Weekly Post 7
1: In Boyd’s reading on “white flight” on the internet, I wonder if the phenomenon she documented has occurred in other countries as it seems to have in the United States. I’ve seen a lot of news and press about how social networking sites like Facebook expanding into international markets. How will their social norms and ethnic divisions translate into digital spaces in their own internet usage and social networking as these media become more prominent?
2: Speaking from experience and some research, it is a common complaint that Facebook is becoming “too much like MySpace”, and I find a lot of truth to that in both function and aesthetics. What does this say about Boyd’s assertion that there is a certain “look” different ethnic groups like. Is Facebook marketing to those groups? Was the change to Facebook, as she noted was possible, more about social groups than function? Are we not seeing the same flight simply because Facebook has no other major competitors than MySpace?
3: Given that Boyd had labeled the movement from websites as “white flight”, are there social and economic consequences to this digital movement that mirror or are similar to that of the white flight in America’s urban centers in the 20th century? Maybe it’s too soon to reasonable gauge the impact of what may be an ongoing phenomenon, but with the Facebook IPO debacle it has been shown that the digital world can have very significant repercussions in the physical world, and I think it’s a question worth asking.
White Flight: In its strict sense, the exodus of whites from America’s urban centers. As used in the article, it seems to be used as a way to describe the self-segregation of youth on the internet, both in cases of white and non-white social organization and how the phenomenon of this self-segregation has imprinted itself on the internet.