Weekly Post 7: boyd, Anderson, Sengupta
1) Like Alex, while I was reading the article about Myspace and Facebook I was wondering what a discussion around the international use of social networking sites might look like. For a while I was a part of many different social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook, Friendster? (don’t remember the name of it, but my friends in Mexico used it), and used both AOL and MSN in order to stay in touch with friends in the US, Mexico, the UK and Canada who all used different platforms to connect. Now I think everyone is on Facebook. I wonder too, as facebook has been opened to a wider demographic, how we can think about age in regards to online space. While boyd makes it clear the class and racial aspects of conversations around the move from myspace and facebook, and the elitism of facebooks beginnings, I wonder if the conversation around teenage use of facebook could be pushed further. I remember when it switched to allowing high-school and middle-school kids that conversations in my college centered around the age and immaturity of new users. Also, thinking about age, what does it mean to now exist in an age where your parents and grandparents are also on facebook? How does our sense of online spaces change as more and more of our friends/connections/acquaintances are on there, across age groups?
2) Anderson’s book helps us think about the role of print material, language, and changing world-views (in terms of religion and concepts of time) and their role in creating nationalisms, and continues conversations begun with the Sassen reading about global flows, and thinking about space across borders. I wonder how we can connect this to thinking about print-material in the digital age and the flow of information and how it shapes national thinking. The role of the media/internets/twitter in the current presidential debate comes to mind.
3) On one hand I appreciate the ways in which Sengupta offers an analysis and metaphors of violence to think about intersectionality, and I found particular passages provocative, for example in terms of thinking about the assumptions around various types of power, and the way that oppression gets articulated through patriarchy. However I am not sure if I quite buy his argument about power and difference being an algebraic equation that is the same no matter the identities of the different parties. Perhaps I just didn’t understand the grand scope of the article? But I was left wanting something more.