[Air-L] facebook ethnic diversity?

Alexander Halavais halavais at gmail.com
Fri Dec 18 10:54:22 PST 2009


On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Kevin Guidry <krguidry at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 8:27 AM, gustavo <gustavo at soc.haifa.ac.il> wrote:
>> More on this issue, selection bias is present.
>
>   I don't think it's fair or accurate to say that of this study since
> it's not attempting to generalize the results to the entire population
> (I don't think; did I miss that?).
<snip>

That gets at the crux of the issue. In a cursory reading, I don't see
them making any general claims, but we can ask "to what end?" I'm not
opposed to making observations and discussing them for the sake of
doing so, but there are some implications here.

The suggestion is that racial minorities are making up gradually
larger proportions of the Facebook community (with the exception of
"Asians"). I think there's very little we can generalize from this, in
part because it doesn't speak to *why*--and in part because of the
degree to which race may be conflated with class and economic status.

But their original question is a more interesting one: *why* and *how*
different people make use of Facebook differently. For me, this
doesn't move that conversation very far forward. I still think its an
interesting attempt to observe something about changes in users. But I
wonder if (presumed) race is the most useful way of dividing the
population to the applied end of making Facebook more usable to a
diverse set of users. I would be more interested in economic
diversity, for example. Or in creating categories based on usage
strategies and seeing whether these might map to other data provided
(age, gender, nationality, etc.) or inferred.

If they took the next step with this data (presumably not too
difficult) and reported differences in access times, operating
systems, screen size, browser, use of various functions, location,
etc., based on predicted racial category, then it might be especially
interesting. But it would also likely raise red flags for privacy
advocates that the current data might not.

- Alex




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