What I found most interesting about the notion of different motives to create content online (as demonstrated in the Jeong and Correa article) is that creativity reveals things in its very inception about what motivated the person to create it. What this article suggests is that race is a factor in determining the motivation. I’m not sure how one could know why that is, other than by maybe looking at the various ideological underpinnings of how race has been interpreted and discussed rhetorically throughout the history of a culture. It would be interesting if the participants in this study were asked questions about their perceptions about their race, how they thought others perceived them, if they feel connected to a larger community of people categorized by race, and what that category or community of people is culturally like—meaning what rituals, expressions, inside jokes, or symbols are recognized by the group.
I find it fascinating to study how new media enables previously disparate people to connect to each other as they seek after (the apparent human drive of) belonging, to connect, be a part of something greater. It never occurred to me that race could underlie a motivating factor or even represent creative differences as in self expression or self promotion. What is also I think at the heart of this study is that which separates races as a result of seclusion. If communities of race form cultural groups that “learn” what it means to be their race (due to ideological orientations), how does one then “learn” what it means to be not a part of someone’s race? Perhaps a study could be done that focuses more on the instances of races such as white that engage in self expression and evaluate participants to see if they were aware that it wasn’t as much of a “white” thing to do. Are creators of online content racially conscious of performing or creating that which is more predominant in communities of other races?
The point made in your second chapter reads almost like a “peer preasure” scenario. If my ethnic heritage is “a” and I’m aware that “a”‘s are expected to produce this kind of content, am I more likely to also produce that kind of content as a way of fitting in? It will be interesting if sterotypes develope out of that kind of behavioral observation.
I do think we have to be very careful about drawing conclusions about race as a motivating factor because they had very small focus groups for each racial group. Their findings raise interesting questions, for sure, but without replicating this on a larger scale I would not treat these motivations as set in stone.
Other larger scale research has found differences in the way college students in different racial/ethnic group present themselves online, see for example this article: Ethno-Racial Identity Displays on Facebook (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01498.x/abstract).
We don’t know if we had a mixed focus group, and a minority respondent brought up a point, if the white students would have agreed or not. We also don’t have any way in this study to tease out the effects of socioeconomic status on motivations to create content.