Category Archives: critical theory

Race and Ethnicity: A Demographic Analysis of My Facebook Friends, Part 3

Posted on
4

dancing devatas

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 Archetypal Friend: A Demographic Analysis of My Facebook Friends, Part 2

Posted on
7

mass laughter

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.

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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?

buddha graveyard

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.

a buddha was here

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.

head on a stick

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

Posted on
7

still life with mannequins

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Facebook Notes: Maximum Capacity

Posted on
5

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I joined Facebook, the online social networking site, about a year and a half ago. Back then, Facebook had opened its site to third party developers and a large wave of people joined, jumping to about 30 million users. There seems to be another wave of users recently and the latest figures show 150 million users. And probably increasing.

I find myself using Facebook for most of my emailing, a lot of my photo-sharing, some light blogging, event organizing. And I link most of my other online activities to my Facebook wall. It’s an amazing tool, often time-sucking, but always useful for keeping in touch with friends who are all over the world, and sharing interesting links. I used to do a regular mass email, alerting people to things I’ve been doing. Now I just let Facebook take care of that.

It could be alarming, entrusting so much of my personal information to 189 other people who may be careless with it. But I set the privacy settings pretty tightly. And I’m prudent about which Facebook applications I use. What more can you do? Life has always been full of risks.

Maximum Capacity or Dunbar’s Number
At the beginning of the year, I accepted my 150th friend. And considered capping it off there. Shut the gates and put up the no vacancy sign. I’m a tidy guy. I go through regular cycles of purging everything I don’t need or use. But it doesn’t work that way with people. People aren’t old newspapers or fraying socks.

I chose 150 as the maximum because of Dunbar’s Number, an idea popularized in the Tipping Point. The concept theorizes that a group works best up to about 150 people. It’s the maximum number of people that the human brain is able to conceptualize as one group, knowing everyone’s relationship to each other. Beyond that, accountability starts to decrease, competing factions start to naturally form separate groups.

The plan was to only accept new friends if I unfriend someone else. These unfriended people would be someone who I rarely interact with on Facebook and who I never see in real life. But I just couldn’t do it. It seemed unnecessarily mean.

Still, some limits had to be set on who was able to have access to all my photos, photos of my friends, personal information on daily activities of myself and others.

So I devised guidelines on who to be Facebook friends with. I’m now at 189 friends. My social network is well past its cohesiveness, apparently. And it appears to be burgeoning recently, with a wave of people joining. Some tipping point seemed to have been reached.

The Secret Handshake
These are the criteria that I seemed to be loosely using on whether to accept friends. The following are automatic ins.

• Family members.
• Close friends.
• Collaborators in dance or music. Grueling hours of rehearsals and getting naked together in dressing rooms form permanent bonds.
• Current co-workers. How awkward would it be to ignore a friend request from someone you see every day?
• We’ve lived together. No secrets there.
• Fellow graduate students. We were a close knit group.
• We’ve traveled together. Nothing bonds people more than traveling together.

After a while I had to expand those criteria. And now factors that increase the likelihood of sharing the secret handshake include:

• High school friends.
• Acquaintances who always gave off a good vibe.
• Teenage kids or younger siblings of my friends. Even though they all have 700 friends.
• The more mutual friends we have the better.
• We recently connected and they seem like someone I’d like to know more.
• People who write a note of greeting instead of just send the request.

So I guess that’s pretty much anyone. The only people I’ve ignored are those people who I don’t know and have never met. Or I barely know but can’t remember any kind of interaction with them. Also, people with 700 friends are obviously in it for the popularity contest, and I tend to ignore them, unless they’re kids of my friends. They can’t help it if they grew up in the age of social networking.

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Facebook 3.0
The next step for Facebook should be giving people levels of access. Right now, it’s just two levels. Either access to everything, or almost nothing at all. It’s not useful.

I’d like to see several circles of access. Like one for friends, co-workers, family, old classmates, etc. That way, embarrassing party photos could be limited to your drinking buddies. Interesting acquaintances you just met recently might have an introductory area of access. And these circles could be overlapping.

So many applications already do this in clumsy ways. There are Top Friends, Girl Friends, Dance Friends. It’s natural to want to make order out of the community of friends.

Otherwise, it’s just a mass of people milling around your Facebook house. Some people you want to have tea with in the living room. Others you want to laugh and drink wine with in the kitchen. There may be one or two you want to plop in the basement and shut the door. And you certainly don’t want to mix these crowds.

For a demographic analysis of my facebook friends you’re welcome to read:

The Gated Community

The Archetypal Friend

Race and Ethnicity

The Olympics Deconstructed

Posted on
9

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It’s the last day of the Olympics and as usual I have opinions.

Save Baseball
I just finished watching the sweaty-palmed 9th inning of the baseball game between Korea and Cuba for the gold. Korea was leading 3-2, but the Cubans had the bases loaded with only one out. The Korean catcher had just gotten thrown out of the game for arguing a pitch. And the starting pitcher was sent to the dugout after pitching a superb game.

Then the Cuban batter hit a grounder into a double play. Korea won, and that was another huge upset in an Olympics full of them. The Cubans had won gold four out of the five times that baseball has been an Olympic sport. That was a fun exciting game.

