One thing I didn't see mentioned, and granted I did a very quick read, was the idea of trust and identity that is more important on Facebook than it is on Myspace.

Facebook heavily emphasizes common connections, whether through "network" or common contacts. Unlike Myspace, most users on Facebook cannot see the profiles for the majority of other users, because the network is built on commonality and trust.

I'm not quite sure what this says about class, but I think it's important. One thing that gets drilled into the minds of college students and 20-somethings is the idea of "networking" and "building your network." The idea is very middle/upper-middle class - that other people, not applications (forms, processes, etc) are the key to your professional and personal success.

Facebook successfully translates that by using common factors to allow users to see other user profiles - either geography, school, or workplace. Another important factor is that, by and large, Facebook profiles have the user's full name displayed. Using real names gives users extra pause in deciding whether to establish trust relationships with other users.

Myspace, by contrast, does not employ these features. Again, I'm not sure exactly what that says about class, but I think that the identity and commonality factors are important.

Nice essay.

It's as though those students who self-identify as "fringe" have selected MySpace vs those who self-identify as "mainstream" (whatever that is, the cultural norm?) are using facebook.

Are there any parallels to this in the 90's use of AOL chatrooms or the late 80s, early 90s BBS and Fidonet culture?

Fascinating insight. I whole heartedly agree with the assessment of the actions of 'hegemonic students'.

As a university student I find it interesting to see info sessions on what should and should not be on one's Facebook profile. "Remember, employers are looking more and more on Facebook and MySpace to get an impression of who you really are." they say. I find this emphasis on censorship disturbing. Instead of learning the "good" things we (the hegemonic students) are taught to mask the "bad" behavior. I find this masking much more troubling than any of the "bad" actions being masked. Honesty is the most valuable trait. If there is something that needs to be masked perhaps it should be changed instead of buried. Masking is what worries me about my generation and those after me.

At the core of everyone is a human being with the same necessities, hopes and dreams as you. The moment one refuses to recognize this, one is doomed.

I think you're onto something here.

To add a bit of anecdotal data, I spent a couple of years involved in an MMO and eventually became active in a guild there. The vast majority of the guild members had MySpace pages, and I found it interesting that the people who were on MySpace either had not gone to college, or were getting their education from part-time schools, community colleges, trade schools, etc.

Excellent paper.

makes perfect sense. the inherent appeal of myspace or facebook to their respective cultural demos seems literally built in to the functioning of the sites. i remember you writing earlier about the uproar that happened once facebook started using the news feed feature to let you know what all your friends were all doing, and likewise letting them all know everything you were up to.

the fewer non mainstream-compliant contexts of identity you hapen to need to navigate between, the more pallatable facebook's braodcast of all your actions to your whole network regardless of context would be. especially if, as you were saying, being on facebook itself essentially became a signifier of your mainstream, college-bound identity, the value of being on facebook might end up getting completely lost on or maybe even anathema to those for whom an expression of a mainstream identity is not what they're aiming for. same as some kids would never be caught dead sporting abercrombie--even if it's by no means a brand outside the budget of their economic "class".

so many other social network sites are already distinguished by serving a particular kind of lifestyle or identity, this just seems like a logical progression. i mean, before there was myspace there was the high school cafeteria anyway. the social web's here now and all, but why would that mean that social behavior would undergo some kind of fundamental chage?

This is an interesting pattern. I wanted to share a reaction:

In your conclusion, you write: "there's something so strange about watching a generation splice themselves in two based on class divisions or lifestyles or whatever you want to call these socio-structural divisions."

Isn't it a little premature to give this phenomenon the intentionality characterized by "splice themselves"? Especially if you find that most MySpace users don't know what Facebook is. What is their reaction after finding out what Facebook does?

Aside from the teens, Facebook is clearly having a very quick expansion recently among an older audience -- many of whom I am certain would never be able to tolerate the wilds of MySpace. It will be interesting to see if the grown-ups "chase away" the youth.

Thanks for the paper.

Good thoughts, Danah, and I think for the most part, I agree with your assessment of the situation.

The most striking part to me, was your brief diversion onto the subject of social networking and the military. I hadn't thought about it in that light before, but I think you're dead on with your assessment there.

I don't disagree with the the thesis of the article. Though I do think some of the points were a little overthought--Facebook started off as being network based because of its affiliation to university students, and though it's more or less open now, it retains a culture which is still a bit on the exclusionary side.

The one counterpoint I have is that, at least in my region, African-American participation in Facebook is very strong, regardless if they are in college or not. I dare say that the initial popularity of Myspace jumped over that group, and they went straight to Facebook.

Facebook started as a way for people who were already part of a delineated, culturally recognized "network" to represent those relationships online. It's not surprising, then, that Facebook continues to play the role of representing existing "hegemonic" (could we perhaps say "mainstream," instead? it feels less pejorative) institutions and strucutres. Facebook was top-down from the beginning.

Myspace, in contrast, wasn't about pre-existing socially "respectable" structures--it was bottom-up, creating networks rather than replicating/representing them.

It seems to me that Myspace is more about people creating their sense of belonging through the connections they make online, whereas Facebook is more about representing existing senses of belonging through replication of real-world connections.

There's so much to comment on, but staying on point I think what you are observing is the class delineation that comes primarily from intelligence and the affinity for the quality/values that result. That's an over-generalization of course but what you are describing with MySpace and Facebook my generation saw with AOL and the web. MySpace and Facebook are just the biggest/most well known platforms at this point in time.

The issue as I see it is about knowing better, meaning those who realize how restricted they are by their environment/medium/platform aspire to move to one less restrictive. This is not taking into account narcissism or being recognized by the largest numbers, just authoring and publishing capabilites for expressing oneself. If you are not smart enough to understand what you are missing out on you won't go anywhere. You'll make do with and be loyal to what you have and where you are. This of course goes beyond online applications, but at the very least it coincides with what you say about class - a lower class person with a computer may only appreciate it can be used for accessing free porn, not that it's more powerful than the systems currently in use on the space shuttle and they could be using it for aspirations just as high.

Facebook is better than MySpace because it is more functional and hence less restrictive to those who know how to use the functionality. Similarly, people smart enough to know these services are just DIY web page publishing tools and know how to author pages and applications by hand think these services are dumbed down and restrictive services designed for people who don't know any better, which is also true.

Now add to that the subjective quality that results from the usage. MySpace suddenly becomes ghetto because people with less intelligence and skill are using it by nature. Let the exodus of those who know better, and the defense of those who revel in it begin.

[See 'The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind' - A theory first proposed by French social theorist Gustave Le Bon in his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. The masses live by, and are ruled by, subconscious and emotional thought process. The crowd has never thirsted for the truth. It turns aside from evidence that is not to its taste, preferring to glorify and to follow error, if the way of error appears attractive enough, and seduces them. Whoever can supply the crowd with attractive emotional illusions may easily become their master; and whoever attempts to destroy such firmly entrenched illusions of the crowd is almost sure to be rejected. This is also reminiscent of Freud's Civilization and it's Discontents.]

MySpace is what it is, it targets people of the intelligence level and quality that it's functionality supports. Same with Facebook. Same with AOL vs the web at large. It's just another meter for gauging where people are (technographics), it doesn't necessarily keep them there. No professional web developer I know will use MySpace or Facebook other than as another marketing channel to reach the audience that's already there. They won't restrict themselves to it, they'll use them all as channels of distribution because they are smart enough t know better, and the content in that channel will refelect the intellectual and emotional maturity level of those that use it. No pro I know likes what the DIY services have done to the quality of the web, just like my generation doesn't like what AOL opening up to the web did to the quality of users online.

Suddenly every idiot could create their own web page and every idiot did. MySpace and social networks just took it to the next level, making it even easier and lowering the bar even more and none of the younger generation seems to have a clue as to what the quality was like before they got there and the Jackass generation took over. Before AOL opened up to the web there was a lot more respect and a lot less commercialization. People actually treated one another with respect. There weren't people acting out as much and hiding behind their keyboard to see how far they could push buttons before they were banned. Mostly this is because of the age of people who suddenly had free access - immature kids did it. They explored boundaries as you say, pushed buttons and tested limits until we have what we have now.

