Your construct of teens as congregating with "people like us" bothers me because it seems overly broad. Based on my experience talking to teens online, they move to online venues first through word-of-mouth from f2f friends and acquaintances. Once they are online, many younger teens only converse with people they know f2f...the media has done a good job in scary parents about the "dangers" online, who then scare their kids. Older teens may expand their circles into the circles of their friends, hence the popularity of second level friending. While a few, more experimental, teens may converse with random partners...many try this once or twice but don't continue the practice. A few will continue it often for less acceptable purposes - bullying, flaming, or "hooking up." Movement between online spaces may take place because of recommendations from f2f friends, or online only friends. Some adventurous types, or most 15-year old boys, will check out new spaces based on news coverage or random searches. But like most forays into the dark side, these are usually fishing expeditions rather then gateways to extensive use of new spaces. In other words, they may check out new spaces, they may even take up a temporary residence in such spaces, but total movement of their online "home" is tied to the location - or relocation - of primary f2f friends. So at it's simplest and most basic form, when teens enter an online space initially it is for "people known to me" who of course may be "people like me" but implies a different level of specificity. I must admit that I have found Bourdieu to be only partially applicable to adolescent spaces. In applying his theories I have to use a "small world" approach first. With teens their primary concerns are with the social hierarchy of their f2f world. Unlike adults, they are not as concerned that everyone they meet - or cross paths with - recognize their social standing. They are, however, very concerned that their social standing, stands out among their peers...their classmates and friends at their high school, in their neighborhood, and in their acquaintance pools. I believe this is because many of their social worlds are still very small towns where they see the same peers at school, socially, on teams, etc. Their social circles tend to have much more overlap then do the social circles of many adults. In all my work I use adolescent development theory as my true underpinning because I have found even without consciously using it we still end up proving that it works, i.e. the average 15-year-old boy is more adventurous than and less tied to social conventions then the average 15-year-old girl. However this may change during various developmental periods with the adventurousness see-sawing between the sexes. Without an understanding of adolescent development theory, I have seen researchers attribute characteristics to online interactions that rather then being unusual or motivated by their use of online spaces are normal teen developmental stages that if we were to follow that young person 24/7 we would see enacted with their f2f friends, their teachers, and their parents. To tie adolescent development into the MySpace/Facebook discussion. I have found that at an experimental stage teens move to what is "new". So for most of my adolescent research population (10-19) Facebook was not a factor since prior to the launch of their high school section in Sept. 2005, the only college and university email address holders had access to Facebook. So from it's inception, in 2003, MySpace has allowed access to non-academic teens. That gave MySpace a critical two-year jump on Facebook with those not yet in college or university, in truth the "two-year" jump is misleading since not all U.S. institutions of higher education were allowed access to Facebook from the beginning. So is it surprising that their is an economic and ethnic divide between the sites...it shouldn't be if you have even a passing acquaintance with statistic on college/university attendance based on family of origin economic status and ethnicity. Will the divide hold true now that Facebook allows access to anyone with an email address? Give it another year of so and we shall see. Lois Ann Scheidt Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington IN USA Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and IUPUC, Columbus IN USA Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com Quoting Jason Wilson <jason_a_wilson@yahoo.com.au>:
Hi Andy and all,
Thanks for the question.
First I'd reiterate what I'm trying to account for: a specific, well-heeled, well-educated demographic is making the switch to Facebook, while other people stay where they are, and others still continue to join MySpace. In addition, other specific groups are heading to other services entirely, e.g. American teens to Xanga. I would argue that "tipping points" and "usability" arguments can't entirely account for this, and class and the desire to congregate with "people like us" plays a part.
I guess that I'd defer to Bourdieu for the most basic theoretical underpinnings of what I'm arguing here. In Distinction he remarks that "Objectively and subjectively aesthetic stances adopted in matters like cosmetics, clothing, or home decoration are opportunities to experience or asset one?s position in social space, as a rank to be upheld or a distance to be kept." One of the central arguments in the work is that "taste" and cultural preferences mediate class distinctions, that taste is one of the primary ways in which class distance and membership are asserted. This informs my belief that design, "usability" and the contexts of social networking are never neutral, and are always inflected by issues around class (among others). I guess that for me, the problematic assumption would be that social networking, and the selection of an SNS, could take place in a way that somehow evaded, or was innocent of all of this.
Why would I think of this specifically in relation to MySpace vs. Facebook? Well, to amplify on an earlier example, I think that the ways in which the two services can be personalised appeal to different taste formations. The often-"gaudy" nature of MySpace personalisation, arising from users' ability to insert large amounts of HTML into their profiles to create background images etc. presents a contrast with the essentially "modular" personalisation available with Facebook profiles, where users select from a range of options which do not disturb the given, "clean" colour schemes and layouts of Facebook profiles. The Facebook interface strikes me as very "designerly" - it is reminiscent to me in its look and feel of an OSX application, with all that connotes in terms of "funky"/creative professions, the blurring of work and/in play, and discernment (think of the Mac vs. PC ad campaigns). The use of whitespace, drop-down menus and a very "Web 2.0" set of icons allow it to be read as uncluttered, fresh and efficient. Personalisation for many Facebook users takes place by way of deferring to the expert knowledges of application designers. By contrast, MySpace personalisations often seem inexpert, distracting, ungainly - in short amateur, even where the "pimping" is outsourced. Coincidentally, both Danah Boyd and I (me in my blog post on the 22nd) are drawn to the metaphor of/comparison with Swedish furniture stores and their emphasis on modularity and design in thinking about Facebook. There are visual rhetorics in Facebook's presentation that connote a restrained minimalism which is not avant-garde but rational and "tasteful". This observation chimes with the excitement of those marketing high-end consumer goods about getting access Facebook's "elite" user base. Facebook's aesthetic of personalisation appeals to a certain kind of networked, linked-in, design-aware, educated, "mature" (non-emo :-) ) subject, in part because of the "distancing" it offers from messy old MySpace, which begins, by contrast, to resemble the chaos of a teenager's bedroom wall. In this sense, I think we can talk about class in relation to the design interface.
That's an example - as I said in yesterday's post, I think the modes of networking Facebook offers as well as the narratives associated with it's success are appealing to a certain kind of contemporary, class-inflected sensibility. If you wanted specific examples of MySpace profiles that bear out the contrast, I'd hesitate to give them on a list, but could send you some off-list if you like.
Cheers Jason
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