Technology supposedly says a lot about your station in life. i-Phones are for folks who like a lot of bells and whistles while Blackberry’s are for the serious businessman. Macs are for cool urbane techies while PC’s are for stodgy old office
Technology supposedly says a lot about your station in life. iPhones are for folks who like a lot of bells and whistles while Blackberrys are for the serious businessman. Macs are for cool urbane techies while PCs are for stodgy old office drones. New research shows that being a MySpace or a Facebook person says a lot about you, too. I’m a Facebook guy, and according to recent studies that makes me a snobby middle class white kid.
Dr. Danah Boyd, a Microsoft researcher and social networks scholar has put out a recent study showing that MySpace and Facebook are beginning to diverge by class and race. MySpace and Facebook are beginning to look a lot more like America and maybe that’s not such a good thing.
Over 55 percent of American teens between the ages of 12 – 17 are on one or both of these sites so just about everybody ought to know what’s going on between the two top dogs in the social networking world.
MySpace launched in 2003 and immediately become popular with teens interested in music, art and design. The site’s flashy colors, and ability to carry lots of music and videos on an individual page launched the careers of celebrities and singers like Tila Tequila, Asher Roth and Cassidy.
Facebook was founded in 2004 by a couple of Harvard undergrads looking to meet girls. Initially the site was limited to college students, but upon opening it up to anyone with a valid e-mail address in 2006 the site has surged in popularity, finally eclipsing MySpace this summer with over 60 million unique visits a month. The founders have become internet legends and a best-selling book “The Accidental Billionaires” and a movie are coming out about them soon.
But according to Boyd the rise in Facebook’s popularity isn’t a result of popular trends but actually a form of Internet “White Flight.” In a recent presentation to the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, Boyd relayed survey findings that showed middle-class white kids were choosing Facebook or MySpace or abandoning their MySpace accounts for Facebook because the site had become too “hood” or “ghetto.”
It is true that Blacks and Latinos are more likely to use MySpace than Facebook, but the idea that middle-class white teens are abandoning the site in droves because of this is a cause for alarm for activists like Boyd.
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