I am only now beginning to enter the space of social media, so I am very much in a learning mode. Yet, I think it is worth pondering Danah Boyd’s initial findings around racism, classism and social media. She is a a Social Media Researcher and Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, recently completing her PhD at the University of California (Berkeley).The following is an excerpt regarding her work: Speaking at this week’s Personal Democracy Forum in New York, Danah Boyd said that even among people with access to the Net, long-held social divisions of race, class, and income are starting to play out online, particularly among teens now starting to choose which social network they prefer, MySpace or Facebook. “Social media don’t eradicate social divisions,” says Boyd, an expert in NextGen behaviors for Microsoft and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “[Social media are] making the old social divisions obvious in totally new ways.” For the full blog, go to: http://www.poptech.org/blog/index.php/archives/4438. It points out the entrenched complexity of what it will mean for us to engage in bridging racial, cultural, and economic barriers for Christ. Our blinders are wider than we realize and there is, as always, much to learn. I want to refer you also to an article/blog I wrote around EHS’s contribution to The Next Evangelicalism (Soong-Chan Rah’s term) https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/blog/?p=200. Do you think this is true about Facebook and MySpace? What do you think are the implications of this?
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