Last weeks discussions, seeing that we dealt a lot with gender and race, involved the question of equality online. Although many people initially saw the Internet as a space of freedom, equality, and anonymity, as we have somewhat come a consensus, this assumption is incorrect because problems such as racialization and bias, especially when it comes to formulating algorithms and structure, continue to exist. Inequality is very visible on the Internet, and “it is necessary to promote research that grasps that not all Digital Natives are equal,” state Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham in their survey “Digital Natives with a Cause?” This idea within Shah and Abraham’s work seems very obvious to me, maybe because I fall into the identity of Digital Native myself, or maybe because of what we have learned in this class; although, as an active and former participant on various social networks, I have noticed the inequality surfaced through artistic elitism, ethnic exceptionalism, and hierarchical systems established on or off the online space before taking this class.

Recently with my study of the online community of Letterbox’d, I have noticed certain hierarchical trends. Although this site does a good job at eliminating issues of race and gender through minimizing profile description to only one box, which most users use to describe their interest in cinema, rather than their age, gender, occupation, or other details concerning identity. Although the personal is not the focus of this site, their remains inequality through hierarchies that establish via popularity created on and off the site. Users who review on other websites are more likely to have more followers therefore more likely to have more people reading their reviews and also more likes on their reviews. The establishment of this hierarchical system is closely linked with popularity, although users who rate their films on a harder scale , rather than rate all films they watch positively, tend to also be respected more because of their esoteric taste. This means that users who rate films “easier” or that fall into the category of mainstream tend to have a small following. Despite that this hierarchy is established in more appropriate ways (rather than gender or race), it still highlights the illusion of equality online.