Mymy, I’ve missed Danah Boyd‘s talk because of mingling with some fellow bloggers in the lounge area – that’s both a shame and a peek into the social effects and the nature of great conferences.
Luckily Stephanie jotted down some live notes, check them out – I earmarked Danah’s take on the Internet as “bringing diverse people together mechanism”, by enhancing visibility overall. Indeed platforms like Twitter are potentially “demasking mechanisms” – exposing prejudices, narrow-mindedness and :
People move to gated communities to get away from different people and not have to deal with them but the internet is bringing all these people together. We might not want to be in such a mixed space.
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We’re making all sorts of parts of society visible, parts we like and others we don’t.
Yes, there’s a number of necessary conversations that we need to have: from questions of online privacy and security, to how we deal with the visibility of hurtful and harmful things on social networks. Lots of real web issues indeed …