These people waited in line for hours to get free grilled fish at the Sanma Festival. About 5,000 sanma (Pacific saury) were given away. And they remained in line to get their lime and grated radish. Continue reading
Free Fish!
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Category Archives: community
Race and Ethnicity: A Demographic Analysis of My Facebook Friends, Part 3
Last summer I did a statistical analysis of my Facebook friends and wrote two posts about it. I was going to dedicate the third post to the racial and ethnic make-up of my online friends, but got writer’s block at the magnitude of the task of writing about race.
Do I outline a short history of how race has been defined? And from who’s perspective? Should I approach it as a purely statistical exercise? Or should I deconstruct it nice and easy?
So this is what I’ve decided to do. First, I’ll write about my observations on how race and ethnicity are defined in each of the three countries that I’ve lived in. I’ll be focusing on how race and ethnicity is defined officially, by the government, and colloquially on the streets. Then I’ll compare the demographics of my Facebook friends to the US and world populations. Continue reading
The Moment of Silence
The clearest memory I have of 9/11 actually occurred one year after the attacks. In 2002, I had arrived at Heathrow Airport in London and was waiting for my connecting flight to Leeds. I had just retired from dance and was about to embark on a totally different direction in my life, entering academia in a country I imagined was a cross between a Dicken’s novel and a Hugh Grant movie.
Of course, I was aware that I was traveling on the first anniversary of 9/11. There was much fuss on the news about air travel leading up to that day. But I was more excited about being in Europe for the first time and starting an adventure.
By accident, my brief layover at Heathrow coincided with the exact time of the attacks from the year before. I was groggy from the 14 hour plane ride, the time change, and agitated by the cigarette smoke that seemed to be everywhere. A woman announced over the loudspeakers that in a few seconds it would be the anniversary of the attacks. She asked us to observe 2 minutes of silence to honor the victims.
Heathrow is the busiest airport in Europe by far, and the 3rd busiest in the world. Yet, for those next two minutes everyone stopped working. Passengers from all over the world stopped walking, or looked up from their newspapers. No one said a word. Even the children seemed to understand the gravity of the moment. I didn’t even hear a phone ring until well into the 2nd minute. I was stunned.
And moved. And humbled.
During those minutes, I felt a global energy of good will and empathy directed at Americans. It was like Britain had my back. And many other countries came to offer support and condolences in that brief memorial service. I sensed that the US could enter an era of openness and compassion with the world community. But that good energy would be squandered over the next 6 years through pointless wars, domestic paranoia, and building walls to keep the world outside.
It was an unfortunate path. But I don’t think it’s too late to get back to that other path. I think that the world would have our back again if we let them.
The Archetypal Friend: A Demographic Analysis of My Facebook Friends, Part 2
In this post, we find out who my most typical Facebook friend is, statistically speaking.
In Part 1, we saw how privileged and not representational my Facebook friends (and all Facebookians) are. But surely for someone who has lived on 3 continents, involved with a broad international community, my Facebook friends represent a good cross-section of the world in other regards. Let’s see.
Girl Power
In the global village of 100, men and women constitute 50 each. In my village, 60.5% are women and 39.5% are men. That’s quite a dramatic difference. I think the main reason for this is because of my involvement in dance, a field overwhelmingly filled with women. As far as I’m concerned, the more women in my life the better.
Age Distribution
I couldn’t find a good source for global age distribution. They lump people in three groups: under 15, 15 to 65, and over 65. Not terribly useful I’m afraid, since every one of my Facebook friends are in that 15 to 65 range.
The vast majority, nearly 60% of my Facebook village is 30 to 39. This makes sense since I’m in my 30’s too. To compare that with the US, people aged 20 to 44, a much broader range, make up only 37% of the population.
This is followed by nearly an equal number of people in their 20s (13.2%) and in their 40s (16.2%). I was surprised by this. I thought my village would be more evenly distributed among these three age groups. I especially thought the 20’s would be much more represented since that’s the age that’s savviest with social networking sites.
