A four-word anthem played on Twitter the other day, and I fell silent in awe: “SOCIAL MEDIA IS DISCO.”
The author was Emily Nussbaum, a cultural critic I’ve admired for a long time. She was answering a question I’d raised about why women, gay people and nonwhite people revel in the very forms of Internet culture that make some of the prominent straight white men who write about the Internet most dejected, fearful and furious. Those forms include message boards, online video, social networking, online publishing, various mobile apps and chat technology — all the digital stuff I happen to find more or less miraculous.
This article is just strange. As a college-educated, uptown-living, straight black man in his 20′s (for a few more months, anyway), who is also a tech-sector guy, this just doesn’t make sense. First, almost every man I know is straight and white. And almost every one of them posts to Twitter and Facebook at least ten times daily, and most have a Tumblr, a Posterous, and a blog that they are posting to at least daily.
In contrast, among the nonwhites and women that I know (I don’t run into a lot of GLBT folk, since I’m at the seminary almost all the time), while all use their Facebook on most days, only one has a Twitter feed, and – other than the ubiquitous mommy-blogs – none have a blog of any sort that’s maintained with any regularity.
So what’s going on here? Am I living in a pocket of the Twilight Zone that snuck into my little urban area? Am I just not paying close enough attention? And why does Heffernan seem to go to such great lengths to make this distinction between the SWM (that’s straight white male) and everyone else? Why does she try to make it empowering to lump all of us “others” into one group? Read more
