NEW YORK — In a speech to a receptive audience at the Personal Democracy Forum 2009, Danah Boyd, an ethnographer who works at Microsoft Research New England and at the Harvard Berkman Center for the Internet, said that many within the technology industry and the Internet industry believe, erroneously, that technology always delivers democracy in a speech she called “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online.”
Instead, she said, the online world mirrors the racism, classism, and stratification of the offline world. She said that a critical case in point is the competition between MySpace and Facebook.