The question should be, what does it take for someone to outgrow MySpace and why, and Facebook and why, and whatever comes after Facebook these days. In another 2-3 years the next generation will be in full swing in and there will be all new services for us to have this conversation about just like in my day when it was AOL vs the web, or Web 1.0 sites like Geocities and The Globe vs the web. Before all that it was Compuserve vs AOL, when all the really hardcore geeks were saying it was the Internet vs Online Services.

Marshall McLuhan said who controls the media controls your mind. The media and mediums you use are thus a reflection or gauge of where your identity is at based on who is and has been controlling it's development.

And I'm sorry to say the easier the tools are to use, the lower the bar gets with each new generation of content. And these are the rules of a free media. To quote Dave Chapelle, "if the Internet were a real place it would be disgusting and intolerable."

I also need to note this is analogous to the effects of globalization on the real world. But that's a whole separate conversation/thesis.

Sorry for the long comments. Philosophy is a team sport.

excellent piece, you make some great points. another area you might want to consider is how the sites are structured, what they have to offer, i.e., like how facebook walls disable html and myspace comments are full of spam and tacky glitz. another proof you might use would be the dramatic differences in the levels of discussion myspace groups vs facebook groups, or at least up until mid-2006... since facebook opened up, the quality of posts has gone down, so it's harder to compare now, but still.

Through my dissertation research I've been looking at the intersections of multiliteracy, identity, and online pop culture. In my interviews with teenagers I noticed the interesting divide, in terms of identity, between those who are still using myspace and those who have begun using facebok.

Fascinating article Danah, and I agree with the majority of it, it seems to make sense.

I think the most important question this raises is, "What does this mean for advertisers as they consider the relative purchasing power of their served ad base?" ... just kidding, mostly.

This essay really intrigued me, as so often happens when the topic of class is brought to my attention from the position it holds just in the periphery, ever present but always evasive. I think you're on point with most of the conclusions here. What I don't have, sadly, is enough of an experience with Facebook networks and communities outside my own education-based realm (HS, College) to reflect on the qualities of FB in that capacity. Does a regional group have a less hegemonic identity about it than say, X college? I don't have answers to these questions, but I'm curious about niche communities which must readily crop up given facebook's structure and organization.

Likewise, the places in which MySpace and Facebook (and their userbases) are widely divergent are easy to see, but what if any might be a nexus of convergence? The facebook kids who have MySpaces for all their favorite bands--do they interface significantly with MySpace types, as a consequence? Do they peer over the hedge?

Obviously from my position I can point to countless examples of subaltern teens and subaltern teen groupings on facebook, though they float within the sea of hegemonic respectability (such awful mixed metaphors, I'm sorry!). Class is such a slippery issue that it's no wonder I'm struggling just to find some granularity in describing where people go along this spectrum of SNS lifestyles.

I've just rambled and made no sense, so I'll stop, but--looks like some great insight.

It's an interesting idea, for sure. I'd really like to see some statistics to back up your opinion. Was your conclusion based on observation alone, or did you happen to see the results of a particular study?

Just to elaborate on Liz Lawley's point. The hegemonic teens choose Facebook to keep in touch with the contacts and friends they already have. Through the Facebook Groups and other features, users can meet new people who share their interests, much like the idea of Myspace, but they would probably not add them as friends.

Meanwhile, the marginalized teens don't have much friends to begin with. I can imagine they'd registered on Facebook but couldn't add many people on their friends list. On the other hand, one can add anyone as friends on Myspace (even bands and other celebrity profiles) and being the outsiders themselves, the befriended would most likely accept the friendship in return to increase the number of friends one has.

Greg also made an excellent point about the anonymity of MySpace. The educated and well-off prefers honesty while the non-hegemonic prefers invisibility (even when they strive for friends).

It's also interesting to note that it's hard to know what Facebook is unless you are a registered user, and in order to register, you are encouraged to assume your true identity (though there are some fake accounts). Somehow it seems in order to gain access you will need to expose yourself. This sort of commitment may scare off the lower class and of course those who fear for privacy online.

Oh, in related news: MySpace is coming to the Sidekick 3. (slashphone.com/64/7540.html )

Fascinating essay! It's interesting - I had heard that Apple has begun banning access to MySpace in its retail stores. I wonder if such restrictions exist for Facebook. Having read your essay, I now wonder if that's also inherent class-based discrimination. In effect Apple is saying, "if you ever hope to own one of our computers, you should be using something like Facebook rather than MySpace" Now of course Apple will say its a bandwidth conservation issue or that MySpace users spend an unreasonable amount of time in their stores, but the subtext is unsettling, imho.

You could probably apply this analysis to how certain models and brands of cellphones are being marketed to youth. Subalterns: ringtones and wallpaper. Hegemonic: MyFaves type social networking features and upwardly mobile designs (Razr).

I thought that this may be the case when I was discussing using Facebook as a backend for a human rights charity with a friend. Apart from the potential conflict of interest as Facebook will eventually divulge the details of an unwitting activist to some state, the audience would be limited to just higher socioeconomic classes.

hi danah,

great reading and thanks again for another interesting piece of writing.

my initial thoughts are that what is going on is more about class as shaped through cultural capital and mediated by technological choices. this is classic Pierre Bourdieu material (see his work Distinction - A social critique of the judgement of taste).

as others have pointed out, marketing drives these choices in the presentation of self even further. what the 70s subcultural theorists were seeing back then has at least since the early 90s become everyday life across most social strata in most industrialised societies.

but it is interesting to see the distinctions, these 'judgments of taste', coming back to very traditional ideas of 'aesthetics' - facebook (clean and minimal) vs myspace (cluttered and messy); as well as the drawing out of those tensions between MySpace as a space for identity and Facebook as a space for identity AND professional networking.

As someone who has only recently joined Facebook, my experience with it has been vastly different from the conclusions you've reached. Of 27 friends, 11 have never attended any post secondary education (I just checked); instead they are friends from public school, high-school, and previous workplaces. Aside from that, those who have attended hardly fit into any 'hegemonic' class structure. They aren't the 'good kids' or the 'preps'. On Facebook I've found many hard working individuals who blur the lines of social group or at best fit into so many as to be difficult to categorize. Sans statistics to support its conclusions I would argue that this articles conclusions have been drawn from a very limited experience of Facebook.
As for Myspace, there are hundreds of good reasons to avoid it, and only a few of them have to do with class. 'Bling' culture is not an excuse for some of the most visually offensive site construction to bombard human retinas. I know plenty of alt types who would agree with that.

I think you are misreading some of what is going on with the Facebook/myspace divide.

A few observations
1) Facebook used to be limited to the Ivies. Then it expanded to encompass less-and-less elite schools, and now finally it is open for all to use. This presumably is a market-driven transition. Its selectivity gave it cache, which it used to raise capital and advertising revenue, and the pressure for more revenue lead to it rapidly becoming as open a network as Myspace. Now, it just started using a system of customizable applets that provides myspace-like functions (with music, trip planners, friend-trackers that install in exchange for releasing demographic data to the corporate author's view)- i.e. it is converging into something that looks more and more like myspace. So I think the gulf between facebook and myspace is narrowing.

2) Insofar as the gulf will persist, it will be because of self-selection: you are more or less expected to be on facebook once you are in college. I would expect this to be more true in places with insular, residential/dorm-based communities and less so or not at all at commuter colleges. People might join myspace in school if they are part of a subaltern group. But they would if they are part of enlisted communities, too.

3) Middle class participants who go to state universities are likely to be part of facebook but also myspace. And sometimes these cultural habits track - I went to an elite, small liberal arts college in southern california. One of my friends is latina from east los angeles. She grew up with myspace, not facebook - she got facebook because everyone else in college has it. But in terms of usage activity (so i'm a dork and have noticed these things) she still, in college, clung to myspace most of the time. I am definately subaltern. I had nothing to do with myspace in high school. But I joined facebook in college, as soon as I could. If anything, it helped me navigate a place that was very hegemonic (lots of the naked guys holding red cups) and build some social capital in those environments, insofar as FB can do so.

