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rfmcdonaldVia Facebook, I've come across an interesting study on Facebook and MySpace use, summarized here by The Globe and Mail's Matthew Ingram.
Boyd's paper is here, and her blog posting announcing the paper's initial findings is here. One blogged criticism of her work is telling.
The statistical sampling that she describes--formal interviews in eight states which capture a variety of variables, analyses of apparently random MySpace profiles, very limited access to Facebook profiles, an undersampling of users from "rural environments and [...] the deep south"--certainly has its flaws, though I do think that this paper might still indicate certain interesting trends. For the sake of her--at least superficially plausible--thesis I only hope Boyd can get much better data.
Danah Boyd, a sociologist and researcher in the U.S. who specializes in youth culture and online social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, has posted a draft version of a new paper she is writing on what might loosely be referred to as "class divisions" between the two popular social networking sites. Although she says that the differences between the two audiences are not strictly class-based, in the sense that they don't really follow economic lines, there appears to be a clear difference between teens who gravitate to MySpace and those that tend to join Facebook.
For the most part, Ms. Boyd says, the younger users on MySpace are what she calls "subaltern" -- a term meaning subordinate, or lower in station -- in the sense that they are outcasts in some way or another, either because they are involved in a social sub-group of some kind (i.e., they are gay, or goth, or interested in punk music) or they are a member of a racial or cultural group that is non-mainstream (i.e., black, Hispanic, Asian, etc.). Teens that join Facebook, she says, are what she calls "hegemonic," meaning they are sympathetic to mainstream society in some way.
Boyd's paper is here, and her blog posting announcing the paper's initial findings is here. One blogged criticism of her work is telling.
The conclusions coincide, satisfyingly, with the presumptions of Facebook users with snobbish disdain for the ghetto design of Myspace pages. They're probably true. And Boyd's essay has the patina of academic credibility, obtained through the liberal use of lingo from critical theory such as "hegemonic" -- by which I think the author means the cool kids. But, astonishingly, there's a complete lack of survey data to support the thesis. If this Berkeley PhD candidate really had six months for the project, how hard would it be to recruit a few hundred survey respondents? And some of the conclusions are truly pedestrian: the research suggests that Facebook users are more likely to go to college. Well, Mark Zuckerberg's social utility started -- duh -- as an online facebook for college students, so it's hardly so surprising that it would do well among that demo.
The statistical sampling that she describes--formal interviews in eight states which capture a variety of variables, analyses of apparently random MySpace profiles, very limited access to Facebook profiles, an undersampling of users from "rural environments and [...] the deep south"--certainly has its flaws, though I do think that this paper might still indicate certain interesting trends. For the sake of her--at least superficially plausible--thesis I only hope Boyd can get much better data.
