Hey there (also posted to danah's blog), danah: I'm sorry--I'm tight on time and can't read the copious comments posted to your blog (or give a thorough re-read of your original and thought-provoking blog entry on the class issue). but, I'm guessing the rural U.S. scene provides as good a canary in the mine as any so, here are some thoughts based on my own fieldwork with rural queer youth in the U.S.: the fragmentation perhaps reflects youth following their friends to college and Facebook (or not depending on whether those youth are college bound AND coming from college-oriented HS educational communities). so, if important sets of a young person's HS friends are heading off to college, they're more likely to add themselves to Facebook and use it more than MySpace (or use them equally for different purposes). so, the rural queer youth I work with tend to stick to MySpace (if anything beyond IM'ing) because they don't really have many friends going off in college. a point on method: I'd venture to guess that youth coming from an affluent bay area suburb are more likely shifting to Facebook to keep up with friends in college (definitely key to recognize Facebook's dominance as a social networking site for the college set in the U.S.). Youth from small schools in, say, rural Kentucky are sticking with MySpace because their school social networks aren't heading off to college where Facebook is ubiquitously used. This seems like something one could test out more broadly by looking at the relationship between references to hometowns, colleges, and high schools shared by folks on Facebook vs. MySpace (sampling would be key here--and, needless to say, daunting). One could also find the list of the lowest performing schools in the U.S. and I'd venture that a higher percentage of its students are using MySpace than Facebook. Either of these strategies could yield numbers to bolster the argument (if one believes in seeking numbers to bolster arguments) that uses of MySpace v. Facebook say something more broadly about class status. In short, this is about class but, as Barry Wellman suggested, it's also about local clustering. Class position clusters by location in the U.S. more than it doesn't. Best, Mary ps--did you know that the BBC webnews site quoted you on this topic? it looks like they read your blog and threw snippets of it on their website. not the best reporting--and, it makes this complicated topic look pretty thin. i wish they'd report on how many young people of MySpace and Facebook user demographic are getting blown to pieces in Iraq instead. ________________________ Mary L. Gray, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Communication and Culture Affiliate Faculty Gender Studies Department and American Studies Program Indiana University Mottier Hall-Ashton Center 1790 East 10th St. Bloomington, IN 47405-9700 ph. 812/855.4379 fx. 812/855.6014 email: mLg@indiana.edu http://www.indiana.edu/~qcentral On Jun 25, 2007, at 6:13 PM, air-l-request@listserv.aoir.org wrote:

Message: 1 Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 17:02:16 -0700 From: danah boyd <aoir.z3z@danah.org> Subject: [Air-l] viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace To: aoir list <air-l@aoir.org> Message-ID: <E54198BD-60F3-4A34-B87F-C275E816B96C@danah.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed

A week ago, folks were talking about class divisions around Facebook and MySpace use in teen culture. I was in the middle of writing an essay about that exact topic(and some folks have heard me speak to this issue over the last few months) so i didn't want to peep up until i had written what i could. I finally gave up and realized that I didn't have the proper words for talking about this issue so I wrote an essay with caveats. I offer it to you to tear to shreds in the hopes that maybe some good can come out of it. (I didn't include the full text here because it's long - i hope the link doesn't discourage folks from checking it out.) Feedback is *very* welcome.

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

[Barry - i disagree with your view that it's just local clustering dependent on a random local seed. I've seen this in too many schools in too many states in the United States to believe that this isn't about class. I can't speak to Canada or Britain or anywhere else. I also can't speak to adult usage. I'm talking solely about high school teen usage in the US. If you've got ideas for how to measure this quantitatively when demarcating class is difficult, i'm all ears.]