Reading reflections, Apr. 20th

Both of this week’s readings are relevant to the discussion of the relationship between social media and social inequality. In #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography and the racial politics of social media in the United States, the authors wrote about the “hashtag activism” on twitter regarding the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. They analyzed how and why social media as exemplified by twitter became a novel force in social activism. Firstly, smartphones together with social media have created a form of “informal journalism,” as they enabled people including the marginalized and racialized populations to document the incidents independently of the media outlets. Secondly, in the particular case of twitter, the hashtag has functions similar to the library call numbers in the sense that they both serve as a quick retrieval system and summarize the topic or intention of the tweets. An extra piece of evidence I have for the latter function of the hashtag is that, some people even use hashtags in similar ways when they post on social media that don’t support the hashtag retrieval function, and hence the only reason they use hashtag is to “performatively frame what these comments are ‘really about,’” as phrased by the authors. Thirdly, Twitter in particular enables users around the world to feel united, or at least related, across space at a given time and feel like participating in the event in real time. But as the authors noted, it is a question how much this helps besides providing the users with excitement and feelings of “eventfulness”.

Chapter 9 of How the World Changed Social Media discusses the relationship between inequality and social media. The author introduced two opposite views on how social media shapes inequality: the first view is that the privileged people have more resources even online thanks to education and networking, and the second view is that social media enables less privileged people to have access to resources. Personally I do think that less privileged people are able to gain considerable resources from social media in the form of information. But it is also important to notice that the social networks online can be as exclusive as offline, thereby limiting social mobility and the equality of resources obtained by different classes of people.