Race and Social Media 1

Social Media: We all know that social media has become a prominent feature in our society within the last decade or two. It has allowed people of different backgrounds to communicate, interact, spread and share information with each other, and have access to things they might not have known about before. What people consider to be “social media” may vary from person to person. Just to have a brief overview on what social media can mean, some people have a more narrow view on what social media is. They may only see it as a person to person form of interaction, such as sites like Facebook. However, broader definitions can include sites not only like Facebook and Twitter but also sites that encourage community interaction and collaborative opportunities as well as YouTube, online games, and virtual worlds. One inclusive definition is: “websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.”(1).Even before these growing numbers, people of color found ways to interact with social media and to have a voice in online communities.   

 Brief History of Race in Social Media: Through the years, social media has also become a powerful tool in terms of allowing people of different racial backgrounds to be heard and have access to the same information. As the internet has changed, “the history might then chart how ‘smart phones’ have changed the demographics of internet access, noting that, in the United states a least, 'over the last decade, the internet population has come to much more closely resemble the racial composition of the population as a whole'"(2). People of color have especially been able to find a strong voice through Twitter and similar platforms. 

Just looking at this past summer, the events of Ferguson Missouri were largely covered (and are still being covered) on Twitter from the black residents of the community, sometimes giving people more information than news sources and journalists were able to provide. In fact, people of color’s use of the internet and social networking websites has grown so much over the years that now “70% of African Americans and English-speaking Latinos reported using social networks (higher than Whites at 60 present)”(3). Even before these growing numbers, people of color found ways to interact with social media and to have a voice in online communities.  

(an example of social media users on a specific website, in this case, Twitter.) 

Source

How It Relates: As stated before, social media can be a powerful tool that lets people of color have a strong voice. It can greatly add to the conversations about race and ethnicity and impact people’s awareness of related issues while also being a way to hinder the conversations about race. For anyone who has spent time in the YouTube comment section or Reddit subforums, you know that race if often used as a way to insult or “troll” people. Lisa Nakamura states that "Racist 'trolling' is an attempt to instrumentalize feeling, to engineer abjection, to find a way to gain the attention economy," she said. To call Internet racism "trolling" is to dismiss and minimize hate speech”(4). Also, while social media can give a voice to people of color, it can also give the same thing to anti-Semites and white supremacists. Also, if black people (or PoC in general) are not on the same social networking and social media sites as whites, it is easy for them to be overlooked in the job market and to gain access to working opportunities.(5) That being said, social media can also offer safes spaces for many marginalized groups of people away from the larger population of the internet along with helping to inform masses of people at once.

Sources:
(2)(3) "Routledge Handbook of Social Media." Google Books. Ed. Jeremy Hunsinger and Theresa Senft. Routledge, 2013, n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2014
(4)"Race and Social Media: How to Push the Conversation Forward."Mashable. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.
(5)Ditomaso, Nancy. "How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment."Opinionator How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment Comments. N.p., May-June 2013. Web. 24 Sept. 2014.
Image: Www.pewresearch.org. "The Demographics of Social Media Users — 2012." Comp. Maeve Duggan and Joanna Brenner. The Demographics of Social Media Users — 2012 (n.d.): n. pag.Http://www.lateledipenelope.it. Pew Research Center. Web. 23 Sept. 2014.