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June 25, 2007

Social websites expose class divide

Social websites expose class divide | Technology | Guardian Unlimited Technology

Typical Facebook users, she said, "tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are primarily white, but not exclusively." MySpace, on the other hand, "is still home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens" as well as "other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm".
The class difference between the two websites could lie in their origins. Mr Zuckerberg started his service while studying at Harvard and until late last year membership was limited to university students and individuals with an email address from an academic institution. This, said Ms Boyd, had given the site higher value among aspirational teens. In the paper she also conjectured that a recent decision by the US military to ban service personnel from using sites including MySpace showed evidence of social fissures in the forces."A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there's a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook." According to Ms Boyd, Facebook is not used by young soldiers, who are generally less well-educated and from poorer backgrounds, and there is an element of social conflict in the ban." The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. I can't help but wonder if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in the military are leaking information or spending too much time online or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage."

Posted by joegrohens at June 25, 2007 07:57 PM

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