4) Facebook then might not indicate as much of a class divide as it is becoming another ritual for those entering the putative elite or who are seeking acceptance and validation in structures of hegemonic culture. Those who have a mismatch of intellectual or social capital as compared to their wealth (i.e. your workaday intellectual barista) are more likely to have been to college, and to have been socialized through facebook as part of college. The split is going to be between status-seekers in 'elite' culture and people who went through four year, residential college and universities, versus people who have eschewed traditional models of higher education for vocational school and skilled labor (here i'm thinking medical service workers, construction contractors, union workers) and the expanding underclass of high school dropouts and graduates who are suffering the most from globalization in the United States service economy. I think it is probably not even useful to think of the issue in terms of class, but instead of cultural self-image and perhaps 'culture war'.

On one axis, you can consider the left/right cultural divide in white america as being exemplified in facebook and myspace. While rich, white republicans are guaranteed to be on facebook, the stereotypical angry white male who feels disenfranchised by structural change in american society, the kind who will end up at Wal-Mart or in the army, is going to be on myspace. NPR-listening, latte-sipping philosophy majors from coastal cities are much more likely to wind up on facebook.
In terms of racial empowerment, however, myspace is clearly a left/populist impulse against a right/elitist facebook. 'Polite' society on facebook is contrasted to an aesthetically and politically rancorous myspace. I think the usage pattern between minority groups is going to be radically different, but i'm done spamming.

Just a brief comment: There is a common prejudice, that when we see something that appears nice, clean or friendly arise from a culture we don't identify with, we tell ourselves "Oh, but I'm sure it's rotten underneath!", "Oh, but they buy it at a high price in freedom!" or something similar. Sometimes people write fiction about it, and we cite that fiction as evidence of rottenness.

I suspect that the emo kids and similar have more problems than the nice, successful kids, and also that they on the whole actually are less naughty when it comes to substance abuse, risky behavior, etc. Things sometimes are as they seem.

Are you suffering from this particular prejudice? I know plenty of nice violinists who actually don't smoke marijuana, plenty of Christians who don't hit their children, plenty of harmonious families that actually are still quite harmonious once you get to know them.

If more people realized that many of the common and dull approaches to happiness actually work quite well, we might have more of the nice kids at Facebook, and less of the poor emo kids at mySpace. Please, don't further the myths more than you have to.

@Liz Lawley, Alice

Absolutely. I don't use Facebook to find friends, and I don't just add random people who friend me. Facebook lets you specify how you know people, which helps when your list gets big, and it's like, oh yeah, we were in such and such class together.

MySpace is like most online forums, with relationships mostly between people who've never met face to face.

@zephoria

An interesting read.

I went to college and avoided all online social networks for the longest time, then finally joined Facebook when I saw how easy it was to look up where everyone from high school went.

You're right, the interface is clean. Facebook looks like most professional websites now-a-days, though that's been changing, and as a long time web designer, I cringe at all the new "Apps" that Facebook has been adding.

I tried MySpace for about a week. My first impression: my god, it's 1990 all over again. Purple backgrounds with unreadable yellow text and a 20 min load time thanks to oversized photos, videos, and that mortal sin of background music.

I'm not worried about the "wrong crowd" aspect of MySpace, there's already enough of my info online for any would-be stalkers. I just can't navigate MySpace. Within a day of opening an account, I already had comments from people that included embedded youtube videos that threw off everything on the page. Turning off HTML support meant seeing the code written out, which was equally as annoying. I closed my account soon after.

Look at most blogs (using predesigned themes) and compare them to the personal sites of the early 1990's. It's one thing to make something obnoxious and glitzy (both forgiveable), it's another to have random colors/photos/video/music everywhere, so that you have to scroll in all four directions. Not that I was ever immune, I made some pretty "user unfriendly" sites back in the day.

Finally, you could probably find a simillar division within blog software: MySpace: LiveJournal/Xanga/Blogspot vs. Facebook: Drupal/Wordpress/MoveableType.

Blessed be,

/jon

great article.

We all remember the angry basketball games where the private, catholic, college prep school's fans would all chant "we're going to college!"

It would be more shocking if we didn't fight for status online as intensely as we do in meatspace.

Interesting. I'd like to note, however, that it's thoroughly possible to be a non-working-class member of the subaltern group: there are many bright kids without the social indoctrination to keep them in the popular group, and many of them do go on to college. It would be interesting to analyze the choices of this particular group (my guess would be MySpace for actual use & Facebook because they 'have' to have it).

Thanks for putting this out there, danah. It reminds me of the dissertation topic I originally wanted to do (before I found it was too difficult!) Just a literature note here - if you want a theoretical backing for this, Bourdieu is your man. Lots of stuff you could pull across from him about the intersection between taste and class and his idea of 'fields' helps tackle the problematic definition of class (Willis uses him extensively).

As for statistics, I note that the proportions of online teens from households above and below $55,000 with SNS profiles is nearly identical, but that doesn't tell you what *kind* of profile they have and of course poor kids who go online regularly may be different from poor kids more generally, which complicates things...

(Lenhart, A. and M. Madden (2007) "Teens, Privacy & Online Social Networks: How Teens Manage Their Online Identities and Personal Information in the Age of MySpace" Pew Internet & American Life Project )

I work at an inner city school where the students are 99% African-American and low SES. These kids are all on Bebo and more recently iLike. I didn't see any MySpace or FaceBook at all this year.

I work at a large software company. My 20- and 30-something coworkers are either on MySpace or nothing at all. This includes all of my Latino coworkers all the members of four different bands.

Great paper danah.

On the face of the idea that Facebook and MySpace users are divided by class - it certainly feels right. Facebook is populated by early adopters. It's not mainstream in the sense that it hasn't been talked about in mainstream media anywhere near the way MySpace has.

I bet any class divisions that exist right now between MySpace and Facebook will resolve themselves with greater awareness of Facebook. And that you will see teens choose one or the other based upon their personal choice - and not upon class. I can say this pretty firmly because the closed friend systems of both is a bug. One that third parties will learn how to break open and change for profit.

The Web leans towards personal empowerment and closed gardens such as both of these will need to open up further when it comes to aspects of personal identity.

So what does that leave us? With aesthetics, and with the communities that exist on both.

Here's some things to consider - there are no bands on Facebook.

Why? Is it functionality alone?

I think it was Doc Searls who once said you can't escape your beginnings. MySpace's initial hot user communities - bands - models - teenagers - demand aesthetic control. To them, it's a feature, not a bug, to have a blinking neon background image. Facebook's initial user base - college students - certainly do not demand such functionality and to them it is a repellent.

I would have loved to have seen in the comments here who has a MySpace profile or a Facebook profile. It would be telling. There is a lot of elitism on the part of some who look down on visual expression that offends. To them, your paper is an affirming piece that reinforces their prejudices.

I'm the rare case of someone who has traversed classes. From poverty, to middle class, to something nearing upper middle class. I'm a software engineer. The only reason I've joined both MySpace and Facebook is because folks I know are on both and I need to network. That and I want to experiment.

Let me add that when the mainstream does find Facebook, and it will, that is when to expect the next 'great new thing' to be launched. Possibly by the Facebook folks themselves, utilizing viral marketing, and selectism, to choose just the right folks to seed their new service.

very nice essay, in particular the core idea of looking into divisions in usage of software tools among different groups and the why there are those divisions.

I have two suggestions. First, apart from making preciser distinctions between the concepts on class and social stratification and possibly finding out why the notion of 'class' doesn't seem to work well in the USA but does in many other countries (unfortunately), I think that if you could back it up with some statistics, it would have more impact. E.g., what percentage of the "hegemonc teens" is on facebook only, is/was on MySpace as well/before; idem on the "subaltern teens"? (as an aside: What about any sub-structure within the latter group; could alternative terms for this division be 'rich-WASP-minorty' and 'majority of the people in the US'?) I'm not from the US, so it's difficult to make sense out of relative terms like more, less, majority, etc. and the overall impact; e.g., are we talking about just, say, 5-10% of all teens anyway?

Second, in addition to Jon's sample division in the blogsphere, you could probably find that with email addresses as well (hotmail vs gmail?), idem MSN messenger/Yahoo instant vs Skype. There's some (natural language processing) research done on Mac users versus Microsofties, where it appeared that on online fora about the Mac, the level of English used (grammar & vocabulary) was higher than that of those who added content to MS fora--with, of course, lots of speculation why.

