Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.

[randomness]

From http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html:

It starts:

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.

and concludes:

"Anyhow, I don't know where to go with this, but I wanted to get it out there. So here it is. MySpace and Facebook are new representations of the class divide in American youth. Le sigh."

(Full disclosure: I have a Facebook account, but not one on MySpace.)

Comments

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

Which site is which class? I have never visited anybody's page on either site.

[mmeubiquitous.livejournal.com]

MySpace is lower/working class, and FaceBook is the upper/educated class. According to her.

[jtdiii.livejournal.com]

So where does that leave LJ? :)

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

Most to the point, where does it leave those of us who are no longer teenagers? Or does no-one care about that?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the vast majority of Facebook users are current undergrads or high-school students, or recent graduates. I can't really speak to the population of MySpace users, but I know that on Facebook, people whose class year is before 2003 are few and far between. So it's reasonable that she looked at MySpace and Facebook and studied people who are current undergrads or high-school students.

I do think it would be interesting to study older users, but I don't think it's unreasonable that she didn't.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Oh, and she also said this in her blog comments (http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/06/24/viewing_america.html):

"1. I'm talking about high school class divisions. College practices and adult practices are quite different and I cannot make any claims about class divisions between the two sites when it comes to adult adoption. There is a rite of passage for going into college and for as long as Facebook has been around, going to college has meant joining FB even if you were on MS. This has not seemed to change.

"4. One of the things that I know that I did was conflate college-bound locally marginalized teens (i.e. geeks, queers, subculturally identified) with non-college-bound broadly marginalized teens. The more I think about it, I should've split the two rather than lumping them under "subaltern" together. The former are going to join Facebook when they go to college. The latter currently won't, even if they go to community college. I still need to work on that."

I can certainly agree with 4.

[dianec42.livejournal.com]

It took me like 4 tries to parse "MS" as MySpace. (Multiple sclerosis? Microsoft? Mortal strike...?)

[starheptagon.livejournal.com]

http://www.homeonthestrange.com/view.php?ID=195

[cerridwynn.livejournal.com]

Interesting observations... though i wonder if myspace and facebook are really comparable. I don't know how most teenagers or undergrads use these sites but i know i use my lj account (which i think of as akin to myspace, no? only older and less flashy???) and facebook accounts for different reasons. Lj is a blog, sorta, with silly memes and life updates, etc, while Facebook is for social networking (a la friendster).

So i think there's a bit of an apples-to-oranges problem, no? Not that i don't think the observations about class are apt...

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I tend to agree there. They're different kinds of sites.

Nonetheless, I also agree with you regarding the class observations. I'm not sure her comparison is valid, but the questions raised are interesting.

[marmota.livejournal.com]

I saw that article recently as well, but barely have time to post about it let alone follow any threads. I found her comments on social class distinction versus income class distinction very resonant. Given that my own life has strong trade labor roots with exposure to immigrant culture, but I've ended up surrounded by for the most part by academics and desk laborers (and becoming one myself), I can say I've crossed over and am somewhat stuck between several different class boundaries. I think it would be a more interesting topic to discuss in a group in person.

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

I can't say I'm surprised by this divide, since I know who started Facebook (my god that man should NOT be the public face of his company, he doesn't seem to know how not to condescend), and I know MySpace has been way more open to the general public, up until just recently when Facebook caught up, and has been a good site for groups like indie bands and rollerderby leagues to have spaces, because it's more open.

Facebook tries to keep from registering individuals who don't actually exist, or groups as individuals, though they don't seem to have figured out that Grigoriy Efimovich Rasputin isn't actually a Yale student yet, which is fine with me. In academic librarianship Facebook usage for keeping track of people you only see once a year, or keeping in touch for committee work, is really taking off.

[bookly.livejournal.com]

I have accounts with both. My FaceBook account has been pretty rewarding; my MySpace account has added nothing to my life except a few emails from high school peers I'd really much rather forget and a bunch of email informing me that I have new email (invariably spam) in my MySpace inbox.

That said, I've seen a few MySpace pages by artists (of whatever type) and been really impressed by them. If I found myself one day with nothing to do and the thought of MySpace entered my brain, I'm sure I could happily poke around at various pages for the better part of an afternoon. Not sure I'd find FaceBook that gripping.