inequality, violence and #

Chapters from How the world changed social media focus on gender relations, inequality, and politics respectively. For each part, authors define or frames the subject to a certain extent, from the culturally constructed gender to the ambiguous meanings of inequality, and politics in terms of instinct feeling and national scale. Chapters, on the one hand, articulate the similarities across various field sites on each topic, for the gender part, social media, especially those are more public, strengthen the existing gender relations when such media platforms are integrated into building relations that extend from offline society; for inequality, the social media does bring equality to disadvantaged communities, although demanding prerequisites; for the politics, the politics does remain a low-key affair in social media in different sites because of its unique nature and power relation it embedded. Differences or discontinuities do exist, on the other hand, because of the visceral world that frame the online or virtual world. The differences in the offline world between field sites deeply impact how people uses social media as well as how we evaluate social media. For the gender part, platforms like Google+ and Facebook can be both conservative and liberating based on the certain context they are used. For the inequality part, the evaluation of social media varies per different meanings of inequality in the different context, whether inequality is about monetary, cultural or something else, or inequality itself constitutes a hierarchical order when comparing inequality in different states.

The # article that conducts the internet (related) ethnography focuses on two cases that under the Black Lives Matter #, showing the complexity when choosing # as a research field, which is deeply influenced by different context and different users. The # “culture” relates to the inequality discussion in the previous chapter, denoting the multiple meaning and level of inequality. Social media, in this sense, contributes to bringing equality, when enabled by the spread of technologies like networks and smartphones. Contrary to the argument in the book about the absence of politics in social media, we find the increasing appearance of politics in social media, at least in the US, especially since the absurd presidential campaign, when politicians massively used social media.

Another question is about the solution to #, in terms of the use of violence in both social media and the real world. Does social media helps to construct a better world by displaying uncomfortable violence (from Michael Brown to David Dao), or it encourages violence both in the internet and the offline world.