, but they share media regarding these actors as well as many other actors of color. I see a much wider variety of people in a non-creepy way now, which is a relief because Tumblr can be a lot to handle sometimes.
I plan on further breaking down the white-centric film that covers my social media by delving deeper into where these accounts pull their content from. One source leads to many, and it’s a great start to a wonderfully diverse online space.
I find that most of the social media websites that I use are greatly self segregated, especially the public ones like twitter. For example, like you said there is a “black twitter”, there are actually multiple pages in reference to only black twitter that may exclude white people and their opinions. While on the other hand you have sites like Facebook and instagram that give you the option to control your feed completely. I’ve noticed that my feed NOW, is more diverse than when I was in high school. About 2 years ago the accounts that I did have were full of Black and Spanish followers, very little of my own Middle Eastern followers, and only spam accounts with White fake happy profile pictures. Contrary to my idea that Twitter is easily segregating itself, I find that my Twitter feed gets more and more diverse while my Facebook and instagram page continue to receive follower requests from mainly non-whites. Now my follower rates haven’t increased with white people on twitter but they have on Snapchat, which I find to be a lot more personal than twitter. This is probably because I didn’t know as many white people then that I know now that I’m at a school with higher exposure to white people.
After reflecting upon my use of the internet, I found that I segregate not by race but by political opinion. I had a fairly diverse group of friends growing up because of the activities that I was involved in and those individuals are still people I follow on Facebook. However, the high school that I went to and the area that I am from is primarily Republican, and that tends to show on my Facebook page. I was tired of seeing Republican news articles, opinions, and political rants, so I went through all of my friends and un-followed individuals who constantly posted, so now the articles that pop-up on my feed are more moderate and Democratic than highly conservative. My Instagram shows about the same level of diversity as my Facebook and I hide less people on it, so it is more diverse in every aspect. I don’t really use any other form of social media, and the only news source that I pay attention to is NPR, which you could argue is geared toward white listeners and readers.
I was just thinking about “black twitter” when you mentioned it. This will be a difficult unit. For one, with the exception of sources like Brietbart and The Root, the internet is not explicitly racialized, and for most that’s enough to prevent this conversation. It is also harder to compile demographic data for websites–there isn’t usually a check box everywhere you go. And like all other aspects of privilege, it will be hard to expose my own blindness to the situation and analyze my possible role in the process of online segregation.
Most of my media would include watching Netflix and scrolling on Twitter. On Twitter I honestly feel that I see a combination of two things. One being how White policemen are brutally racist against young Black men and also a plethora of jokes about how White people do weird things. Depending on the current news twitter tends to take a more comedic side on the situation. If race is involved in the current news twitter typically makes the situation about the supremacy that Whites hold over other races. When the movie “Get Out” came into theatres I saw a vast amount of jokes about white supremacy. In the media that is perceived over Netflix I feel that it is fairly diverse. The only show I really watch is one called “Black Mirror”. This is essentially a modern day twilight zone. The British TV series equally presents Black and White characters as main roles. However there is not a large percentage of any other race on the series. Other sitcom shows I watch tend to have an all-white cast with only one Black character that is usually noted for being Black. This can be seen in “The Office” as the main character, Michael, attempts to make cultural jokes with Stanley because of his skin color. TV series typically always have at least one Black character in order to show that they are diverse when in reality it is not. This can be seen also with how Mary Washington presents itself. On the homepage there will always be a picture of someone of color, when really the campus is majority white.
I believe the internet is a strange dimension in which there can be completely racially segregated places ( black singles meet.com, brietbart) and can also be completely integrated ( YouTube, Facebook) it depends upon the single person. I went to a fairly diverse highschool so my Facebook itself is made up of a lot of different races. I frequently look at mitu, a media platform that focuses on the Latino audience, and see a lot of posts from my former classmates. However, for me the segregation comes from personal taste in activities. I like history and I like 80s pop, so that narrows what I see on my feed a lot. When it comes to media itself I feel I have a slightly more diverse feed than others. This is in part thanks to my boyfriend who has had a strange obsession with RnB since he was 12. He has definitely opened me up to more of Black media and a wide range of it as well from Menace to Society, to Mississippi Damned to Think Like A Man. I don’t mean to psychoanalyze these films at the moment. However, there is a huge gap in the media portrayal of Black and Latino people in comparison to Whites who have more diversity in their characters and roles given.
I never really considered the internet to be a segregated channel, but what I found most interesting about the blog and this topic is that we are doing this to ourselves. That saying “birds of a feather flock together” comes to mind when I consider my internet presence. I don’t think that my time on the internet is geared specifically towards a white, feminist, liberal perspective but through the algorithms that Facebook and google utilize I think that’s what surfaces most when I scroll through my feed. I don’t have an overwhelming Black presence on my accounts, but I do get an occasional different perspective from the posts of my peers of color. I agree with Kai, I think that this will be a tough unit, but I think that it will be a very eye-opening unit in trying to branch our perspectives and break from the set flock that we are so used to surrounding ourselves with.
Overall, I think segregation on the internet can be more extreme than segregation in the real world. Since the internet gives us the idea to choose, I believe people are more likely to choose familiarity. This may include family, friends, and coworkers. Whether these subgroups include a group of racially mixed people is based where you grew up, where you live, and/or personal views about race.
