I’ve previously linked to danah boyd’s controversial essay about social class on MySpace and Facebook. A month later, boyd has taken the time to respond to her critics:
Qualitative research has data. Typically, written ethnographies and other qualitative-driven findings show that data through individual accounts, quotes by people that are contextualized, and detailed descriptions of people or situations. I have that data but I did not include it in my blog essay. I intentionally save data for my academic works so that I can flesh it out and situate it in the depth that needs to happen. The decision to not reveal data has to do with separating the academic writing from the blog writing, but it also has to do with what I’m trying to accomplish with each. Writing a case study of someone or using data requires a lot more fleshing out than I typically do in my blog. Thus, I didn’t show data in that essay but that is not because I don’t have it. This is another way in which this is not a formal article – leaps of faith are fine when you’re having a conversation, but not when you are trying to document something for posterity.
I’m mildly uneasy with “leaps of faith are fine when you’re having a conversation”. I know one thing my friends appreciate about me is my precision, and that when I quote something I often recall exactly where I read it. That is, I can offer cites. I think people are willing to tolerate uncited material in a conversation because none of us have the kind of memory that would allow us to remember where we learned every fact in our head. Nevertheless, I think it is the kind of thing that people indulge for the sake of friendship (and the knowledge that they will need to be indulged the same way, that is, reciprocity), but they are never really happy about it. And if you speak to someone who is not a friend of yours, and especially if they disagree with what you are saying, then assumptions of goodwill, indulgence and reciprocity cease to exist. Even among people I’ve known ten years, when we have a conversation where we disagree sharply about a political issues, they ask me to cite where I am getting my facts, and I’m often curious where they are getting theirs.
However, I have no reservations with anything boyd writes about the difficulty of defining social class in America. This is really one of the aspects of her writing that I enjoy most:
At the top of the essay, I snarkily wrote “I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I’m going to face the stickiness…” The issue is not just that I don’t have quantitative data; it’s that quantitative data does not have the nuance to show what’s going on. It gets us part way there, but there are problems with it. Class is not simply a matter of what income bracket you’re at. When we use income level as a marker, we get the Marxist cafe worker and the immigrant janitor in the same bucket, but they are not living the same lifestyle at all. Another approximation that is often used for class is parental education. Post-graduate degrees are often helpful at pointing to upper class activity, but there’s still a huge difference between a Stanford Law degree and a master’s in special ed from the local night college. There’s also a big difference between dropping out of Harvard after 2 years and getting a 2-year community college degree. Surveys usually ask what the last degree one got was. Do we really put Bill Gates in the same bucket with other just-finished-HS individuals? (Gates was not just an average dropout… His parents were powerful and he dropped out of Harvard.) Marking teens’ class is even more sticky because we use their parents as proxies. Many children replicate their parents class norms, but not all. This is why parents complain that one kid is doing “OK” and the other is not; this means that one kid is living up to parental class expectations and the other is not.
Also:
I chose the term subaltern to refer to subculturally-identified and non-hegemonic teens because their expressions are often interpreted by hegemonic mass media in a way that they are always seen as failure. I wanted to choose a term that did not simply place them as second-tier citizens, but as powerful voices in discourse. Too many people who read my article assumed that the group that I talked about as subalterns are somehow inferior or less valuable than hegemonic teens. Perhaps that’s hegemony speaking, but I find it frustrating. I think that they are equally powerful forces in society (and they are certainly equally powerful in the market) but I think that they have different views on the construction and maintenance of society as we know it.
The terms are extremely problematic but I used them with a smile on my face because I thought that they would evoke an image and make people think. Many have been outraged that I appear biased towards one or the other (although no one seems to know which – I’ve been accused of being condescending towards subaltern teens and I’ve also been accused of fetishizing them). Perhaps I should’ve located myself. As a teen, I would’ve been caught in between – a smart kid whose friends and world were very much in the subaltern camps (geeks and burnouts primarily). As an adult, I have more privilege than I ever thought possible and my world is extremely hegemonic and I’m always trying to fight against that. Thus, I probably have more sympathy with subaltern teens but my friends are all raising hegemonic ones who I adore. Thus, I’m definitely caught in the middle.
It is amazing to me how many people will criticize an essay before they’ve read it:
Unfortunately, misinterpretations were made worse by the mainstream media, and namely the initial BBC article that talked about this essay as a formal report of a six month study. (The article was corrected a few days later.) I realized very quickly that people read the BBC article or the Slashdot coverage or their friends’ blog posts and decided to critique from there. I have been astonished at how lazy people have been. My article is not that inaccessible and it’s not even that long. What was even funnier was that when I wrote a response to the BBC article on my blog, people then took that to say that I saw the essay as based on no data and otherwise meaningless. The essay is based on data; it is rooted in a very long ethnographic study; but it is just not a formal report of my findings.
I especially like this, utopia is dead:
We used to have this utopian view that the Internet would solve all of our societal divisions. On the Internet, no one would know you’re a dog, right? The reality is that all of society’s issues are simply perpetuated online. And that’s frustrating. I liked the utopian dream better, even if it’s not real. But if we accept the reality – that the Internet mirrors and magnifies offline values and views – we must start to think of what the implications of this are. Society is in a dangerous position when people who are different do not interact. This is how intolerance breeds and we definitely have enough of that in this country.
boyd describes the criticism of her as absolutely brutal:
I couldn’t help but wonder if the academics I know could’ve handled some of what I received this month. Not all of it was what we would call a review. I’ve had to practice deep breathing as I went through detailed discussions of whether or not I was cute enough to fuck or look through bulletins that had decided to gather photos of me for analysis (they concluded that my arm bracelets prove that I’m a cutter). I know the Slashdot/Metafilter community well enough to not take the personal threats on my life or body seriously, but that doesn’t mean they don’t suck. Emails from parents accusing me of destroying their children’s lives suck. PR campaigns to discredit me suck. In general, being mocked isn’t any fun. Many of my dearest friends can’t stand even the slightest personal attack online; I’ve learned to take it for granted while being continuously disappointed by it. If online peer review is going to be this personal, few are going to be masochistic enough to want it.
For all that was written about Kathy Sierra and the attempts to silence women online, this strikes me as a more common example of the forces at work that might limit women’s careers, especially careers that depend on some kind of online presence.
