Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Social Class and this Website
Any connections? The internet is relatively free of speech patterns, dress, whatever may persist as notes of class in 21st Century Britain. But does it have any relevance in the context of a site like this? Not an idle question. It's come up as an issue already - which took me by surprise. What do you think?
Tags for Forum Posts: HoL inclusiveness, class, website
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by kerry winterflood on
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My knee jerk reaction would be that class does have an impact (or not, as the case may be) to a site like this. I wonder how many people on this site are of white middle class backgrounds and from the more 'affluent' areas of Haringey as opposed to the poorer parts which have more concentrated social problems that many people are reluctant to talk about?
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Permalink Reply by empyrean_aisles on
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There is some really interesting work being done on the social class aspect to social networking sites by a young US researcher called Danah Boyd. I saw it here first
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2111657,00.html
but her own site goes into greater depth, and shows that she's not making crass generalisations but trying to understand a pattern that she's observed in a lot of face-to-face interviews with people who use the sites.
http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
She's looked at Facebook and MySpace, and while I realise this Ning site is something different again, some of her observations talking with users of Facebook & MySpace did seem to ring true for other networking sites I've seen.
Going back to look at her page I see that even talking about the taboo topic of class in America seems to have earned her huge amounts of cyberflak!
(... dang ... guess I just gave my own class away by revealing myself as a Guardian reader ...)
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Very interesting. I can imagine that she'd have got alot of flak. I was tentative about raising the issue on this site, but was so surpised (at my own lack of forethought?) to encounter class-based reactions to what's going on here, I just hadda give voice. Thanks for the links.
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Permalink Reply by StephenBln on
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Dear administrator .. may I add my Working Class video again..??
It sums up exactly how we grew up on the gardens side of N4..
The other Tottenham Video I added touches the subject, but from the other angle.
As an ex-pat* (*I hate that word), the first thing I notice when I come back to the UK are the class differences.. Outside the UK it's more to do with who has plenty of dosh and who doesn't.. But in the UK, there's the double edged sword of dialect/accent/language.. which is really difficult to shake off... I for one, still have my Tottenham/Harringay accent even after all these years away.. and I notice on occasions how some people react to it... when I mention "mioolk" instead of "millk".. which certainly doesn't happen in Germany when speaking a dialect/accent here.
I've also noticed how the London accent/dialect has changed over the last twenty years and how it is now spoken by younger residents.. and how much impact the Caribbean residents have made on it.
I suppose I've gone a bit off course from "Class" but as I said "Class and Accent" are intertwined in the UK.
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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on
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An interesting discussion but on the social class of the people using this website - it's inevitable that there will be a lot of white, middle class people with a reasonable income signed up. We can afford the computer and internet connection. It's one of the ironies of moving into an age of e-communication that wealth divisions will make access to information more polarised. A few hundred quid for the means to get on line is very different from 50p for a newspaper.
How is it overcome? Not an easy question to answer. Where my mother lives, the local authority (Sunderland) have won government money to get internet access into the homes of people who can't afford it. On the surface this sounds great but a lot of my mother's immediate neighbours have fairly basic levels of literacy (having left school at 13 in the 1930's). So bunging a PC into their living rooms isn't really going to help on its own.
On accents, when first moved to London in 1978 I had a very strong Sunderland accent (note - this is called a Mackem accent and NOT a Geordie accent!). It gradually slipped away for two reasons - beng sick of people asking me to repreat myself and wanting to fit in. Regional accents are wonderful but there is an unfortunate habit amongst English people to judge you by the way you pronounce your words.
Tara for now marras.
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I understand the generational gap in "E communication" provision, but is there really a gap in the amount of white and black, middle and working class users in the UK?
I thought one of the benefits of the internet is that it allows universal access to information.
The world is getting more complicated. In my late 1950s childhood in Harringay it was all quite easy.. we knew our place.. and kept quiet.. :o)
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Permalink Reply by Clive Carter on
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beng sick of people asking me to repreat myself
Michael: This makes sense. Partly due to being a colonial, I take a utiliatiran view to the spoken word and communication is the only thing that matters. I couldn't care less about class or regional accent or voice (except I'm a sucker for an appealing female voice) but what I do care about is diction, which is something distinct. Sometimes I find myself having to ask someone to repeat a word or words several times and its only because of lack of understanding. I fear they think I'm being rude or taking the piss. But if they really want an intelligible answer from me, I have to have heard them clearly.
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