While I enjoyed reading this article, I find myself disappointed at what I will call your research methodology (or more precisely, a seeming lack thereof). As maria hints at in the comment above, you provide very little information to validate or replicate your findings. How many people did you talk to? What type of demographic data did you collect on your subjects? When did you collect this data? How did you collect this data?

Seriously, you seem to be generalizing based on your conversations with a handful of teens. I guess I expect more than that given your presense in this field.

danah, I know your focus is on the United States, but I've been in Copenhagen and Shanghai this past month looking at issues surrounding social networking and I see similar splits. A shift takes place in China between QQ and MSN (both the chat clients and their other blogs, pets and online spaces) when people either study or begin to work. It's partly a class distinction and a growing-up distinction. Also, workplaces don't allow QQ but encourage MSN: if you enter the middle class office workforce, you can't chat on QQ but must use MSN, which shifts the social networking tools people use.

Facebook was beginning to make their way across certain communities -- not the middle class kids I met but the emo/indie kids and of course the expats. It has a habit of being nowhere and then all of a sudden, everywhere. Same in Europe.

Great essay, though to be honest I find the use of "hegemonic" and "subaltern" a little odd. Maybe just go with "upper" and "lower"?

I really like Greg's comment, about Facebook being a networking tool, and a tool for building connections that may be useful for personal or business success. I think most Facebook users will, after meeting somebody, almost immediately go look them up on Facebook and add them, in case they need to look them up again later.

Facebook in some ways acts as a modern rolodex. I doubt many college students actually have a physical rolodex anymore. A cell phone phonebook only holds so many contacts and is susceptible to drowning. Look at all the "X lost his phone, give me your numbers" groups you see.

I'm sure there's more to this thought, but I'm not making too much sense even to myself right now.

As an old guy who has looked briefly at both MySpace and Facebook, I found this very insightful. Most of my friends on Facebook (I don't really use MySpace) are "hegemonic", as you predict, even though many are not earning lots of money yet.

You are my hero of the day for (inadvertently, I presume) doing at least as much as anybody else to make Rupert Murdoch poorer.

This is interesting, if only because a lot of what you say is playing out right now in my family.

I grew up on the borderline between working and middle class. My father had the highest degree in the family with an associates in buisness.

My brother is a die-hard MySpace fan, while I've always used Facebook. I went to school in a private liberal arts Midwest college that tended to cater to the upper class; he's going to high school in what was always known as the "stoner" school.

We used to have a lot more in common: We were both heavily into music, both a part of the "alternative" groups. After attending college full time I've mellowed some. He's still a die-hard socialist.

What's interesting is that I've always been known as the driven, hard working one in the family. My brother, on the other hand, is seen as the complete opposite.

I think what will be interesting to see is when MySpace members start going to college if they'll pick up on facebook...

Oh, so much blog about nothing. Remember Geocities and the legion of me-page creators? That's all these overhyped hogbloated student tatoo page sites are. Amateurish and embarrassing. And they will suffer the same descent into irrelevance any day now. Look for 2.0 tatto removal and reputation cleansing services that offer to hunt down and delete any pages corresponding to any user name and password combination you can remember, or just change all occurances of "drunk" (as in "me drunk") to "having a good time, gee the camera must have slipped."

Upon what evidence are you founding these speculations? Have you surveyed these youths' household incomes?

Are there really only 2 social classes? Are some people not on both networks?

You also do not address how this boundary has emerged, but clearly you are relying on assumptions that people are mainly friends within their classes, because presumably the main reason people pick one service (MySpace vs. Facebook) over the other depends on where most of their friends already are.

Your article is not scholarly work, I don't know why you have citation at the top to pretend it is authentic. That is misleading. Where are your citations?

Visualization would be a fascinating extension of this essay. If you could anonymously overlay facebook and myspace communities onto the Google Map. If your SNS requests zipcode then you are being class-profiled for marketing purposes.

Four brief notes before dealing with the larger discussion:

1. I'm talking about high school class divisions. College practices and adult practices are quite different and I cannot make any claims about class divisions between the two sites when it comes to adult adoption. There is a rite of passage for going into college and for as long as Facebook has been around, going to college has meant joining FB even if you were on MS. This has not seemed to change.

2. Since I realized that many people who were not familiar with my work were reading this essay, I added some methodological notes at the bottom of the piece.

3. I should clarify (especially to the academics who are probably cringing) that this is too early to be a paper in progress. This is only a blog essay where I'm trying to put together my notes on what I'm seeing before I try to properly situate or theorize it. I totally agree that Bourdieu is key. If anyone has other suggestions, I'm all ears. I'm putting this out there in a super raw form because I think that it's important for folks to hear, even if it's not a clean study and I have not cleanly situated it or nuanced it. I love my blog because I can do this, but it's not really the academic way (which is why I'm in trouble with the academics). Hopefully, there's still value in the rawness.

4. One of the things that I know that I did was conflate college-bound locally marginalized teens (i.e. geeks, queers, subculturally identified) with non-college-bound broadly marginalized teens. The more I think about it, I should've split the two rather than lumping them under "subaltern" together. The former are going to join Facebook when they go to college. The latter currently won't, even if they go to community college. I still need to work on that.

I think a part that needs to be taken into account is the fuzziness of what the SNS is in the first place.

One of the reasons facebook draws a more technologically sophisticated crowd is because the site works as designed. It has a superior architecture, a clean interface, it adheres to high design standards and web standards, etc. As a SNS -- it is highly functional. Yes, it is about formal networks, and this is the point. This is a key difference between MySpace, which attempts to combine several things into one -- a blog, a personal homepage, a SNS site, a dating service, groupware, a dating service, etc. It does none of these functions well... however -- because it's all bundled together, it's more accessible to technologicaly unsophisticated people. Conversely, Facebook users tend to use a variety of web services for different purposes (flickr, hosted or independent blogs, other online spaces..) and use Facebook primarily for just the stated purpose of formalizing ad hoc social networks.

And yes, I agree with DS that this isn't scholarly work, which makes me scratch my head at the citation instructions at the top. If it's a blog essay, post it as a blog essay. If it's actual research and not just casual observations, then prepare it in manuscript form and post the manuscript... I don't know what the norms are in the social sciences, but if I submitted a paper to Nature with such a casual tone and imprecision, I'd easily predict the outcome. It's an interesting discussion to have, but let's not pretend it's publishable in current form without any kind of statistical analysis to back it up :)

Great article--absolutely fantastic. It got me to thinking, that's for sure. One thing, though--you really could use some help editing your work. I noticed a lot of typos there. You're obviously a very intelligent person, and there's nothing wrong with the fact that you lack the skills to get everything down in writing perfectly--some of the best writers need serious help with their spelling, grammar, punctuation and the like. But the really good writers take that extra step and get the help they need from an editor (could even be someone you know personally who has the skill--doesn't have to be a professional). I suggest this because you really have talent, but it would be a shame to see that your work isn't taken seriously because of all those little mistakes. Whether you like it or not, or agree with it or not, your work WILL indeed be dismissed by people because of those mistakes. Don't let that happen--your work is otherwise very good!

Interesting article, I have one point to stress to the non-hegmonic nature of MySpace and "bling" (I didn't see this in the comments): the ability to radically modify the design of a MySpace page. An entire cottage industry of MySpace design templates sprung up alongside the site's rise. MySpace allows a much higher level of personalization, those with HTML knowledge can go beyond the templates thanks to articles such as Mike Davidson's tutorial (recently made famous by John McCain). As I noticed in another comment, Facebook allows no access to page design (uniformity in the name of usability).

"One of the things that I know that I did was conflate college-bound locally marginalized teens (i.e. geeks, queers, subculturally identified) with non-college-bound broadly marginalized teens. The more I think about it, I should've split the two rather than lumping them under "subaltern" together. The former are going to join Facebook when they go to college. The latter currently won't, even if they go to community college."

I love your work danah. And I love this piece in particular (it's revealing in the comments it is attracting), but that's still a terrific assumption.

