(a photo of dinah boyd "speaking le web," taken from her website)
dinah boyd (yes, the lowercase is intentional), a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, writes about her sociology work involving social-networking sites. dinah's work notes the origins of and differences between MySpace and Facebook and the users they attract. The main dividing line? Socio-economic class. According to boyd, MySpace tends to attract what she calls the "subaltern" while Facebook draws the "hememonic." Or, to put it in blunt Mean Girls clique-speak, Facebook is the domain of choice for college-bound jocks, preps, and queen bees, MySpace the one for immigrants, alternakids, and wannabes. Facebook is more like Target; MySpace, more like Wal-Mart.
boyd's fieldwork consisted mainly of talking to teenagers around the country. Her website can be viewed here, and the essay that talks specifically about the Myspace/Facebook research can be viewed here.
2 comments:
You know, I've been thinking about this woman's claim and it does not really hold water. Facebook started out as a school network, thus more educated people used it. It is not by nature classist, but rather is an entity that was created for a specific sect, which is exclusionary but an attempt to be classist. And now that it is opened up to everyone, that claim will totally be shattered as people from all walks of life sign up.
Overanalyzing crap. Maybe she shouldn't be shoving every user of specific websites into stereotypes. I don't know anybody who likes either site better for any reason other than a preference of features.
Post a Comment