Three forces create unequal access to the opportunities created by the Hype Machine. First, there are disparities in access to the Hype Machine across geography, socioeconomic status, and gender. Developing countries lag behind advanced economies in Internet, social media, and smartphone access. But beyond the digital divide in access to social media, there is a digital divide between what my friend and colleague Eszter Hargittai calls “capacity enhancing” and recreational uses of social media. The economically advantaged tend to use social media in ways that offer “opportunities for upward mobility,” including relationship and reputation building, information seeking, collaboration, mobilization, and other “activities that may lead to more informed political participation, career advancement, or information seeking about financial and health services.” Although research has found positive effects of activities that lead to self-improvement for those from less advantaged backgrounds, Hargittai found they tend to engage in these activities less, exacerbating inequality in the distribution of social media’s benefits. Second, the Hype Machine’s network helps the rich get richer. As people make connections on social media, they connect to other people like themselves (that’s homophily). So new connections reinforce existing disparities. Friend-recommendation algorithms are based in part on the user’s current connections. Since mutual friends guide “people you may know” recommendations on social media, the tendency to connect with people like ourselves keeps social media networks segregated and divided among the rich and the poor. Finally, the Hype Machine provides greater returns for highly skilled workers whose jobs depend more on acquiring and processing the information, knowledge, and skills that social media provides, exacerbating inequality.*2 The Hype Machine holds the potential for tremendous promise and significant peril. It enables broad, rapid collective action, but action that is fragile. It spreads both positive and harmful content and behavior. When it is programmed for privacy and security, it forgoes transparency. It supports broad increases in economic welfare and costly harms that are not priced in. It creates social and economic opportunity, but with unequal access. To achieve the promise and avoid the peril we will need scalpels, not broadswords.
Several things to distill in this excerpt. One key insight is that the Hype Machine (social media and its impact) is basically a catalyst that can be used to accentuate its impacts. This effect basically widens the economic gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged due to access and better networks. Your network on social media and its recommendation algorithm can have a huge impact on how it benefits you economically.
If we accept the above as true, then it means that there can be huge societal benefit and we should not be too quick to ban or severely curtail social media just because of the negative impacts. Rather, what we need are “scalpels”, dealing with the deleterious impacts of social media while leaving the good.
