Approaches to social media and inequality: the positive, the negative and the grounded

The relevant literature can largely be divided into two – almost entirely opposed – camps. The first argues that social media is bound to introduce greater inequality in society through concentrating educational and networking resources among those who are already privileged. Alternatively the ‘techno-utopian’ approach sees social media as a panacea for problems of inequality, giving disadvantaged people access to greater resources through the internet.

Literature falling within the category of ‘digital divide’ is often informed by notions that new ICTs exacerbate pre-existing inequalities in societies: poorer individuals are excluded, while wealthier persons are provided better access. Early studies, which focused on access to the internet itself rather than social media, were conducted largely in developed countries; they emphasised that, although the vast majority of people had internet access, an important minority either completely lacked or had sub-standard connections. Often the constraints that prevented people from benefiting from online communication were dictated by factors such as age, household income, educational achievement, English level, disability and rural/urban location.⁹

As internet access has improved and social media and other online resources have become increasingly available, scholars are suggesting that other kinds of divides are emerging. Much depends on the different forms of access, and the specifics of local context, which impacted upon how people used these technologies.¹⁰ It has been proposed that the ‘network divide’ has a greater impact than the ‘digital divide’, and that the key distinction is now whether people are able to acquire the skills needed successfully to cultivate their social networks online.¹¹ This transformation has been informed by an increasing stress on ‘digital literacies’ by some scholars, emphasising that mastering the use of these networks has become as important as merely being able to access them (as discussed in Chapter 5).¹² Finally there are approaches that look more to systematic global inequalities. Even if individuals have both access and skills, there remain huge imbalances between the amount of content available in different languages or produced in areas of the world such as Latin America, Africa and India.¹³

Notwithstanding these issues of inequalities of access mentioned above, techno-utopian discourses claim the internet represents egalitarianism, freedom of speech and democracy.¹⁴ These works portray social media as a tool that can be used to consolidate collective power against powerful institutions, often represented through the polarity of ‘individual against government’ or ‘consumer against corporation’. These discourses therefore suggest that social networking acts as a kind of empowerment, promoting civil protagonism that challenges systems that produce inequalities.¹⁵

As demonstrated in the previous chapter on gender, early internet commentators wondered whether the online virtual communities that emerged during the 1990s would stimulate equality by allowing people free reign to create imaginative online identities that were independent from their own bodies. Such a concept equally has implications for inequalities based on other aspects of identity, for example age, race, wealth or class.¹⁶ An associated question is whether, given the potential for online anonymity, social relations could exist apart from differences based in the body or other ‘offline’ circumstances, instead appreciating the online domain as a new, independent space in which the mind may be allowed to roam free of these prior constraints.¹⁷ This question is a key component of the previous chapter on gender.

Less evident in both of these categories of literature, and of greater significance to our project, has been the way that inequality itself may mean different things to different people. A growing number of scholars have called for a move away from work that assumes social media must have either a good or bad effect on inequality, calling instead for approaches that consider the complex, nuanced and often contradictory range of effects that social media has on the ‘messy reality’ of people’s lives.¹⁸ More grounded, ethnographic approaches to internet use by teens in the US suggest that many of the problems young people face online remain rooted in long-running social and racial inequalities.¹⁹ For instance, a study tracing the migration of educated, white, middle-class American teens from MySpace to Facebook compared the growing perception of Facebook as offering greater safety than MySpace to ‘white flight’ (a phenomenon in which affluent whites move to suburbs, away from the non-white population living in urban centres).²⁰ Another study conducted in the US looks at how social media use may exacerbate class differences, as under-privileged parents exercise greater control over their children’s social media use to balance the risks that these young people face by living in less affluent neighbourhoods.²¹ Our own project has endeavoured alongside others²² to broaden the scope of these enquiries, and in particular to use comparison of the inequality found within each of our field sites with that found between these different field sites.