[Air-L] Best lit for documenting/explaining lower online participation by disadvantaged groups

David Brake davidbrake at gmail.com
Tue Jan 24 05:51:24 PST 2017


Dear all,

I am teaching how to encourage participation in online communities and I have a paper - my own (a) - which describes some of the inequalities in education level, class and age that exist in terms of usage of social media but I realized looking back at it I don't have enough foundational literature on how and why it is that the voices of the disadvantaged (women, LGBT people, the disabled, ethnic minorities) are less often heard - in part because of straightforward discrimination but also because of internalized doubts that they will be understood or appreciated and feelings of inarticulacy. I was always struck by Bourdieu’s writing about this (b) Much of this literature is I imagine from political science and may not relate directly to the internet - that's okay. I'm just interested in short, clearly argued and (preferably) recent works.

I have been struck by the absence of this factor in text book and practitioner discussions of how to encourage participation in online communities…

I hope you can help!

Regards,

David

(a) Brake, D. R. (2013). Are we all online content creators now? Web 2.0 and digital divides. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3), 591–609. doi: 10.1111/jcc4.12042 
(b) "Certain categories of locutors are deprived of the capacity to speak in certain situations and often acknowledge this deprivation in the manner of the farmer who explained that he never thought of running for mayor of his small township by saying: ''But I don't know how to speak!’’ p. 146 Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. J. D. (1992). The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop). In P. Bourdieu & L. J. D. Wacquant (Eds.), An invitation to reflexive sociology (pp. 62-215). Chicago: University of Chicago Press

--
Dr David Brake, Researcher and Educator http://davidbrake.org/, @drbrake
Author of "Sharing Our Lives Online: Risks and Exposure in Social Media” https://www.facebook.com/sharingourlivesonline




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