My bet is as Facebook becomes more mainstream (wait when you hear about it on CNN, Time Magazine, etc), and when advertisers, marketers, and those seeking that mass audience build presences there, that the picture will change radically.

Apophenia isn't making connections where none previosly existed. It is inventing conections where none if fact do exist. I think that pretty much sums up this paper. Anecdote and peronal opinion usually produce faulty conclusions.

As always, danah, completely fascinating and a very useful contribution to emerging knowledge, despite the disparagements of the quants in the audience.

I'm also fascinated by the classism being demonstrated in the methodological critiques (and the complete cluelessness of "big bad editor" in his comments about what seems to me to be more like a grounded theory memo). 90 interviews in a qualitative, ethnographic study is a huge sample (let alone the volume of your profile analyses). The domination of the positivist paradigm, and the infiltration of deterministic methods into social sciences (what a colleague of mine calls "physics envy") has created yet another hegemonic discourse in the academy. Consequently, researchers like you (among many others) see their work and methods trivialized and marginalized. Ironically, it is positivism that has become less able to adequately describe and account for the complexities of a massively interconnected world.

Thank you,

It is an interesting look inside America. However, with the teasing out of a class distinction, I cannot help to think how the purchase of myspace by News Corporation plays into it. News Corporation owns and operates a large number of tabloid papers in Australia which are aimed squarely at the working/battler, lower-middle classes in Australian suburbia, for example the Herald-Sun. Its primary competitor is the small-l liberal broadsheets in Melbourne and Sydney. Newspapers such as The Age have generally been the media outlet for the more affluent, tertiary/college educated and left-leaning population.

Extrapolating the nature of class through media and the Murdoch press/media empire to always target the most profitable (in aggregate) sectors of the economy, that the strategy/marketing of myspace, in its consolidation, could be a reflection of the nature of class to be automatically played out through information dissemination.

I think that if you could probe further into this structure, the way that the organisation is embedded within the flow of a global media empire and how it is figured as an extension of News Corporation, then there is something in there. Not sure exactly, but I think worth pursing.

I am not a social scientist, I have not even finished my undergraduate degree and I still see faulty conclusions in this paper. I am a previous user of Myspace and I still participate on Facebook. My background does not include wealth or even parents that have both attended college. I find it highly insulting to make generalizations when you can hardly know the details of personal experience. I stopped using Myspace because I got sick of the ads and the fact that the server was often down, Facebook is easier to use, its simpler. I believe that before you make vast generalizations maybe you should try to learn more about the people that use these sites. It appears to me, that you have taken a personal opinion and have backed it with little scientific evidence.
Maybe instead of discussing the class divisions caused by programs such as these you could think about the effect that the computer age is having on our country's youth. Yes, there are good virtues now and then, but think of the health of mind and spirit that is lacking in this new indoors lifestyle. Maybe instead of brandishing these programs as evil, we should instead, extol the virtues of a walk in the park.

Brilliant and definitely needed to be said. It feels very 1950's-ish, as a parent of a teen these days. My son's health ed book says that his parents will be disappointed in him unless he stays abstinent until marriage (in the San Francisco Bay Area!)

The rules for being "good" are untenable, and the kids who can see that the emperor has no clothes have to choose between being devious liars or rejecting the system entirely.

Now, we certainly had good/bad dichotomies too, but rebellion was an accepted stage of development back in the day (late 70's to at least early 90's). Teens separated and then they figured it out and returned. To some extent, they felt protective of their parents, unwilling to horrify them with what actually went on during those years (Traci Bonham's Mother Mother springs to mind). Now, forget it. Kids aren't allowed to (visibly) separate. That's disloyal.

Again, in an excellent high school I'm intimately familiar with, a previous valedictorian (there are typically about 15) had a crisis of conscience when at a worldclass university about how she cheated to get her straight A average. She returned the valedictorian artifact and was shunned by her community for ADMITTING she had cheated.

In a culture that values transparency, when you're powerless it seems to me you have two choices: you can either take photos of innocuous crap or you can be real but distance yourself from anyone who, having never experienced powerlessness themselves, might be appalled by the choices you have to make.

I'm a student pastor (read: I minister to middle and high school students) in metro Atlanta and I tend to agree with what you're observing. In my youth group I have some students from a lower-middle class to high-lower class as well as students from the middle and middle-upper class. I've seen most of my students migrate away from MySpace in the past 6 months.

This summer I spent a week with 120 teens on a missions trip and of all the teens I met (well, those who wanted to stay in touch with me) _all_ of them gave me their facebook address. Almost none of the students (as far as I could tell) were from a 'poor' family background.

Thought-provoking essay, Danah.

I'd be interested to see whether a study of the advertisers (and the ads themselves, obviously) would yield parallel results. Marketers have been searching for ways to get the best ROI out of social networks, and your analysis seems much like the demo/psychographic research a brand would do before choosing to post a MySpace page or throw some banner ads on Facebook.

I'm post-college, and I'd never joined Facebook because it wasn't an option for me. While I'm growing tired of the "one size fits all" social network phenomenon, I do keep up with my high school and college friends on MySpace. I think we'll continue to see audiences for these fragment culturally and regionally.

Hmmmmmm... it concerns me this article makes a lot of bold statements without citing *any* facts to back them up. Where are the citations, the statistics, the reliable sources? These seem to be observations and nothing more.

And on that note, I could write a similar article on the basis of *my* observations about my friends and my clicking around these websites (which, as it happens, I am paid to do - so do so a lot!) but it would bear no resemblance to this author's "findings":

As also commented by "James L", my experience of Facebook is a real mix of friends - some from high school, others from past jobs, people of all backgrounds, they are all friends on Facebook and simply cannot be categorized according to the author.

Further, most of my friends on Facebook also have MySpace pages and revel in the opporunity to "Pimp My Profile" - regardless of their "class". To suggest a "bling" MySpace page gives away your social background is tenous at best, because everyone on MySpace has a "bling" page - because they can! That's half the fun!

I think it is far more realistic to simply view MySpace and Facebook for what they are: just two different SN websites, encouraging their users to behave in distinctly different ways. While they may attract a slightly different audience, in my experience they overlap hugely. People tend to have a presence on both and appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms. My friends tend to have their fun on MySpace and keep in touch on Facebook, regardless of their social background.

It's plain to see there is a difference in the way users behave on the different websites, because they encourage different sorts of behaviour and thrive for different reasons - but class divide? I think not.

That said, I would be very intrigued to see *real* facts (e.g. MySpace and Facebook officially published demographics).

Nice.
Just one request; can you also talk a bit about your background? If MySpace and Facebook existed back when you were a High School senior, which one would you have chosen?
I'm not calling you out on bias. Even "bad" kids know they're "bad", and they wouldn't have it any other way. In fact, there might not even be all that much wrong about it. These kids could actually have chosen their lifestyle to be such. Those who jump class are those rags to riches or lunatic celebrity stories. And so humanity marches on in the way it has for hundreds of years.

Fascinating work, danah. While I understand your preference for qualitative methods, I also agree that some descriptive statistics might be helpful. In particular, do you have a sense of how many users have active accounts on both platforms? If this is a non-trivial population, it might be interesting to know how much time they spend on each, and whether or why that might change over time. Is it (as Ms. Gorrell suggests) "feature driven," or is it (as you suggest) a sort of proto-classism?

On a different note, I'm teaching a course on inequality this winter, and may like to have my students read your essay. These will mostly be college frosh-level (I understand this is not your focus, but they're near enough to high school they may offer relevant insights); I would have no problem with asking them to (voluntarily) fill out a survey (of your design), if you like.

Couldn't be more timely, good stuff. Can't help but think that this is part of the unspoken appeal in the rush for everyone to build Facebook apps (my employer included). I nominate that guy above who commented about pot smoking violin players as boob of the year, btw.

The BBC sure took the political wind out of this study's sails!

I learned of your essay from my digital friend, Prometheus 6.

Your research is pretty cool.

I read your blog essay and some of the comments in this thread. The essay and one of the comments sparked a few ideas.