Teens, another internet savvy group, make up only 4.8%. They are mostly kids of my friends. And there was a sprinkling of friends in their 50s (1.8%). In the real world I have a lot more friends who are 50 and older, but most of them do not frequent Internetland. And good for them.
Nationality
I’ve got friends who are citizens of 35 countries. That’s a pretty good variety of nations. But most of those countries are only represented by 1 friend, so it’s not as diverse as it sounds.
Here’s what the global village of 100 looks like:
- 61 villagers are citizens of Asian countries (of that, 20 are Chinese and 17 are Indian).
- 13 are African.
- 12 are European.
- 5 are South American.
- 8 are North American (5 from the US).
- 1 of the villagers is from Australia, New Zealand and Oceania.
How does my Facebook village compare?
My Facebook village is skewed towards North Americans (64.9%), Europeans (14.9%) and Asians (11.4%). It makes sense since those are the continents that I’ve lived in. The two most populous countries are barely represented in my village; I can count my Chinese and Indian friends on one hand. It’s important to note that this doesn’t include ethnicity, only citizenship. I’ll get to race and ethnicity in Part 3.
Each of those continental figures are further skewed to single countries: the US (62.7%), Japan (8.8%) and the UK (6.6%). The heavy US representation is because I’m American and have spent most of my life there. I’m surprised the figures for Japan and the UK aren’t bigger. The low figure for Japan can be explained because most of my Japanese friends use Mixi, the predominant social networking site in Japan. And while I lived in the UK, my university community was very international.
Most surprisingly, even though I’m ethnically Korean and still have relatives in Korea, I have no Facebook friends who are citizens of Korea. Do most Koreans use another social networking site?
Australians and New Zealanders in my village number more than 3 times the global average, at just over 3%.
South Americans are a mere 2.6%. Africans are a paltry 2.2%. I have quite a few more friends from these continents in real life, but they are not on Facebook.
A Side Story
Just to illustrate how difficult it is to get on Facebook (and on the internet), let me tell you a story. One of my fellow graduate students in the UK was a soft-spoken Sudanese man. Near the end of our program, a week before he returned to Sudan, I took a group shot of our class and he asked me for a copy of the picture. I told him I’d email it to everyone as an attachment.
He explained that it was difficult to get on the internet and check his email in Sudan. And even then, there would be no guarantee that the computer would be attached to a printer, much less a color printer that could print photos. I couldn’t fathom this situation and since he told me this with his usual big smile I thought he was just teasing me.
A day before he left, he told me again his situation but with more of an air of desperation. I took him more seriously this time and we went to a print shop and we got the photo developed then and there.
He was not some poor herdsman. He was a graduate student studying in the UK, so he had some means. Yet even he had difficulties getting online.
All Around the Pacific Rim
Even though there are 8.8% citizens from Asian countries, 21.9% of my friends live in Asia. Almost all of these are expats living in Tokyo, the city most called home among my friends.
An overwhelming number of my friends (54.8%) live in North America. Still, compared to the 62.7% of people who are US citizens, this suggests that quite a few live outside the continent. Within the US, my Facebook friends are clustered along the West Coast. Almost 25% live in Oregon. And at least another 10% are in California.
I don’t know where all of my friends live, so these figures are probably much higher. If you add up all my friends who live in Seattle and Vancouver, I’d estimate that more than 45% of my Facebook village is on the West Coast of North America. That means at least 65% live on the North Pacific Rim.
Sexual Orientation
In the global village of 100, 10 are gay, lesbian or bisexual. In my Facebook village, they represent 8%. But I don’t know the sexual orientation of all my friends. So that means only 8% are out, that I know of. I’m certain this number is much, much higher. Come out, come out, wherever you are!
