In danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison's "Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship," "social network sites" are described as "web-based services" that allow individuals to create a public or semi-public profile, build a list of other users/"friends" with whom they can share a connection, and view and navigate their list of connections and others' content within the system. According to boyd and Ellison, what's unique about social network sites is their ability to enable users to "articulate and make visible their social networks," which can result in "connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made," although that is often not the intention. In theory, social network sites, just like the Internet itself, offer the potential to expand an individual's group of connections and opportunities. However, media literacy is not uniform across populations, and neither is access to the web. In "The Digital Divide and What to Do About It," Eszter Hargittai defines "digital divide" as "the gap between those who have access to digital technologies and those who do not, or the gap between those who use digital technologies and those who do not, understood in binary terms distinguishing the 'haves' from the 'have- nots'." In 2006-7, social media researcher boyd interviewed teens in 17 states and spent more than 2,000 hours observing online habits. At the time, she found that black youths tended to cluster on MySpace, while whites were leaving what some users called "ghetto" MySpace environment for Facebook. boyd indicated that their comments were often integrally tied to race and class, and thus, "reflected a reproduction of social categories that exist in schools throughout the United States. Because race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status shape social categories, the choice between MySpace and Facebook became racialized," boyd wrote in "Race After the Internet."
Peter Chow-White of Simon Fraser University stated, in "For Minorities, New 'Digital Divide' Seen," that "as long as you have structural inequalities in society, you cannot expect to have anything less than that on the Internet. The Internet is not a separate space from the world, it's intricately connected to everyday life and social situations." Ultimately, that's a good starting point for reconfiguring the accessibility. One of the dominant approaches to dealing with the "digital divide" focuses on distinguishing those who are connected from those who don't have access. Resultant policy discourse also limit their attention to identifying "connectedness" without truly delving into issues of "ability" and "skill." In "Why Critical Design Literacy is Needed Now More Than Ever," S. Craig Watkins indicates that the need for critical design literacy is extremely urgent, stating, "There is one clear and dominant trend in the most populous metropolitan areas of the U.S.: growing racial and ethnic diversity . . . The problems that these communities are facing require a broad array of resources, skills, and social innovations. Crucially, the individuals living in these communities must become the change that they want to see. Their very survival will be dependent on the ability of educators to make the skills and learning principles that critical design literacy promotes accessible to the students and communities that need them the most." Thus, the ability to use a medium effectively and efficiently allows the users to benefit from its use, and as such, policy may be more effective if the focus was on improving BOTH access AND training. It's simplistic to assume that merely providing those with access will enhance the lives of everyone who use it.
We end with a quote that will hopefully invite us to think beyond the constraints of previous discourse on the "digital divide," stated by award-winning performance artist, writer, activist, and educator Guillermo Gómez Peña, who explores cross-cultural issues, including new technologies and the digital divide in an era of globalization through mixed genres and experimental language, combining English and Spanish, "fact and fiction, social reality, and pop culture":
"Less than 3 percent of the population of Latin America is wired, and less than 10 percent of the Chicano/Mexican population in the United States is wired. So what are we really talking about when we use terms like global or access? Whose global project are we talking about? Access to what? Cyberspace reproduces almost identically the geopolitical cartography of nonvirtual reality. There are borders and there are people south of the digital divide . . . Latinos. That's why I often describe myself as a 'Webback,' illegally crossing the digital borderline and facing the 'cybermigra.' Once in cyberspace, my own weapons are my humor, my linguas polutas and my political imagination."
- Guillermo Gómez Peña
(Peña, Guillermo Gómez, and Elaine Peña. Ethno-techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy. Routledge, 2005).
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