Facebook Study- Profile Analysis

The facebook that I studied was a white male around the age of 19. His facebook listed him as interested in women along with a single relationship status. Already, by looking at the first couple lines of the facebook page, you know that he is interested in women and is heterosexual. His facebook read of looking for a relationship, friendship, and random play. His political views are shown as conservative. His facebook and mine have 15 mutual friends in common. He has 169 friends from his college being Ashland University. Six of his friends from his school looked to be African American descent, only by me looking at the pictures, the rest were white or white descent. His activities are listed as wrestling, working out, reading, fishing, doing wheelies on his bike, and camping. Already someone could conclude that he is a competitive, athletic man who loves doing male activities. His music interest includes tenacious D, 50 Cent, The Game, Snoop Dogg, etc. It seems that he is interested in rap music or hip-hop. His groups include Stop Hilary Clinton: (One million Strong AGAINST Hilary), and the group slogan is “To develop a network of online volunteers to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming President!” There are 144,827 members in the group. His ABOUT ME states “I love wrestling, hanging out with my friends and having a good time. I’m down for just about anything, Except for gay sex. I ♥Brady Quinn, Grady Sizemore, Eric Wedge, and PRONK. I do work son.” Here we see that he is racial against homophobic. From the looks of his facebook, he seems to be more middle class All- American boy. He looks the exact ways we researched during the Abercrombie and Fitch assignment. He is wearing mostly the same clothes as their company makes.

Tara McPherson “I’ll Tale My Stand in Dixie-Net”

In Tara McPherson’s article “I’ll Take My Stand in Dixie-Net: White Guys, the South, and Cyberspace” she confronts websites such as Dixie-Net, The Confederate Network, and The Heritage Preservation Association on their acts of racism through cyberspace. McPherson writes of how she discovered websites such as these through searching museum when finding a link for the Confederate Embassy in Washington D.C. She then followed the neo-Confederate trail through cyberspace. As she described it was a way of “prosthetic living” and “rapid alterations of identity”. Cyber communities such as the neo-Confederates were making reference to place which in time made reference to race and racism. These were the identities of Southern masculinity through the language of the civil rights struggle. Many people questioned McPherson’s research and wondered how she could stand all of the investigations on such racist people. When she was exploring the Virtual Dixie, the websites primarily labeled their meaning behind “preserving Southern heritage” and often referred themselves to “Southern Nationalist” or “Southrons”. Many of them even practiced in southern heritage groups offline. They referred to “heritage violations” as attempts to ban or remove symbols of Confederacy and especially confederate flags. Many of these sites advocated Southern separatism or nationalism, sometimes through secession. They also made clear the vision of a “new confederacy” and a virtual secession at precisely the moment that Black Americans are moving to the South in greater numbers than they are leaving it for the first time since the civil war. This virtual battle still exists and is being fought to defend a very specific Southern heritage that is predominantly white. Whiteness itself is not mentioned in these websites, Anglo, Celtic and European are. McPherson writes that “these men struggle to find ways of securing the meaning of whiteness”. According to McPherson, to her the definition of Southern Heritage is conservative, white and mostly male.
I think McPherson describes why these cyberspace groups are so popular is because they are completely hidden from society. Unless you are specifically searching for rebel groups such as these, the chances of you running into something so racial as these websites is almost impossible. It gives the advocates of these websites, a way to show their racism without the possibility of someone seeing it. There is no one telling the creators or users of the cyberspaces to quit what they are doing. There is absolutely no stopping the things that are done on the internet.