Digital Affirmative Action

Of course it’s a clichéd way to begin a post, but “in this day and age” is more than apt for the moment. We certainly can’t argue that we are an unconnected people. You are who you know and this is something that we not only accept, but have come to regard as the rule.  Our value is shifting from something singular and internal to something plural and external.  Corporations are making decisions based on the company we keep and our ability to be persuaded by that company.  We see that we affect and are affected by other people on a consistent and continuous basis.  “The power effect of social networks on individual behaviors and outcomes suggests that people do not have complete control over their own choices” (Christakis and Fowler).  We may not even recognize just how far our presence travels; whether we are the influenced or the influencing.  And yes, it is not infinite, but in the digital space, it doesn’t need to be. We can increase the number of our personal connections by just a few and our sphere of influence multiples by at least 3, as we have now formed indirect connections with our friends’ friends.

Interestingly, with increasingly more people creating and maintaining online identities, a large part of our connections with other people are initiated and maintained in a digital environment and may never transition into the real world.  So, it becomes important to understand our interrelatedness in terms of an online network and what it means to not only be a plot on the map, but a plot in relation to the other plots, both near and far.  With that being said (perhaps to contrary belief) a digital network is not without structure and structures are not without boundaries and hierarchies.  So, congruent to the real world, digital networks may not be entirely transient spaces where you can move freely between your or anyone else’s network, even if we have built it up as a place where this is fully functional and limitless.  Digital networks still exist inside larger frameworks of access and opportunity, so inequality in both the power that you wield and where you are fixed in the network is present.  Although they have only a brief mentioning in Connected by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler; positional and situation inequality caught my attention (no surprise there).

If you are happier or richer or healthier than others, it may have a lot to do with where you happen to be in the network, even if you cannot discern your own location.  And it may have a lot to do with the structure of the network; even if you cannot control that structure at all … social networks can dramatically reinforce two different kinds of inequality in our society: situational inequality (some are better off socioeconomically) and positional inequality (some are better off in terms of where they are located in the networks).

We have already begun the identification and discussion of situational inequality offline. For the most part we recognize that some have more than others; whether we care to classify it as a problem or have the desire to set up a way to equalize the distribution of wealth, is yet to be seen.  What we have neglected is understanding or even acknowledging positional inequality as it becomes more important in a networked society.  Is it possible that someone can have a better plot on the map and in turn wield either a more powerful or farther reaching influence?  How are minorities situated in the network and is there room for manipulating the network if they are consistently on the outskirts?  The manipulation would be a sort of digital Affirmative Action. Consistently being on the periphery of the network means limited access to current and detailed information, and if your immediate connections are made up of other minorities, then do you ever build up enough influence to centralize yourself?

I recognize there are a lot of questions here, but I find that this topic is still burgeoning. We have talked about minority representation in digital environments, but we didn’t anticipate that it wouldn’t be enough; that we would also have to talk about gaps in what we assumed to be perfectly ordered connections between individuals.  For some minorities they have yet to be able to actively participate with the networked group. No, they are not digitally isolated, but central to the system just isn’t realistic.

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