White Flight Part 2: When the upper class disconnects

It's been awhile since I've published anything in this blog. Mostly, it's been the incentive to publish in peer-reviewed journals in order to attain tenure that's to blame for the lack of blog productivity. I continue to have stray, undeveloped thoughts about media uses and effects, and there are a few drafts of blogs waiting to be finished, but in the meantime, here's one that's been percolating of late.

There are reports from the past year that many highly-educated, upper-class or upper-middle-class parents are raising their kids with minimal or no screen time, primarily out of fear of its addictive qualities. It seems to start with lay theories of people who work in the tech industry and/or people who live in Silicon Valley - people with a very idiosyncratic perspective on media technologies. One could look at this particular group of parents as experts, given their unusual access to the ways in which these technologies are developed, marketed, and used. But it's also possible that their experience skews their perception of the extent to which these technologies actually are addicting or otherwise pernicious.

One possibility is that the parents are right, that the technologies are pernicious, at least when used in what they deem to be excess. Another possibility is that they're mistaken, that the technologies are merely a new form of communication, like books or telephones, not bad in and of themselves. For now, I want to set aside that issue and focus on the repercussions of a certain type of young person - an upper-class young person - dropping out of the social media universe (or never participating in it in the first place).

There might be a new kind of digital divide, one in which upper-class young people are not participating in or contributing to online social spaces. Those young people will, of course, communicate with one another, through face-to-face social networks if not through technologies that upper-class parents look at with less fear (the good ol' fashioned phone; Facetime/Skype; maybe even texting). They'll use the internet, of course, but primarily for work, or the consumption of curated content with high production values.

Meanwhile, the hurly-burly social media universe - the YouTubers, the memes, the bullying and the overnight fame, the narcissism, confessions, and anonymous social support, all overcrowded with ads - will continue to exist. If the hostility and hate speech get worse and worse, and if other people become helplessly addicted to its pleasures? Well, that's their problem. It's hard not to think of the 'white flight' of privileged families from the sites of fear and anger of yesteryear - urban centers. Privileged young people's image of the unruly social media universe will be akin to the caricature of urban life that children of the 80's grew up with: they will see the most sensational worst-of-the-worst stories, and have no personal experience with it to temper these simplistic, negative depictions. When they get to college, whether or not they grew up on the internet could be as important as whether they grew up in a one-stoplight Midwestern hamlet or Brooklyn. The social distance between a lower-middle class child who spent hours on social media from age 9 and an upper class child who read books and played Dungeons and Dragons at his friend's house, even if those two kids grew up across the street from one another, might be immense.

Among the many fears that social media evoke is the fear of the filter bubble: that subtle social media algorithms and quirks of human behavior will work to balkanize societies. Ten years after the popularization of social media, evidence seems to suggest that the opposite has happened, that we vastly overestimated the power of those algorithms, underestimated the extent to which offline social networks of old were already balkanized, and underestimated the serendipity and unpredictability of evolving online social networks. If balkanization occurred, and if it is occurring again, it may be between those who were/are socializing online and those who were not/are not.