Labor Queer and Youth Online, Thoughts on my Mind

There are two major avenues of thought that are going on in my life currently.

The first is an investigation of queer notions of family and how we fight for them. By this I mean a definition of family that moves beyond the two adults, monogamous, kid oriented definition. I was really excited to hear that the SEIU just embraced a more queer friendly understanding of family and has committed to fighting for it. (PS. the article is from BEYOND (STRAIGHT AND GAY) MARRIAGE written Nancy Polikoff, a really excellent blog about these issues [I haven't read the book yet, but really want to])

Laws and policies that narrowly define “family” as limited to two legally-married adults of the opposite sex raising their biological children are often used against immigrants, people of color and the working poor who are more likely to live in family structures that differ from this model.

Narrow definitions of family exclude many relationships that our members call family, including relationships with individuals for whom we have primary care-taking responsibility and relationships with individuals with whom we share economic and emotional interdependence.

Government and employer-provided benefits should support individuals with day-to-day responsibilities to care for and financially support minor children and dependent adults in all family forms, and should protect interdependent adult relationships.

The second thought going around my mind is an interrogation of the norms for youth-adult contact within the youth services non-profit world. This is especially tricky in the context of social network site like Facebook and Myspace. I've been fallowing danah boyd for awhile now because of her really insightful work around youth use of social networking. Today she posted an article about when, why, and how teachers should interact with their youth online.

All too often, there is an assumption that when teachers interact with students out of the classroom, they have bad intentions. This breaks my heart because, for all of the fear, most of the teachers that I've met in my line of work have really meant well by their students and their engagement with their students has helped their students tremendously. I've heard so many stories of teachers intervening and helping kids who really need it. Stupid things like giving them lunch money or being there to listen to their woes or helping a first generation kid learn about college.

Social Change Cause it Makes Me Happy, Well-Being and Social Networking

An interesting article from Seed Magazine, in it Albert-László Barabási and James Fowler discuss networks, and how understanding them is changing everything from evolutionary theories to political campaigns. There’s a lot in the article I didn’t really get. For example scale-free networks, which as I understand it has something to do with networks being built around “nodes” or “hubs” which are units (whether people or cells etc.) which are connected to high numbers of other units. That is to say that in a network, say Facebook, there is not an equal distribution of “friend” connections. Instead there are people who have vastly more “friend” connections than others, in fact there are several “levels” of connectivity, and that some highly connected people tend to have connection in multiple different “communities.” These people are the “nodes” and “hubs” (the only difference I can see is the quantity of different connections, with hubs having significantly more.) One of the interesting things about scale-free networks is that they have found the same structure in a variety of seemingly very different network systems, for example, social networks and cellular networks.

For me, the meet of article was a reference to a study by Fowler and his colleague Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, which found that both behaviors like smoking and obesity and emotions like happiness and loneliness spread through social networks. What this means is that if your friend or family member starts loosing weight or is happy, you are more likely to loose weight or be happy. The really cool thing is that this is not only true for your friends/family but also for their friends/family. Meaning, if your friend’s mom is loosing weight you are more likely to loose weight whether or not you’ve ever met her.

This makes an empirical argument for all sorts of things like social welfare programs, civil rights, economic justice, etc. This is because these are all factors which affect people’s happiness and since our personal happiness is affected by the happiness of people in our social network, it seems fair to assume that as the happiness of our community rises so shall ours.

Of course, the other option is to attempt to keep those who are likely to be unhappy, the poor and oppressed for example, out of our social networks all together. This has, in fact, been the historic practice of the ruling classes and points to the need for connection between classes and communities as a strategy for social change. For example, one of the long standing traditions of the queer/lgbt liberation movements has been “coming out” to friends and family. This then demonstrates to people that they are being negatively affected by homophobia through their social network. Now, of course people didn’t use the language of personal happiness and its connection to social networks. Instead they thought of it as creating visibility and evoking empathy and understanding. However, I would hypothesize that these are based on instinctual understandings of the impact others have on us. Ie. We care about others because we know that they affect our lives (understanding that this is probably a huge oversimplification of why we care about others, but you get my point.)

Image: Wikipedia: Scale-Free Networks

PEW Study of Youth and SNS (Social Netwoking Sights)

Pew put out another great report: Teens and Social Media. This report fleshes out what I noticed earlier - teens are much more protective of the content they post online than adults are. Yet, this report is sooo much more than that. Here are some of the new findings to whet your appetite:

• Digital images - stills and videos - have a big role in teen life. Posting them often starts a virtual conversation. Most teens receive some feedback on the content they post online.
• Email continues to lose its luster among teens as texting, instant messaging, and social networking sites facilitate more frequent contact with friends.
• More older girls than boys create and contribute to websites.
• Girls have fueled the growth of the teen blogosphere.
• Teens from lower-income and single-parent households are more likely to blog.
• Teens who are most active online, including bloggers, are also highly active offline.
• Most teens restrict access to their posted photos - at least some of the time. Girls are more restrictive photo posters.
• Content creators are not devoting their lives exclusively to virtual participation. They are just as likely as other teens to engage in most offline activities and more likely to have jobs.
• African American teens are more likely to look for college information online.
• Girls are more likely than boys to look up health, dieting, or fitness information on the Web.
• The number of teens who report instant message use has dropped since 2004.
• Visiting a chatroom has declined significantly in popularity since 2000.
• Fewer teens are buying products online.
• Wealthy teens are more likely to engage in multimedia Web activities.

This from apophenia a really interesting blog by Danah Boyd, who studies youth's interactions over the internet. She talks more about the study here.

Class and the Great Equalizer

I was looking over my friend Laura’s blog the other day when I came across a really interest blog post from Apophenia. Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace is a very interesting (informal) look at the ways American class divisions are being reflected onto the internet, and social networking to be specific.