It's Complicated Danah Boyd Analysis

In It’s Complicated, Danah Boyd asserts that social and racial divisions transcend the digital barrier and persist online through various social networks. Boyd argues argues this, rather effectively, through a number of anecdotes and personal stories as well as research she has gathered herself. Boyd’s claim and argument are of particular importance to youth and teenagers actively using social media sites. From analyzing Boyd’s argument, its structure, and its flow, I have determined that it is through strategically placed appeals to the ethos, pathos, and logos or the reader that Boyd is able to effectively formulate a convincing argument. TODO Boyd intentionally opens with a story of about Keke, a young black girl, and her experience as …show more content…
Boyd explains how it was mostly racial and social divisions that transitioned many users from MySpace to Facebook despite the two platforms offering many of the exact same features and differing in only a few ways. Boyd interviewed that a student admitted to her that “MySpace now is more ghetto or whatever,” citing this is the reason many high school teenagers are leaving MySpace (Boyd 167). Clearly Boyd is using this example to demonstrate the crude and harsh effects of racism in high school teenagers and how teenagers are able to continue racial discrimination online. At times, it may seem like Boyd is attempting to dismiss this harshness of this version of racism: online racism. This is because Boyd acknowledges that since there is relatively few differences between the sites MySpace and Facebook and neither pose a large barrier to entry, the social media site an individual chooses to use is a completely fair decision independent of race. However, Boyd mentions that it is likely the case that teenager’s friends are of the same ethnic background in high school and that since all of an individual’s friends are on one social media site, there would be no point in joining the other site. Relying on the common knowledge that MySpace and Facebook are less functional with few friends, Boyd demonstrates that because of social divisions that …show more content…
Primarily, Boyd demonstrates that the effects of racism online and offline are similar in nature. In one notable way, online racial tensions cuts far deeper divisions than in real life. Boyd explains the immense “pressure that [teenagers] receive to not engage with strangers [online]” through different social media sites (Boyd 174). Boyd further notes that by limiting themselves to friendships and relationships that already exist in real life, teenagers are being “discouraged from building new connections that would diversify their worldviews” but that it is in these connections (the one’s teenager’s are not making) that “the transformative potential of the internet to restructure social networks in order to reduce structural inequality” exists (Boyd 173). Boyd successfully demonstrates the personal effects of teenagers online interactions as reinforcement of the racial divisions that already exist in high school and how the “transformative potential of the internet” is rendered useless by the way teenagers interact on different social

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