Are You Discriminating Online?

Subtitle: The guy with green spiked hair will probably pass me by to sit near my 20 year old daughter - aka the chick with the sexy Mo Rocca* rectangular black glasses

In the Everyday Economist Blog, the author writes about  The Bus of Discrimination, telling this story

"Everyday I ride the bus to work. Recently I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon.  As people choose seats they reveal their prejudices.

". . ..  once every row has a person in the outermost seat, new passangers on the bus tend to walk to the back of the bus hoping for an empty seat.  As they realize the probability of an empty seat is low they quickly find a seat.

". . .people find seats of people like them selves. Hispanic women tend to find a hispanic woman to sit with.  A black woman with a black woman.  A white middle aged man will find another white middle-aged man."

Thinking about it, I wondered if my friends, fellow bloggers, entrepreneurs and artists couldn't be accused of doing the same thing every day.

And the answer is that of course we do. Sociology101 textbooks will back that up. People tend to have positive impressions of people who they perceive to be like themselves.

And on a bus - or online - our first impressions - and thus the knowledge we have about these people with which we might identify - is rather limited. On a bus we rely on our eyes to find someone "like" us. The guy with green spiked hair will probably not pick me (aka the grey haired granny) but will pass me by to hang out near my 20 year old daughter (the chick with the rectangular black glasses and black boots).

And online entrepreneurs like to hang out with other people who will be a good audience for our ideas.

Which puts me, for example, in an interesting category. I'm grandmother, solo-preneur and confirmed blogging evangelist who just happens to also be an artist and designer. There are not a lot of artists, not to mention grannies, who want to talk about blogging. Or listen to me talk about blogging.

Yup - a definite oddball. And is it just coincidence that Brad Paisley's version of ZZ Top's Sharp Dressed Man (from Time Well Wasted) has just popped up at the top of my playlist?

People like me wind up doing a lot of talking to empty air and closed ears. But most of the time we just start gravitating to people who are more like us. To people who give us positive feedback. To people who contribute something to the conversation.

And it should not come as a surprise to anyone that the readers of the Artsy Asylum blog wind up not to be artists for the most part.

• Some of you are the same kind of nice people I'd meet at my art openings and receptions;
• people who like art or people who want to know what goes on behind the scenes in an artist's life.
• And then there's another cluster who are the thinkers, the tinkerers, the abstractionists, geeks and curious souls of the world.
• They wind up being - for the most part - people who like ideas.

Do you think this is why I seem to have more interaction with bloggers these days than with artists?

I wonder where I'd decide to sit on that bus. And I wonder the same thing about the people who follow my blog.

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Thanks to my fellow LinkedIn Blogger at the Everyday Economist for starting this conversation.

And to my fellow Washingtonian Mo Rocca for:

• the glasses,
• his hilarious visits to NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! and
• for saying "Clinton the philanderer and Bush the bumbler (Version 1.0) were irresistible but nearly two-dimensional. Bush 2.0 is more complicated. You have to work harder."

 

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Comments

[Susan Reynolds]

Absolutely. Hey, I may be not the grannie I claim to be at all. I could be a 15 year old from Spain just claiming to be who and where I am.

So online do you think we pick people who "sound" like us? Or do you think it's more like "sound like people who we would like to be like?"

The other thing people do online is hang around people who they can learn from. On the other hand, on your morning bus route you can't tell what kind of an expert - or non-expert - someone is by looking at them so that correlation doesn't work.

But I'll bet there are other ways in which the net is similar to the bus.

I think it's a very interesting topic you brought up on your blog and I look forward to reading more.

[The Everyday Economist]

Indeed, I imagine one could do a doctorate thesis based on how people build communitees online with blogs and forums and how discrimination plays a role.

One way the internet is VERY different from the bus is that we cannot disciminate based on the same criteria. I may be black, hispanic, or even female and no one would know. They would choose me for what I say and how I say it. The same can be said for you and anyone else blogging (unless they post a picture).