Race and (Online) Sites of Consumption

Abstract

Due to the hybrid nature of material and digital spaces, more decisions are being made online that have a direct effect on offline actions. This is increasingly true for the locations where people are choosing to consume goods and services such as restaurants or retail outlets. The growth of the GeoWeb—personal data uploaded to certain Internet sites such as social media platforms—has established large databases showing the locations where people go during their daily lives for the purposes of consumption. One such repository is the social network, Foursquare, which people use to display their physical location to their friends, digitally. In looking more closely at datasets from Foursquare overlaid with information on racial characteristics in census tracts, a pattern emerges: predominantly African‐American tracts are increasingly left out of this type of online participation. This paper will compare Foursquare data from several U.S. cities to discuss the implications of being left off of social media platforms tied to economic activity. It is likely that these virtually invisible areas will have a direct impact on the economic vitality of their physical counterparts

Key words:

• consumption
• race
• social media
• GeoWeb
• Foursquare