From: danah boyd <aoir.z3z@danah.org> <snip> Also, regarding the comments on Facebook vs. MySpace, i'm trying to write up an essay about my data on this. The short answer is that it's classed at the high school level in the US. Working class kids, subcultural kids, queer kids, kids of color, etc. are using MySpace. College-bound kids, "good" kids, wealthy kids, sporty kids, etc. are all using Facebook. This has changed in the last year. It plays out some in college. If you go to a Latino-dominated community college, you're far more likely to see MySpace be the force. But if you're teaching a a 4-year institution, MySpace is barely visible except in the artist, queer, and subcultural communities. More on this on my blog shortly.

In my (admittedly very anecdotal) experience, class plays a HUGE role in determining the use of Facebook vs. MySpace among college students. For the last year I have been teaching at a) a nationally-ranked, expensive, private university and b) a 4th-tier, regional state college. Both are 4-year institutions, and the student body of both schools is predominately white (if anything the private university is slightly more diverse). But the two schools are worlds away in terms of class. My state college students are by-and-large working class kids, most of whom work full-time and still live at home, while the private university students come from families who can afford the ~$40K/year tuition and room costs. MySpace is extremely popular with my state college students. In our various class discussions they reveal that some of them also have Facebook profiles, but they don't really use it very much; all of their friends and their activities are centered on MySpace. The private university students are exactly opposite-they use Facebook almost exclusively and in some instances have expressed a fairly condescending attitude towards MySpace. I would be interested to know if others have had similar experiences with class and the choice of social networking site. Speaking of the term "social networking," I agree with the various comments suggesting that we won't really see one specific verb emerge to describe the activity, and that generally networking is not what goes on in these spaces. In my summer class last week, we were discussing technologies for supporting groups and teams, and the social networking sites came up. One student basically summed up the attitude of the class with a statement to the effect of "Facebook is really just a good way to keep tabs on people that you don't really want to have to interact with on a daily basis." Kind of the opposite of networking, no? Anyway, those are just my random observations, nothing generalizable, but possible food for thought. -Kris M. -- ********** ********** Kris M. Markman, Ph.D. Email: krism@alumni.utexas.net http://webhost.bridgew.edu/kmarkman/index.html ********** **********