1) Interactions between cultural capital, social capital, and social psychology and the ways these social phenomena influence the distribution of social rewards (wealth, power, prestige) interest me. And, I'd like to learn more about whether or how young adults' social networking software choices and behaviors might inform us about the influence aversive racism* has on ethnic minorities who compete for social capital, as an economic resource, in the U.S. For instance, I'd like to learn more about whether an individual's aversive racist dispositions, which might be measured best using IATs, are influenced most by his social network (something sociometricians might be able to map and compare), his native cultural milieu or social class, the images of other ethnic groups and other cultures that he consumes via popular mass media, or other social phenomena. I predict your work, if it would teach us more about how people make social networking decisions based on their cultural tastes, their aesthetic tastes, and their economic incentives, could also help us learn more about which social phenomena influence aversive racist dispositions most and how. Your research findings might be able to teach us more about how social networks operate to encourage or discourage their members from learning more about the similarities or differences between them and members of other ethnic groups or other social networks.

2) Perhaps your findings regarding the movement of social networks between MySpace and Facebook also suggest that social networking software applications such as these have some kind of natural life cycle or "popularity cycle." If you find there is often a measurable life cycle for social networking apps such as these, a cycle that is related to the average young adult's ceaseless demand for novelty or trends or means to differentiate herself from the last decade's average young adult, then more information about how to measure these life cycles and how to determine which factors speed them up or lengthen them out would be very valuable to marketers, trendspotters, and Web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

3) I'll respect your unedited blog essays, especially those that will contain novel ideas, great analyses, or dot-connecting syntheses. I'm more interested in your inventive, analytic, and synthetic powers, and the great benefits of sharing your ideas and collaborating with others via blogs early, than I am in your blog essay syntax or style. But I'm no linguistic prescriptivist or “grammar hammer;†I'm just a guy who likes new ideas and who doesn't want smart and creative folks, who have the powers to generate them, to hold them back from us until their essays have been edited thoroughly. If I did have some useful suggestions for your blog essay syntax or style, I’d probably send them to you through a private email, so that interested blogs readers like me would not be distracted from your great ideas by random thoughts concerning your blog essay syntax or style.

* Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (2004). “Aversive racism.†In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (pp. 1 – 52). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Gaertner, S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (1986). “The aversive form of racism.†In J. F. Dovidio & S. L. Gaertner (Eds.), Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.

Comment I heard recently in downtown SF, on Market Street, close to the Apple store, from one teenaged Black girl to another:

"I want to go to the iPod store and check my Myspace."

Danah, any idea if the design of each site affects the behavior of those who use it? Or, more specifically, attracts (over time) a certain type of person to use it?

A basic assumption that most of us make, I think, is to treat the design of the site as neutral, that it has no influence on what happens there...curious to know your thoughts on that.

I guess I see your observations as interesting, but unsurprising.

The class difference you seem to be struggling with describing looks pretty clearly to me like the one between "college-bound" and not.

Of *course* young people will choose to hang out where the people who are already where they hope to be going are hanging out! It's the next best thing to sneaking into the bars in the nearest college town.

I'm extremely uncomfortable with the characterization of college-bound youth as "hegemonic" let alone "good". (Just who is this "we" who think the college bound are somehow not doing all the same stupid stuff as their non-college-bound classmates? Hell, I'm a parent to kids this age, and I'm very clear that these kids drink and smoke pot just as we did back in the bad old 70's!)

College-bound youth are the ones who have chosen to accept and act upon the widely-held consensus that professional and social success in 21st Century USA requires a college degree. They may be emo. They may be goth. They may have bands. They may be upper middle class. They may just have parents who are working their asses off to get them the opportunity to become middle class. But in any case, what separates them from the other kids is their sense of where they want to be next, and what they are willing and able to do to get there.

Until we have a society in which an undergraduate education *isn't* most often a pre-req for a middle-class life, yeah, the choice to seek that education or not is going to be a pretty strong stratifier. Most of the influences on that choice are deep-seated and well off-line.

Social networking sites will, of course, continue reflect the choices people are making about who it is they want to be with.

This is a really interesting paper. I'm a University of Texas student and found out about Facebook rather early on, before I had even heard of Myspace. I now have accounts with both (I joined both at the behest of friends) and have noticed pretty much exactly what you've said.

I grew up in a rural poor community in Texas, where very few are college-bound. (My mother was college-educated and a school teacher, and I knew I was going to college before I even started pre-school.) The vast majority of the kids I grew up with are on Myspace and only Myspace. A few who, like me, went off to college, are on Facebook, but usually the ones who are on Facebook only use Myspace to keep in touch with friends from high school. They primarily use facebook.

You might be interested, for further research, in how Myspace is making changes to become more like Facebook -- adding photo albums and so on. It would be interesting to talk to the developers in how they view their own product, and whether they intend to make any movements toward appealing to hegemonic society.

Brilliant, well thought out essay. Perceptive, innovative thinking, comprehensive, unpretentious and astute. wow. Thanks.

Discussing class in the USA is a complex, difficult topic, not one that many Americans are comfortable with and it's usually considered politically incorrect.

Class, A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell is the only likable book I've ever read on the subject.

Merchants of Cool (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/) discusses capitalism and teen society with intelligence.

The documentary, The Century of the Self, (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2637635365191428174) details the beginnings of the advertising business in the USA, has aspects that touch on the topic you've revealed.

But cyber class structure, particularly among teens, has a whole other level of complexity and you've nailed it beautifully.

A couple of comments. What I find fascinating is that in high school I would have been part of the "subaltern" group not because my parents were poor (they're not) but because I was ostracized at school for being intelligent. So I probably would have had a MySpace account if it had existed in the mid-to-late 90s (I graduated in 1998). However, I deftly avoided MySpace when it was launched - by that time I had entered grad school (and am still there) and was bored by what I saw as a lot of pages with poor site design. Basically, you couldn't even read them because the people who had modified the pages were extraordinarily bad at understanding which backgrounds to use so as not to make the foreground impossible to read. Also, music blaring as soon as I log on to a page is incredibly annoying.
I have been a user of Facebook almost since it was launched, even though I would still consider myself far from being in a "hegemonic class" as a Marxist political science grad student, beyond the potential hegemony involved in being a professor. One reason was that, obviously, most of the people I knew were on Facebook when I joined, so it was a de facto place to go. The pages were also cleaner and easier to read than MySpace - I don't know if this has anything to do with a class divide but for me that was part of the dealbreaker. You could read information without having to strain your eyes (perhaps this just shows that my artistic talents are few and far between, but I do appreciate modern art, just not Myspace).
Your research is fascinating because it hits at the heart of the class divide in the US, and of course in capitalism class is always at the heart of matters - but I wonder what the percentage of families is in the US with computers and internet access? Did you take into account the low percentage of computer usage or ownership in poorer communities? I worry that you may have visited communities that self-selected themselves because of a modicum of wealth to have families that owned computers and had regular internet usage. What is the Myspace/Facebook divide in Detroit or the poorer sections of LA, or Bed-Stuy in NYC?

I completely agree with most of what I read, however I would have to disagree with your placement of 'geeks' in the myspace grouping. The geek community has its own online community outside of myspace and facebook and tend to disdain association with either of the groups you mentioned, however if they are on one or the other it tends to me facebook from what I've seen. or to paraphrase, they a) don't go to social networks at all or b) go to facebook because it's open API

Re: Paul Willis "argued that working class teens will reject hegemonic values because it's the only way to continue to be a part of the community that they live in."

This was captured in the brilliant documentary called "People Like Us." It explores the US class divide from all different angles, and there is a scene where a girl from a working class family faces being ostracized from her family & community because she wants to move to the big city and jump classes.

"People Like Us" is definitely worth checking out if you enjoyed this essay.

Thanks for an interesting and provocative blog post.

I got a good sense from your essay at what the "average" user was like for each of the two communities, but I didn't get a clear sense of "standard distribution". It's not surprising to me that competing social sites would eventually tend to focus on different demographics, both from a sociological standpoint and from a business one. (The former standpoint's already been discussed; the latter is one way to avoid everyone treating you as runner-up to the Big Dominant Site; think, e.g., Ebay vs. every other auction site.) And Facebook's original exclusive membership naturally tends to place it from a different pole in the social-sphere than the open-from-the-start MySpace.

