printThe following is an excerpt from “Home-Free on Facebook? Think Again,” now on WND.COM:
“… certain habitual social meddlers have tried to imply that the Facebook forum is racist.
In particular, a public-spirited ditz named Danah Boyd, who is ‘Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, and a Research Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.’
A while back, Boyd was given a significant cameo on CNN to discuss a deeply silly ‘research’ paper she had slapped together.
Boyd’s narrative, cloaked in the raiment of ‘research,’ is titled ‘White Flight in Networked Publics: How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook.’ Sic and sic again: Yes, not even Microsoft’s woefully inadequate grammar and syntax checks have caught up with such linguistic infelicities.
Boyd’s infantile efforts were published by Routledge in the Digital Race Anthology.
The banal Ms. Boyd claims to have smashed our ‘techno—utopian belief’ that the internet has eradicated undesirable divisions. All this was accomplishes not with evidence of rank racism, but with a smashing postmodern word salad—-‘spatial referents,’ ‘taste markers,’ ‘reproduction of social categories,’ on and on.”
Yes, “I am now convinced that American society will collapse upon itself like a black hole under the weight of a young (mostly WASP), idiocracy rising”
The complete column, now on WND.COM, is “Home-Free on Facebook? Think Again.”
My new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon. The “Temporarily out of stock” notice on Amazon is a function of a “temporary” publisher-printer glitch. This should be corrected shortly. Place your order, and the always-awesome Amazon will ship the book as soon as humanly possible.
Readily available is the lower-cost Kindle copy of “The Cannibal.” And you do not have to own a Kindle to download your copy of “The Cannibal”—all you need is a PC or a hand-held device (iPad or phone). This hyperlink describes the free Amazon software application for these devices. You don’t need a gadget to read “Into the Cannibal’s-Pot” on Kindle.
Help this work’s mission, and raise awareness of the issues covered in depth and detail in the book, by posting your reviews to Amazon. And you need not have have purchased the book from Amazon to review it on the site.
UPDATE (July 29): Kennon Gilson writes on WND’s Facebook thread:
“Thanks for the article. … Statistically, both women and minorities are over-represented in the Libertarian movement.
Like
Ilana Mercer replies: “You offer no proof for your assertion, KG. The lonely plight of libertarian men—at least hard-core libertarians who are strong on self-defense, guns, property rights, and against welfarism—has been a long-standing joke in the community. Of course, ‘Libertarians Lite,’ who conflate liberty with Gaga and Glee: they get plenty of dates.
There is a lot of irony here.
It was an important part of the original hacker spirit that people should be judged by their hacking and not superficial criteria (which include sex, race, nationality, age, and so on). The Internet was, consciously or unconsciously, designed to facilitate this, since it transmits only the hacking, it shows only what you do, not what you are.
But of course, the majority of people don’t like this. They want to be persons beyond what they are doing, and want to be recognized as such. So, along came “social networking sites” and OpenID and whatnot. We know, again, who the other person is, and all the old resentments are back again.
Hey, the market does not always do what Marketing Departments project. Remember FoMoCo’s EDSEL…the in-automobile HOT DOG COOKER…and all other one time wonders. Cool technology, ubiquitous communication connections, and utopian dreams do not make a color blind, culturally equal market place. It’s just another social engineering fantasy gone awry and more proof that if private businesses are not infallible with their ideas, then central government planning ideas will not work either. Le Monde va lui-meme.
Hacks like Ms Boyd never have an original thought. They are buried by concepts acccepted by all the right poeple and work long and hard to come up with new angles for the same old stuff. Race, class and gender are the buzz words that get one recognized in those circles so over educated boobs like Boyd can sail on and be the darlings of the elite set. Harvard? Big deal. I would just as soon listen to a honey badger grunt over a field phone as to be enlightened by one of those phoneys.
Microsoft Research? I just think that this stuff is representative of the intellectual bankruptcy of the universities.
Your article was very well written. I loved your troll, her originality is right in there with the other liberals who show the world that the human race is not worth redeeming.
No, the bitch is onto something. W/o the net, I could never spin my evil web. Just one esoteric bait-and-switch site of mine gets more hits in 24 hours than I could have had readers in a lifetime of book-writing.