Facebook Vs. MySpace: What's Class Got To Do With It?
(Photograph by Mack Reed)
At least twice a month someone asks me for a link to my page on MySpace -- I usually end up pointing them to a blog post I made about this time last year called, "MySpace can eat a bag of dick." The short version is that I got so frustrated with every single aspect of how MySpace works that I deleted my account, walked away, and never looked back. The interesting change is that at that point people were asking me for the link several times a week and it's been steadily decreasing since then. For the most part I'm not very vocal about my distaste for MySpace so I don't think that's why requests have slowed, instead I'm getting the same questions but now asking about my page on Facebook.
I'd been noticing more and more of my social circle moving over to Facebook but had just assumed it was the same kind of migration we'd seen a few years ago when people started moving off of Friendster and over to MySpace. This was just my assumption and I had little to back it up, so when danah boyd started talking about the same topic I was very interested. Turns out it's anything but the same kind of migration, and in fact is more of a division. A few months ago danah wrote a piece called, "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace" where she noted that only certain kinds of people were leaving MySpace for Facebook but for some circles MySpace was still the premier SNS. After a bit of explanation about how "class" in America has less to do with how much money you make and more with who you surround yourself with, she points out where this split is happening:
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.
A very important note to make here is that danah's research focuses on high school kids only, as that's who she was speaking with directly before she came to these conclusions. It was interesting to see that among Facebook users, all of them knew about MySpace (and often had negative things to say about it), but frequently MySpace users hadn't ever heard of Facebook. As you might expect people misread her article, pulled bits out of context and jumped to conclusions prompting her to write a response a month later addressing many of the issues people brought up. The age issues was a big one, as was the use of race in her observations. In her follow up she clarified a bit more where all this info came from, stating:
When I talk about data, I'm not talking about my friends or what I hear from teenagers in Los Angeles (or San Francisco). I drive to disconnected communities and talk to teenagers from different schools about their lives. I hang out in public places where I watch teens. I hang out on MySpace and scan the micro-profiles that one can see on Facebook. I talk to parents, teachers, pastors, and community leaders from all over the nation. I talk to people from varied backgrounds, all to get at what's going on. The trick to ethnographic work like this is to understand the biases that are operating in the spheres you study. This is not survey work. This is about contextualizing what you learn, making sense of how an individual is or is not like her/his peers. This is not about random sampling, but sampling until you start to see patterns that are predictable, until you flesh out the domain. While individual experiences are important, when I'm drawing patterns, I'm talking beyond the individual - I'm trying to paint a meta portrait.
One point from her original piece that really struck me was how this division was reflecting in the military. She found that the educated Officers were all on Facebook, while the rank and file troops were hanging out on MySpace. MySpace was recently banned while Facebook remains accessible - perhaps because of who each site is reaching. danah writes:
MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers' MySpace profiles, I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war, pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell. Over the last year, I've watched more and more profiles emerge from soldiers who aren't quite sure what they are doing in Iraq. I don't have the data to confirm whether or not a significant shift has occurred but it was one of those observations that just made me think. And then the ban happened. I can't help but wonder if part of the goal is to cut off communication between current soldiers and the group that the military hopes to recruit.
Bringing this back to my own observations, my peers use their SNS for more than just staying in touch with a select circle of friends. Lots of business is done through these sites and connecting with the right network of people can make all the difference when launching or hyping a new project. As key figures in these networks jump from one ship to the other there are huge circles of people following their lead, in the same way popular kids in high school circles determine (often without knowing it) which sites their peers will be using simply by which they choose to stay on themselves. I personally shifted to Facebook simply because it worked, where MySpace never seemed to.
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