But service demographics shift, as you've noted in your essay; and a number of folks on either site deviate from the portrayed "average", as noted in th e comments. As someone who find social pressures more of a concern than simple self-selection, I'd be interested in knowing the extent to which each site is either open to people joining who deviate from the average, and to what extent there is pushback (or flight) in response to migration or deviation.

As someone who's well over what I suspect is the average age for both sites, I can relate to finding "graphical noise" a bit offputting. When I finally got a cell phone recently, for occasional use (there's another demographic differentiator...), I read through the package inserts and the network's web site, thought "this design is so not me. But it's a good deal for cheap prepaid wireless." And I was pretty sure they had a good read on the demographic they *were* mainly aiming for. Having seen MySpace now, I recognize some design affinities...

Oddly enough, there is a teenage kid that lives near my place who has parents that are both teachers, and because of where they live, he rarely comes into contact with other people his age except at high school. A few days ago, I asked him if he had a MySpace or Facebook account. He told me neither, he had a LiveJournal account, because that is where all the "grown-ups" are.

i am wondering how this relates to tribes, individuality, and cultural humility. it seems to me that the hegemonic teens, as i was clearly one of them, but not, are raised to think about distant futures, where other cultures are taught about identity. one is about WHO ARE YOU, and the other is WHO DO YOU WANT TO BE.

in hegemonic families, you are taught to create your self in the shape of clay that can be later molded. other classes, seem to teach you to harden your form at a younger age.

i plan to blog about this later, great essay!

With all due respect, I think articles like this only contribute to the problem.

Imagine, if you can, that you had never seen or heard of MySpace or Facebook before. You go on, surf, read posts, see pictures of people.

Now imagine that before surfing these websites, you read an article saying, "MySpace and Facebook are new representations of the class divide in American youth."

I think you know the result!

Okay, first things first. I am a typical highschool student you seem to make references to and about. And I don't understand why you have to make something SO simple SO complex!? why don't you just leave it alone! myspace isn't for under or less educated kids! what in your right mind would make you even THINK that?! Myspace and Facebook are just ways of communicating ..and to let you know i have accounts of BOTH sites! And i like them BOTH! And I absolutely disagree with you! I'm actually quite angry with your suggestions of who goes to which site!

great article, and solid points.

i have to disagree with first poster, greg, though about trust and identity.

i started as a myspace user and switched to facebook at the insistence of a friend. i have since left facebook, but not entirely.

while facebook verifies your identity, or tries to (my real name is not tom joad, but i got past its filters), it also forces you to identify yourself and choose a network; anonymity is not an option. say what you want about that being the cornerstone of security, i think it is the opposite - facebook forces users to post their real, identifiable info. that is not trust in my book. i also chose "no network" on facebook, because i value privacy. facebook is just as rife with security problems as myspace; these are simply never publicized. with a note to identity and trust, facebook will still not allow users to permanently delete accounts.

i noticed another trend - facebook users tend to grant friend requests to anyone in their network. on myspace, i would regularly decline friend requests with no problem; picking and choosing your friends and keeping tight social boundaries is respected if not expected. the myspace friend lists are also entirely user generated: few go over 500 and far fewer over 1000 for personal profiles. this is not the case on facebook and raises an interesting effect. on facebook, someone friended me whose politics i did not quite agree with, and i rejected the friend request - the first one i rejected - and promptly received several messages asking why i rejected the request.

facebook creates a trusted environment, while myspace creates an open environment. i think a corollary can be drawn here between the street smarts of working class youth or subcultures v. the expectation of a protected environment for middle-upper class suburban or mainstream youth; you need street smarts on myspace, you don't on facebook, hence myspace users have stricter social filter guidelines as users go - if they choose to have sexbots as friends, it is because they choose so, not because it is expected of them by the structure of the site, as with facebook's networks - whereas facebook users rely on the site itself to filter "social undesirables" from their friends list.

another reason subcultural or social fringe elements stick to myspace is the enhanced creative environment. again, it is a blank palette. facebook is more restricted in user input but provides more ready-to-use apps.

again, perhaps a class distinction arises. when i was in high school eleven years ago, it was still common for seniors to be split into three groups - those whose parents bought them a car at age 18, those who had no money for a car even at age 18, and those who bought a clunker and worked on it until it ran. the auto-shop kids were definitely lower class. the new beemer/audi crowd was definitely upper to upper-middle class. the same went for computer geeks i knew: the lower class kids made computers from spare parts and dabbled in slapped together PC's and Linux and BBS's; the rich kids had AOL and new Windows 95 Pentium PC's (hey, this was 1995-96 we're talking about) bought for them.

the aesthetic is different. if you make something with your own hands, through your own creativity, it has value in working class communities. value in upper class communities derives from the status an object/thing grants you.

interesting essay.

although you suggest that facebook users often come from families that emphasize education, etc., i was wondering if you methodology accounted for the fact that facebook was, up until recently, open only to educational or employment networks, and so most users will probably still reflect this skewed proportion towards educated individuals?

great blog, very interesting stuff.

Very good article! Just one piece of constructive critism. You do not need to use big words to try and convey a point. Rather, your use of hegemonic makes you seem inexperienced.

Congratulations that your article hit /., however, I would be a bit embarrassed. You should have taken a few moments to read it over and edited first. It started as a good article but I got too annoyed with all the grammar mistakes that I stopped reading it.

We will be watching your career with great interest.

Great.

One possible "but". A lot of the "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths" and so on I have known were middle class kids. In your comment point #4 you address that some subalterns are college-bound and some aren't. I might make that claim even deeper: some subalterns are lower class and some are middle (or even upper!) class, with *all* of the follow-on implications that entails, including but not limited to post-secondary education.

Maybe I think that because I come from a smaller town Canadian background where cultural self-identify (are you a grunge kid or a preppy?) wasn't as tightly tied to class (does your Dad work at the Goodyear plant or run a store?) as it may be in larger more rigidly stratified cities and towns. And countries.

And a response to a lot of the comments that have tried to dismiss the papers conclusion's by suggesting that the observed divisions are rooted in the marketing or technology context of the SNSs: class is rarely enforced directly by willing conspirators, it is often the unwitting result of just those kind of infrastructures. Yet somehow the infrastructure is more likely to be class-divisive than class-inclusive. The "intent" of class entrenchment doesn't have to be on the surface for it to be there or effective.

I thought this essay had many valid points. The only thing I was slightly disappointed about may just be due to my experience. I am from Atlanta, Ga, but I had to go Washington for debate camp. A lot of the people I met there were from the general West Coast area, and they tended to use MySpace. On the other hand, most of my friends from the east tended to use Facebook. This is just based on my experience though, so it might not be an accurate statement.

This is a reply to Alice wayyyy back up there from last night-- Alice, I can think of at least one particular instance where FB -IS- used to make new friends, namely when a batch of strangers are joined together in being admitted to the same school. My experience is not unique, but I did recount it more fully in an interview with Karine Joly on her site

Fantastic work--and right on. I teach middle school and almost everyone’s “myspace.” A few serious and studious kids have “Facebook” accounts already to communicate with older siblings (and their friends, but seldom) in higher ed.

If anyone criticizes your use of “class” in your work, that’d probably be for making headlines (to steal your thunder) or displaying his or her own ignorance. Wonderful job here.

i am wondering how this relates to tribes, individuality, and cultural humility. it seems to me that the hegemonic teens, as i was clearly one of them, but not, are raised to think about distant futures, where other cultures are taught about identity. one is about WHO ARE YOU, and the other is WHO DO YOU WANT TO BE.

in hegemonic families, you are taught to create your self in the shape of clay that can be later molded. other classes, seem to teach you to harden your form at a younger age.

i plan to blog about this later, great essay!

I attend Ball State University in Muncie, IN, a school that attracts students from all different social strata due to relatively low tuition and rural location. Facebook is the common SNS, but I see an almost equal amount of students using Myspace in the computer labs.

It seems to me that the two systems serve similar purposes when used in tandem- academic relationships are tracked on Facebook while social relationships (in and out of the classroom) are tracked on Myspace.

A few comments:

* Very interesting conclusions. But I would like to see some data. Yes, it's a very square desire, but one in line with all sciences, including social sciences. If this is meant to be a thought paper to solicit feedback and ideas, it's a great start. But if it's going to move beyond, you need to clarify where and how you've drawn your conclusions from. This isn't to say you're wrong; this is to say you need to prove WHY you're right.