Sadly, that was the last Olympic baseball game since the sport was voted out of the next Olympics. There were a variety of reasons that the Olympic committee decided to boot baseball and softball out of the games. All of them are ridiculous.

One of the reasons cited was that the stadiums were costly to build and then never used again by the host countries. But it’s easy to turn it into another kind of playing field. And what about all the kayak slalom courses, the BMX bicycle piles of dirt, the equestrian fields? I doubt these facilities are used much too.

Baseball is one of the few sports played avidly in and dominated by Latin American countries. It’s played in sandlots by poor kids. It’s a democratic game, with many participants, drawing from many kinds of athletic skills. Baseball should be allowed to stay. But it won’t because the Europeans have never been able to dominate it.

Ditch the Boats and Horses
I began to think about the games that are less democratic, more difficult to participate in.
I think there should be limits on how expensive the equipment used in the sport is, and how difficult it is to acquire the equipment.

Take for instance equestrian events. First of all, it’s the horse that’s doing all the work. We might as well put in car racing into the Olympics. Second, who can afford to participate in this sport? A horse costs more than a luxury car. And did I mention it’s the horse that’s actually doing the jumping and running? If we’re going to do horses, why don’t we just do horse racing, cock fighting, and competitive bird calling?

Another expensive sport is sailing. Sailing? Really? How many countries can afford to send athletes, horses AND sailboats to the games? Perusing the participating countries, they are concentrated in Western Europe, North America and Australia. And how many people even in these countries can afford to ride horses or sail boats? I don’t know any one of my friends who can, and none of us are poor.

Equestrian and sailing. Get these sports out of the Olympics. Only the richest members of the richest countries can even think about joining in.

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle
There’s a second tier of sports requiring specialized, expensive equipment as well. I’m okay with rowing, cycling, and even kayaking. But I’m not okay with having 14, 18, and 16 events in each of these. I figure if you have a short, medium and long distance race, with variations of individual and team, men and women, then that adds up to 12. Anything more is excessive.

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The Rich and the Repressive
Track and field has the most events at 47. But I’m okay with these. They require almost no equipment (although I don’t know where I would get a javelin, a vaulting pole, or the thing they throw in the hammer), and they are quite varied.

At 34, I don’t quite get why there are so many events in swimming. What I do know is that a few years back Australia built hundreds of Olympic size swimming pools all around the country and now they’re a swimming powerhouse. Almost half of their 44 medals are in swimming.

So government commitment and good facilities is pretty important. And it’s only a country of about 23 million people. North Korea has the same number of people, but there’s no way they can even afford to build one swimming pool. Their swimming medal count is 0.

Basically, Australia decided there were a lot of medals to be had in swimming and went for it. That’s good strategy. China is also focusing on individual sports where there are many medals to be had and now they’ve won the most gold. But why do these countries need to be at the top of the medal count? Does it make their society better? Do other countries cooperate with them more if they sweep the fencing medals?

Rich countries definitely have an advantage in the Olympics. A rack of those new Speedo swimsuits costs more than the GDP of Haiti. The rich countries are also able to import the best athletes from poor countries. So it’s great to see a country like Jamaica do well. The Jamaicans send their athletes to train in the US but bring them back to compete for Jamaica. That’s a good strategy for poorer countries.

Nations with authoritative governments with highly organized sports infrastructures and the ability to abduct children at a young age to inhumanely train them into good comrade athletes do pretty well too. The former Eastern bloc countries are still reaping the rewards. Cuba is a milder example of this. China is perfecting this.

The rich and the repressive. They win all the medals. And they rank numbers 1 and 2 in the medal count.

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The Alternative Medal Count
I’ve often wondered what the true medal count would be based on the medals won in proportion to a country’s population, or how rich they are. That’s why I’m so excited about Bill Mitchell’s alternative medal count. Mitchell, an Australian economics professor has made such calculations. You have to check out his website: http://www.billmitchell.org/sport/medal_tally_2008.html

Based on how rich a country is, using its GDP, North Korea ranks number one, getting the most medals for the size of its terribly small economy. Zimbabwe and Jamaica follow. Most developed countries rank low.

If you compare the GDP per capita to the number of medals won, then North Korea still leads, but China is number two, and Ethiopia is next.

If you base the medal count on a nations overall population, then Jamaica heads the list, with Slovenia and Australia ranking behind.

Mitchell also makes rankings based on the team size and by gender. It’s a fabulous project and worth checking out how he made his calculations.

The Ridiculed Sports
There seem to be a handful of sports that are casually ridiculed in the American press. I decided to take a closer look at these sports and see for myself.

One of the most ridiculed is synchronized swimming. After watching the competition, I decided that it’s not ridiculous at all. It involves a lot of power, stamina and control, and yeah, synchronization. It also requires a good choreographer. The same with rhythmic gymnastics. That was just breathtaking and entertaining. It’s like competitive Cirque du Soleil.

And enough about making fun of table tennis and badminton. These are sports dealing with pure reflex, super speed and quickness. Best of all, these are sports that are easy to participate in, requiring only relatively cheap equipment.

The more democratic the Olympics is the more it will balance out the dominance of the few countries that pay its way or repress its citizens into nationalistic glory. More importantly, it would encourage more people to participate in sports, rather than be alienated by the odd spectacle of sailboats and horses winning medals for their masters.