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

[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.