After reading this post, I began to examine the way race determines how different races use the internet. Twitter being the form of social that I use the most often, there is a section of Twitter which labels themselves “Black Twitter” which tweet hashtags, TV shows, and about narratives of Black people. This is the most obvious form segregation on the internet that I have seen. Although, I don’t think that segregation on the internet is “negative” For many, the internet is a “safe space” where social media has allowed us to choose who we connect and share our lives with. It is counter-productive to not acknowledge that there are a collection of common interests and issues which relate to a certain race. Therefore naturally, people want to connect with those who may think, look, and act similar to them.
Segregation takes a more raw form on the Internet than I think it does in other real world situations. Like others have said, you have a blank canvas to build around your opinions, surround yourself with similar opinions, and immerse yourself in a “bubble” version reflecting your ideal thoughts and beliefs. Although it’s been praised as a device to connect and link people from all over the world and share information, it’s still at the control of some form of human manipulation. This, in turn, provides some form of a bias that Internet users are free to navigate.
It was interesting seeing the comparison of walking through a neighborhood and navigating the Internet as similar situations. It’s a subtle choice by the Internet user but one that ultimately leads to the growth of possible racist opinions. Conflict is inevitable (i.e. facebook comments, twitter threads, etc.) when opinions collide. Geographically speaking, the Internet is designed to be one big neighborhood but with a feeling of unlimited control. It’s almost molded itself into a segregated space
I recently learned of “Black twitter” from a friend of mine back home. It has existed ever since before 2015 (wikipedia) and its pretty interesting how some of us are just now hearing of it. It just shows how in some places on the internet (es: social media such as Black twitter/Black Facebook, dating sites such as Asian people meet or Black People meet) it is more of a sacred space than other places on the internet (gaming, music, news sites).
It made me laugh when you mentioned how facebook is “baby picture-centric” because you couldn’t be more right..but recently it has become (at least on my Facebook) increasingly politically centric. It seems to me that people may just follow what they are interested in. We fear what we don’t know or understand.. so I don’t participate in the political part of Facebook feed, and I prefer to see my coworkers wedding pictures. Its just what I prefer to follow. Maybe this could contribute to a radicalized internet as well (an internet feed based off interests).
I follow several different news sites and youtube channels as well. I feel that these kinds of spaces on the internet attract people based off their thoughts and beliefs rather than race.. but I could very well be wrong. As far as the internet being more radicalized than real life, I feel that the internet is so massive and vast that it could easily be more radicalized than other parts of real life.
As for the media I consume ( music, film, tv)it is pretty desegregated. I listen to all types of music and watch all types of film and tv. I love ‘Game of Thrones’ just as much as I like ‘ Black-ish’. I’m 41 so my teenage years were the 90s and I remember being a huge Nirvana, Hole, Pearl Jam fan but constantly being asked ” why did I listen to that white music?” But I was also a huge Aaliyah, TLC, En Vogue fan. Even know, I love Beyoncé ( love might not be a strong enough word. Lemonade is a work of art and she is an amazing performer ) but I also have Taylor Swift on my iPhone.
As for my social media prescence, my Facebook is primarily my friends and close family. I follow a couple of SJW who post and blog about race issues. And I belong to a WOC group where we talk about issues that effect us. That group is secret ( it doesn’t show on my timeline), because there are some things I talk about there that I wouldn’t necessarily want on my timeline for anyone to read.
It’s always funny touring to explain Black Twitter to someone. But it’s hilarious how it can take something awful ( like Rachel Dozel or Yahoo Finance’s mis tweet) and turn it into something funny
I notice the segregation on not only my personal social network accounts but on the internet in general. Although I think my preferences in media crosses the “color line” because I like a variety of things. I do not think everyone intentionally segregates themselves but it’s what we tend to gravitate to because maybe our backgrounds. I do think the internet is more segregated than in real life because people can hide behind a computer and express themselves more freely than they can in real life.
I’m not sure how segregated my internet is. I think that the people I know and the people I follow on social media shape my internet. I follow a good amount of people at UMW on twitter and think that my twitter is the least segregated since I follow a variety of different people with many different views. I think my snapchat is the most segregated since I get to pick exactly who I follow and who can follow me. I think my internet is personalized with some segregation based off things i look for on the internet. I’ve googled birkenstocks for example, and then the next day log on to my amazon account and a million pictures of birkenstocks pop up as if the internet read my mind. I think that this shows that the internet creates segregation based off of everyones individualized searches or from the people that they know and follow.
I do think that we create our own racially segregated spaces. Especially on social media, mainly with websites like Facebook and MySpace. People tend to add who they know because those sites are regarded as a private and more personal life. Therefore, you only add friends you have encountered and vice versa, causing intentional segregation. I do think that my personal social media sites are fairly homogenized, but tend to lead more towards people of color, and specifically, women of color. Just like it was mentioned above that a black friend was a window into the world your colleague knew nothing about, the same goes for me in regards to Asian/South Asians and black people. I get to learn about how they feel about political movements, such as the Muslim Ban and the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter. I do think that I purposely segregate that social media aspect, whether conciously or not, but it’s mainly because those are who my friends are.