A social divide, not digital

I've found myself in the middle of countless 'digital divide' debates in recent years with people in the voluntary and community sectors trumpeting social media as either a solution to all of our problems, or a middle-class fad that only serves to amplify the voices of the relatively privileged.

After being on both sides at various times, I'm now comfortable making the case for elements of both arguments, but have also been looking at the divide from a different perspective altogether.

While access to technology is still a significant issue, it is quickly being made less relevant, by both the prevalence of Facebook and Twitter, and the accessibility of smart phones (in both the poorest communities in the UK, and much of the Global South). What remains, I'd argue, is a primarily social divide.

The biggest problem for me lies in our tendency to create social circles of people like us. This happens online, as much as it does in the real world - we find people who have similar interests, experiences, and existing links to our own peer groups - and then are still surprised when most of our friends (or followers) lack diversity.

There's much talk of the 'Twitterati', or the middle-class intelligentsia dominating the online world. This is assumed wisdom (particularly in the voluntary sector), but its limited truth is likely more reflective of the social divisions mentioned above, than of actual Twitter usage.

There's evidence from America that Black Americans are proportionately much more likely to use Twitter than White Americans ... but White America does most of the writing about Twitter (particularly in the mainstream press), and has little idea this is the case, as very few Black Americans appear in their personal feeds.

The positive flipside of all of this, is that unlike in the real world, where we might have to end up stuck on a cramped bus in an unexpected conversation, or challenge our own comfort zones by walking into an unfamiliar pub, barber shop, or other hang-out of those different from us, now the divide can begin to be bridged with something as simple as an RT.

When I Re-Tweet someone I follow from the hip-hop community, a whole bunch of people see that Tweet who have no idea that a) hip-hop has a massive presence on Twitter, and b) that the hip-hop community has a lot to say about issues that they care about. Some may start following them, which may in turn open doors to a worldview they have had no previous connection to, but are now interested.

This is truly groundbreaking stuff, and is the great value of social media I've yet to see more than a few organisations actively embrace. It's never been so easy to find out what people whose experiences of the world are very different to our own, think and feel. Often the perspectives of an organisation's staff and would-be service users can be as different any two people on Twitter, and as such, they may never cross paths in either the online world, or that of a geographic community. To me, this is where both our greatest challenges and opportunities lie in relation to the social web.

Yes, some divides still exist, but if we hold back at this point (rather than simply be conscious and provide non-online contact where it's still actively needed), we'll be quickly left behind by those who we thought we were waiting-up for. Not only that, we'll likely ignore people we should connect with, who are already online, but are 'running in different circles' to our own.

The 'digital divide' is only superficially digital; until we start to unpick its social dimensions, many of our organisations may continue to have online conversations among themselves. Our organisational efforts need to move outside of our own comfort zones. The online world is just doing us the favour of making our social divisions more transparent than they've ever been ... at least if we choose to look through them.

Liam Barrington-Bush 'helps organisations to be more like people' with Concrete Solutions C.I.C. He is @hackofalltrades on Twitter and is usually up for a good bit of chatter about social change, social technology or loud music of countless genres.

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