University of Facebook
I run with a highly educated crowd. Almost 23% of my Facebook friends have MAs. And 7% have, or are working on, their PhDs. That’s remarkable. That’s nearly a third with post-graduate degrees. And that only includes the ones that I know of. These numbers are high because most of them were my classmates in graduate school.
They outnumber all the people that I’d met from elementary school through college (17%).
Not to be outdone by the academics, people who I’ve met in the dance field make up 14% of my friends. I didn’t add up all the musicians and visual artists, but I’m sure they make up significant groups too.
Names
The most common woman’s name is some variation of Anne. The most common man’s name is, not surprisingly, some form of John, with David, Eric and James close behind. There was no significantly common surname, but there were quite a few with variations of Wood.
There are many cool names. But the coolest has got to be Aejaz Zahid. Aejaz is actually also a very cool person.
The Archetypal Friend
Now that we have a fairly complete picture of my Facebook community, we can identify my typical friend. Let’s call her Wind’s Archetypal Friend.
She is an American woman in her 30s, named Anne Wood, living on the West Coast of the United States, probably Oregon. She is highly educated and is involved in the arts, most likely dance. She also has a tendency to befriend handsome intelligent talented men who reduce her down to a set of statistics.
And that’s probably more than you ever wanted to know about my Facebook village. Next, in Part 3, I delve into the most controversial of all categories of identity, race.
The Gated Community: A Demographic Analysis of My Facebook Friends, Part 1
This is a 3 part essay on the demographic make-up of my Facebook friends. In this post, I explain my methods and show how disturbingly exclusive the Facebook village is.
A Facebook Census
When I befriended my 200th Facebook friend earlier this year, I decided to analyze the demographic patterns in my Facebook community. I did this because I’m a nerd and also because I like to deconstruct things in my spare time. Some men like to tinker with their cars. I like to tinker under the hood of society and culture.
So what I did was type in all the names of my Facebook friends into an Excel file and coded in data about them as if I were taking a census. I entered such things as gender, age range, citizenship, current country where they live, race, period of my life when I met them, and even sexual preferences. I wanted to see how representative they were of the rest of the world. I’ll cover these in Part 2.
The data is hardly accurate since I had to guess some things like age or residence. Quite a few of my friends are dual citizens so I listed them under the country they actually grew up in or spent the most time in. And unlike most censuses, I avoided the topic of income, or socio-economic level, since they would have been wild guesses on my part. Similarly, I only have the vaguest inklings on what religion most of my friends practice. However, I did note educational levels.
Race was another tricky one, since a) race is constructed differently in each country, and b) so many of my friends are of mixed heritage. This deserves a post all its own, which will come in Part 3.
The project sounds tedious and time-consuming, but it must be noted that after years of being a researcher and collecting data, and being a fast typist, I was able to do this in under 2 hours. Analyzing and writing about the data is what takes longer.
The Gated Community
Before sharing my findings, I thought it might be interesting to tell you what the world would look like if it were a village of 100 people (from the Miniature Earth).
I was able to see how dramatically privileged my community is compared to the rest of the world. In the village of 100,
- 80 live in substandard housing.
- 67 are unable to read.
- 50 are malnourished and 1 is dying of starvation.
- 18 live on less than US$1 per day. 53 live on less than US$2 per day.
- 33 don’t have access to a safe water supply.
- 24 do not have any electricity.
I may not know what the income is for any of my friends, but I’m fairly confident in asserting that all 228 of my Facebook friends live in a decent place, have enough food, live on more than $2 a day, have clean plentiful water, and are literate.
If you have a bank account, you’d be among the richest 8. And I’m pretty sure all my friends have bank accounts.
Of the village of 100, 12 have a computer and 3 have access to the Internet. To even be in my Facebook village, you need a computer and access to the Internet. So all 228 of my friends represent only 3% of the world population. If you’re reading this blog, you’re in that 3% too. That’s a very exclusive gated community. It’s startling and humbling.
In Part 2, I’ll look at gender, national identity, and other categories of identity.
