Re: [Air-l] viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
Hi all On this topic, I wrote something last week comparing the shift from MySpace to Facebook to "white flight" on a group blog I am involved with via the New Media Research Group at the University of Bedfordshire. http://mad.beds.ac.uk/nmrg/?p=60 I plan to turn this into something longer - right now I'm thinking through the methodological implications of using freely available marketing-oriented demographics in a critical context. I think that this stuff may be useful when we want to react in a timely way to situations thta are in flux, such as the current shift towards Facebook, which I think has an aesthetic, privacy functions and a narrative of "tech success" that appeals to a middle-class, tech-savvy audience. Cheers Jason Wilson ----- Original Message ---- From: Frank Thomas <news.ftr@free.fr> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Sent: Thursday, 28 June, 2007 9:20:10 AM Subject: Re: [Air-l] viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace Hi Danah, Félicitations. Even Le Monde cites you: http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-651865,36-928363@51-928862,0.html The Fondation Internet Nouvelle Génération (FING) in Paris interviewed Hélène Delaunay-Téterel about the social distinction in French blogs (which seems to be different from the US American one) : http://www.ent-leblog.net/upfing06/2006/06/interview_upfin_2.html Cheers Frank Thomas danah boyd wrote:
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.]
_______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- .......................................... Dr. Frank Thomas FTR Internet Research 93110 Rosny-sous-Bois France _______________________________________________ The air-l@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/ ____________________________________________________________________________________ Yahoo!7 Mail has just got even bigger and better with unlimited storage on all webmail accounts. http://au.docs.yahoo.com/mail/unlimitedstorage.html
The one thing I would like to add to this discussion is that any question of flight from MySpace to Facebook must be viewed not only in terms of class and social context and norms, but also in terms of very basic questions about customer service and attention to detail. Myspace sucks compared to Facebook. And that's not an aesthetic judgment having to do with professional culture versus bling culture, but rather a judgment about how customers are treated, how the site functions, etc. Myspace appears to be clearly in the "milk it for money as long as it lasts" mode while Facebook appears to be trying to build a sustainable business for the long haul. I think this is important because if we see alternative/queer/latino/ etc kids clinging to Myspace against Facebook we need to understand that they really really mean it, that the values of Myspace (cultural context, friends, etc.) are valuable enough for them to overlook or overcome the general horribleness of the site. (And again, I am not talking about the aesthetic qualities of the site, but the basic functionality that is so frequently badly broken on Myspace.) At Myspace, my account just disappeared one day. I complained, it came back. Sometimes I try to do some basic function on the site and I get an error message saying that the site is broken and come back later. Everwhere I turn on the site they make me click 3 times to do something that could be done in one click, were it not for the need to show me yet another hot chick dating advertisement. But still, if we see people fleeing from Myspace, we don't need to assume they are getting away from the people they don't like. --Jimbo
participants (2)
-
Jason Wilson -
Jimmy Wales