Net PRIVILEGE Delusion

To say something to the effect of “we all grew up differently / we all were taught different lessons / we all came from different cultural upbringings” is not inventive or poetic in any sense.  Whether you’re acutely aware of your status as an outsider of a group, or are so central that you only notice difference as a contrast to what doesn’t resemble you, to some degree you’re aware that homogeneity is not a constant.

The cyber utopian belief that the internet would turn us into über tolerant citizens of the world all too eager to put our vile prejudices on hold and open up our minds to what we see on our monitors has proved to be unfounded.

With the internet, we naively (though harmlessly) assumed that our presence would placate these differences—that participation on the web would be so strong of an identity marker, that real world factors would become irrelevant.  Instead, in seeking familiarity or predictability perhaps, we brought our offline selves, online, and deraticalized any sense of a global space of tolerance and justice.

Now, a picture of doom and gloom is definitely not what I am trying to create and I don’t think the internet is a big racist / classist / sexist jumble of ignorance (all of the time).  However, past or present, we shouldn’t lean on it without examining the ways in which our own use impacts social relations on the web.

In most cases the only people who still believe in the ideal of an electronic global village are those who would have become tolerant cosmopolitans even without the internet: the globetrotting intellectual elite.  They are much more likely to use the internet to rediscover their own culture—and dare we say their own national bigotry.

Again, we have to stop looking at the Internet as something separate from human experience, but rather, as a tool that helps facilitate it.  And maybe this means people have to become more aware of their place and impact in the network, which isn’t an easy task, especially when you occupy a well connected space where what you do on the Internet is directly visible to three degrees.  Furthermore, you would have to look (wait for it) beyond yourself at the other nodes in the network and not only understand what it means to occupy their position, but to some extent want to alter it, so that as a whole we practice mindful interaction.

Tim Wise is most famously known for his work on discussing and addressing white privilege, and I think this same model could be used to examine network dynamics on the Internet.  Not all absence of diversity is due to malicious decision making, but aloofness due to network privilege.

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