A Personal Digital Divide
(Note: Sorry about the blog constipation lately! ROFLCon + Finals + Recovering from finals + Packing != productive writing time. I’m working on a ROFLCon postmortem which will be finished someday…until then, I’ve been posting lots of short, unpolished thoughts and links to cool stuff on my Tumblr.)
I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to smooth out my thoughts about “the gentrification of the web.” A short and simplified summary is: web 1.0 was jankity and was somewhat ruled by jankity people; web 2.0 is smooth and polished, and people using it don’t have to know about the jankitiness underneath. Expect something more detailed…sometime this summer.
I found something that, in my opinion, really resonates with this today. I’ve been trying to use Twitter in the last 24 hours, and as part of my habituation process I’ve been using the “Find & Follow” thing on various email accounts.
* When I did it on my “college” email address, the one that I use to contact everyone I’ve met since coming to Harvard: 62 people used Twitter.
* When I did it on my high school social address, the one I’ve had since I was 13 with all the contact info of my high school friends and my internet friends: 0 people. Zip. Nada. Not a one.
So even though I’ve been active in internet communities since I was like 13, it’s clear that the communities I’ve been in have shifted. The weird thing is, all those people on my old email account? They’re still active online, probably more so than my college friends. In fact, they’re active in the places where a lot of internet culture gets produced. But they’re not on Twitter. And the people who are on Twitter are mostly unaware of their existence.
Weird, huh?
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Tags: digital divide, gentrification, twitter
4 Responses to “A Personal Digital Divide”
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You’re very, very right about this, Christina. We’ve talked about our opposite trajectories, and my experience with Twitter definitely confirms this: my high school “internet friends” were ALREADY all on Twitter when I finally joined up. I am dying to read a post by you about the obvious-but-ignored links between IRC and Twitter. People talk about Twitter like it’s new, when really it’s just a slick tool with a stringent ruleset. The ruleset is what makes it fun (140 characters, etc.), but as soon as people try to expand it, it becomes immediately clear that it’s mostly just a subpar IRC tool that has its origins in a gentrified internet landscape, and so has different tetherings than IRC does. I guess Twitter’s different in some ways, but come on. The “@” convention is so not new, and most people (including me, until a few weeks ago) don’t realize that it’s straight out of IRC. Internet culture is not new! Things really do look like the xkcd map of the internet: a lot of how a tool is used depends not on the tool, but on what part of the internet it comes out of. People like Twitter for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that it conforms to their expectations for a gentrified web. Anyway. So yes. I’d love to hear what you have to say on this topic!
LET ME LOVE YOU.
It is certainly true that Web 2.0 and everything that falls under, for the most part, serves a tiny group of people and that you now run in that circle. Only a small percentage of people who use the net know what RSS is or have ever used it. I’d say that’s a bare minimum to even understand why you might to use a large portion of Web Twenny.
Gentrification is about the nicing up — and pricing out — of run-down and poor areas and upper-middle class and about poor people being forced out by those with more money and status.
That doesn’t seem to be happening with the web. The web is expanding radically and is growing fastest amongst its poorer users. Of course, the nature of the net is changing and the leading edge stuff — the Twitters — only interest a small portion of Internet users. But that small portion, in absolute terms, is often very large compared to total absolute terms for any website in the Web 1.0 era.
So Web 2.0 is elitist in that it only seems to be serving certain groups of people but that’s also the nature of any new technology and the role that lead users play. One might call it techno-elitism, social myopia, and even irrelevant but I’m not convinced that gentrified is the word that you are looking for.
Hey what is a cool thing to examine - the comparison of different aspects of your social connections in different tech.
On the gentrification issue - I think I read you saying the smooth-surface web as possibly negative, in a similar way to how gentrification is negative. I agree with Mako that I’m not sure the term is right cuz the problem isn’t exclusivity and property rights/values.. But there are problems, and the one here might be the lack of transparency and lack of choice.
However, that smoothness (lack of transparency) is at least as liberating as it is constricting, because the majority of users do not have the skills or knowledge to engage with the jankity-ness. They don’t have the time, the inclination, or sometimes the knowledge to get involved at that level. There are interesting social/political possibilies that can only come from people getting online who have not historically had access to tools of mass communication & distribution (about which see #1 below).
But if the internet is to be truly mass accessible, it has to be comprehensible and usable. I don’t think you can use technology to force people to become more skilled. If they don’t get it they will not use it. To the extent that interfaces allow more people to be online I think it has some good possibilities.
What would be realy bad, would be two things
1. Allowing the MOST mass-friendly venues to be completely under corporate control and/or controlled by private property rights (so that the privatization of public space in the real world and online would end up denying us rights of free expression, free association, criticism, frivolity and political protest).
2. Preventing (by law, for example) people’s right to get under that smooth hood and tinker.