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rfmcdonaldEarlier research showed that the social networking choice between Facebook, MySpace and Xanga was based on the users' race, ethnicity, and education, with Latino students trending toward MySpace, white students trending toward Facebook, and Asian and Asian-American students trending towards Xanga. Interestingly, there were no discernable social networking trends for black students.
Lauren doesn't seem to disagree with the general picture of different ethnic groups and different socioeconomic classes using different social networking sites, although she modifies this model somewhat.
I always assumed the rise of Facebook usage, at least among my friends, had more to do with usability than any other function. MySpace was created as a band promotion site, not for individuals, whereas Facebook was created for individuals to connect. And to date, MySpace seems more design and tech clunky than Facebook does -- that is, if I ignore all your invitations asking me to join your farm/restaurant/mafia ring. Nevertheless, the evidence appears to be stacking up in a way that reveals a new kind of digital divide, one in which social groups are choosing not to connect with or communicate with one another.
Jutras is critical of this idea.
What does an online ghetto look like, you may wonder. Are there graffiti and broken windows? Drug deals and sexual predators?
Well, sort of. According to Ms. Boyd, it's a community 58 million members strong and it's called MySpace. No broken windows, but broken links. No graffiti, but plenty of visual spam. No drug dealers, but, arguably, sexual predators (more on this later).
This thesis, which she first presented at the Personal Democracy Forum this summer, has only continued to gather steam since. Most recently, she gave an interview to The Root , a black-culture online magazine, that sparked a furor among its readers.
Last year, Facebook overtook MySpace in numbers of members. If you are like me, you made the switch because information was better organized on Facebook, and the layout was more conducive to clear communication. The fact that you were leaving behind a berserker aesthetic – cursors shaped like flames or hearts, layouts that take forever to load (and by forever, I mean, oh, one or two minutes), and messages wRiTtEn liKe ThIs – was a bonus. But according to Ms. Boyd, something more nefarious was going on, and that something was “white flight.”
[. . .]
Ms. Boyd came to her conclusions about MySpace – that MySpace is a digital “ghetto” populated by less-educated, lower-income non-whites – after months of research and interviews with teens across the United States. She seems to have gained inspiration particularly from this comment by some 14-year-old from Massachusetts: “I'm not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever.” Yet last year, marketers Rapleaf found that while some websites have clear racial correlations – Friendster is used primarily by Asians, while Latinos proliferate on Hi5 – MySpace has no clear affiliation.
The main difference, she notes, is that it's very difficult to physically relocate--she cites the example of moving from the South Bronx to Connecticut--but that the cost of leaving MySpace for Facebook is much lower. (Bernard Stein at the Bronx News Network takes Jutras to task for bashing his borough.)
I'm agnostic about social classes and ethnicity, although it does play a role: Orkut's huge in Brazil, French Canada was a slower Facebook adopter than English Canada, et cetera. Thoughts?
