Myspace vs. Facebook: Class Wars

danah boyd (site and blog) published an paper entitled “Viewing American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace” which talks about the growing class divide between users of Facebook (who tend to come from a more privileged class background) and users of Myspace ( who tend to come from a more working class or lower-income background) - I found her paper based on a tip from Joshua who’d recently read it. She also responds to critiques of her essay and her paper was picked up and covered by Guardian UK. Here’s an except of Viewing American Class Divisions:

“Over the last six months, I’ve noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That’s only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it’s not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Who goes where gets kinda sticky… probably because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been traipsing through the country talking to teens and I’ve been seeing this transition for the past 6-9 months but I’m having a hard time putting into words. Americans aren’t so good at talking about class and I’m definitely feeling that discomfort. It’s sticky, it’s uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don’t have the language for marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally descriptive, but in being so, it’s also hugely problematic. I don’t have the language to get at what I want to say, but I decided it needed to be said anyhow. I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all and be done with it, but instead, I’m going to face the stickiness and see if I can get my thoughts across. Hopefully it works.”

Political organizations who use social networking sites should definitely take this into consideration and make sure that they have a holistic online presence which reaches a broad audience. The many social networking and other sites that exist on the net provide us all with tremendous opportunities. Sites like YouTube, Flickr and more are leading the a massive wave of information democratization in ways that none of us can yet fully understand or harness. OpenId will soon provide a way to take your identity with you all across the web. When using all of these new technological and web advances, we should be conscious about how our online identities have real world consequences - including for our political work and social change.

p.s. apparently boyd has received death threats since publishing this paper.