Member-only story
This was originally done for an assignment for Ethan Zuckerman’s class Fixing Social Media.
Hi, I’m Nina. I was born and raised in Arizona, USA. I am a cisgender, white passing woman in her twenties who primarily dates men. I speak English and Spanish and have a smart phone. I have no visible disability and at a US ladies size 12 I am not actively discriminated against for my size. I have no children and I am a graduate student at MIT.
Basically, I am very privileged and especially from a data and media collection standpoint — modern media is basically catered towards me.
I can look on almost any mainstream social network and see people who look like me. If you are in the United States, I encourage you to look at your Instagram Discovery. I bet you can find plenty of white girls my age on there. Look at the trends on Twitter. There are a lot of white and hypereducated trends and voices on the national level (after all, it is election season and Elizabeth Warren is affiliated with Harvard). Listen to Tik Tok — you’re going to hear English and Spanish quite often.
In entertainment I can count on actors and actresses that look like me and have similar conveyed values and aesthetics to me. In music I have a huge variety of artists that are singing narratives I could be a part of.
And while representation has improved, we are far from any sort of level playing field. More representative and diverse images are still not the default in a lot of cases.
