The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.
MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.
Read danah boyd’s Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace. Previously from WNM: Choice of social media reflects class divide (an article from the BBC about boyd’s paper).
2 Comments
July 27, 2007 at 6:41 pm
[...] Read this item from C|Net. Previously from WNM: Choice of social media reflects class divide…II [...]
May 14, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Is this a joke? I use(d) MySpace, because the internet was becoming… dull, and all my friends had it / raved about it. Thus, I too wanted a connection. And it was cool – not solely because of the people who used it, but the concept of being part of something bigger than my own circle of friends was intriguing. Having the freedom to hack and code your own page however you wanted was definitely an up as well.
I was never the social-standard “geek”, or a “jock”, or any of these b/s “types” of people. I was bored of the internet, and found something that was alive and popular.
A few years later, all the soft-core porn ads started to make me sick, and I peaced out, Facebook bound (and for every OTHER reason you listed).
Regarding the class divide, both services are free to the public. So, if there’s any sort of divide, it’s based on the preference of the users in both communities… pure and simple.