Also on this campus, possibly because it is a small school in a small town and thus relatively isolated, MySpace is seldom mentioned. In fact, when I asked my internet class about it, that very unscientific sample reported that use of MySpace was considered somewhat deviant: "That's where the perverts are all hanging out." Some said they had used MySpace in high school, but graduated to facebook when they came to college.
I found that with my students many had been on MySpace but now focused on Facebook. They indicated that Facebook was where their cohort had moved, so they moved too. Many of them had been on Xanga in high school, then moved to MySpace, and then to Facebook. We discussed this in my CMC seminar, and the students indicated that if some new site becomes the social networking place to be, they would abandon their current loyalty to Facebook and move to the new site. Although this may be changing (with notes, etc.), Facebook has for them certainly been more about the social network and less about content: less "bloggy" than MySpace or LiveJournal or Xanga. A pretty important caveat is that I have some students who are pretty involved in local and regional music production and promotion, and for them MySpace remains central, even as they also maintain "Facebooks," as they would call their Facebook pages -- perhaps indicating that MySpace, for all of its changes and problems over the past few years, remains the best place, for whatever reasons, for bands to promote themselves and information about music events to be circulated. Holly -- Holly Kruse Faculty of Communication The University of Tulsa 600 S. College Ave. Tulsa, OK 74104 918-631-3845 holly-kruse@utulsa.edu or holly.kruse@gmail.com http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~holly-kruse