* Can someone's identity straddle categories, i.e. Preppy queer, lower-class kid who is eager to adopt the habits of her new ivy peers, etc.? What if you're both a "good kid" and like weird cultural shit? It happens all the time.

* Earlier posters keep referencing Bordieu, and in particular his "Distinction" article. A big part of that article was that lower classes can learn to mimic many aspects of upper class culture, and I'd think joining Facebook would be among the easist new habits to learn.

* Putting both sites in historical contexts would be helpful. Kudos to the earlier poster who pointed out that Facebook used to be far more exclusionary than it is today, and is growing to be more like another MySpace.

Hi there! I'm an undergrad student at the now-defunct Antioch college in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

I really just have two questions about your article:

The first is isn't most of this pre-determined? What I mean is facebook was originally designed for college students. Wouldn't it then make sense that college bound or college seeking high school students would opt for facebook over myspace?

The second question (I believe) is the more interesting. So as we all know, joining either myspace or facebook is completely voluntary. There is absolutely nothing holding someone back from joining either of these sites (Save for of course their awareness of the existence of said websites, which granted is an issue).

It has been said in our society (Mainly by republicans) that the poor CHOOSE to be poor. Obviously this is not true. IT is however interesting to note that the internet allows us (At least for the moment) true freedom. IF we want something we have the ability to grab it. So why is it we choose to re-create social stratification seen in real life within our virtual environment?

I believe the answer to this question is "we know no other way." Wouldn't it be nice to transcend the societal boundaries and create a true classless society...at least on the internet?

P.S. Sorry if this is unintelligible...At work dodging my boss.

First off, I am glad that people are finally starting to recognize the potential that is in these networking sites. But, as a Facebook user, I feel that you have oversimplified the situation. THis is understandable, as fully analyzing the situation would be almost impossible and would rely on masses of computer spreadsheets and the like.

I come from a fairly 'mixed', as you called them, school. we have a good amount of subaltern students, and a good number of hegemonic students. But most of us use Facebook. You need to account for the fact that many fringe students will joine Facebook because it is the better known of the two in an area, and that many hegemonic students will join Myspace because it is better known regionally.

Take me for example. I'm the kid that everyone likes. The kid that everyone thinks shows up high to class, but who, in reality, doesn't do drugs. This would seem to indicate that I am hegemonic in nature, but that is not the case. I am bisexual, which would indicate Myspace, and I am very involved in a number of arts, all of which would indicate Myspace. I self identify as a fringe student, which would also indicate Myspace. But I use Facebook, primarily because the vast majority of my school uses Facebook.

I am glad that the adult world is finally coming aware of these networking sites, and that they are being looked at closely, all I am trying to do is to give you another way of looking at the data that you gathered. I wonder how many fringe students would identify with my description of myself.

I am confused about one aspect of your article. I do not see subculture, race, and sexual orientation ("Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, 'burnouts,' 'alternative kids,' 'art fags,' punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids", "goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids") mapping directly to socio-economic classess. The article attempts to make the connections, but I am not convinced that they exist. I have many questions that tie into this.

I am a member of the age group and communities being discussed, and my experiences with Myspace and Facebook is contradictory to much of what you have said in the essay. I'd be more than happy to share my experience with you to help your research

I'm a bit disappointed.

I'm not on the same wavelength, politically. At the same time, I'm self-aware enough to know that I'm probably wrong about a lot of that, which is why I am intrigued by papers like this. But I'm not interested in hashing out the same old political crap; chances are, I could probably hold my own on most of the usual topics.

So I was looking to be informed: to hear things that were compelling, and which could alter my political view.

And I got some of that. The first sections were excellent, challenging me with information. But, too quickly, things tended to devolve into the same, tired political debates.

In particular, your section on the military was a profound let-down. Labels like "xenophobic" are not useful; they preach to the choir, and engender suspicion in the less-convinced when not accompanied by evidence. Neither are conspiracy theories about the ban, when evidence is equally lacking. The discussion and explanation that accompanied the teen/college scene and the aesthetics discussion were completely absent in the military discussion.

As just one example: the military is supposed to be more "working-class" throughout than the general population, which would imply that there's a population of officers coming from the ranks of the "subalterns". Is that true, and do their use of Facebook/MySpace change after the transition? I'm interested in that question far more than in the evidence-free musings about why the military banned MySpace.

I don't mean to say that you're not entitled to your political beliefs. Nor do I want to get into any of the specifics of our political differences. My point is that I think you had a purpose in writing this, and I tend to think people like me are your audience--people generally indisposed to your point of view, but willing to be convinced. At least, I think we are part of your audience. At minimum, if I'm "hegemonic", maybe you want my help in combating this class separation, or perhaps you want to counter the anti-MySpace hype (which I've certainly seen, and which bewilders me to a degree).

If not, though, then it might be helpful to understand who your audience is.

Daniel - you sound very right on as far as I am concerned.

Here's something to consider for everyone here.

The default MySpace profile looks pretty clean in implementation and isn't *noisy* at all.

It's those that *decide* to change their page who make their MySpace profiles that way.

I'm neither a fanboy of either MySpace or Facebook. However, when I hear folks decrying the look of most MySpace pages, and blame MySpace, they seem to overlook the fact that it was the participant's *decision* to change their page that way.

A thought provoking read with many good points. Overall I think you "hit the nail on the head" so to speak. Good work, thanks!

Seriously? I just threw up in my mouth a little. Your logic is so flawed I couldn't even begin to start pointing everything out. Oh, BTW, I'm in the military, and Facebook is banned, also. And I'm not an officer, yet I have an MBA and I'm a member of Myspace AND Facebook. Get a clue! Or maybe a real job......

I'd also like to ask if Facebook wasn't closed off to college only (maybe enterting class of that college included) when it first came out? Thus making it "impossible" or at least less likely that younger internet users at the time could have used facebook as myspace; and perhaps as a result people that switch to or use Facebook because it already has the built in "more grown up" for "college aged" kids.

Dana,

Your essay is a fascinating read.

I think that there are two key issues between Facebook and MySpace of which I didn't see much discussion of -- privacy tools and reputation management -- in your essay.

Concerning behavior of "good" kids you state: "many of the 'good' kids will engage in some of the most shocking behaviors... but they get pushed further underground and parents become less in-touch with their 'good' kids." I agree that "bad" kids don't hold a monopoly on participation in unsavory behavior, but is the difference between "good" and "bad" kids the importance they place on reputation management that privacy tools facilitate?

It seems that upward social mobility requires a relatively squeaky clean image; the keyword is "image," not behavior. Perhaps Facebook appeals more to the "good" kids -- as you cautiously assert -- since it enables them more to conceal the entirety of their behavior from parents and other arbitrators of social advancement (college admissions staff members, potential employers, organization member committees, other "good" kids, etc.) than the open-book style of MySpace.

Do "good" kids want to appear better than they truly are while "bad" kids simply care less about their image?

Image alone doesn't explain difference between the Facebook and MySpace crowds. Even "bad" kids also fret about "image" since emos, goths, punks, and similar subsets also invest a lot in clothes, behaviors, tastes, and off-line social networks to define themselves in their chosen way?

Thus, may I ask again, could the class divide between Facebook and MySpace stem from attitudes of reputation/image management?

Steve

danah....there was much talk of Facebook (as well as Twitter and Jaiku) at last week's Supernova2007 con....and lots of talk how social networks/social media can become anti-social. Your findings key into my assertion that if companies use Facebook--with its particular insularity and ways of connecting with others predominantly as a result of f2f interaction--as the paradigm for how *everybody* relates to others online, they are seriously selling short the world of social media. Facebook, beyond the hype, is really a small, small, socially-segregated space in the realm of social media and shouldn't be used as its benchmark. Thanks for the great work!

I don't know what it is, or what it says about me, but my experience with both doesn't fit this essay at all - not that I know people of one subculture on MySpace and another on Facebook, but that my social network has, and frequently uses, both of them.

I would have considered this perhaps more insightful before Facebook opened up, but it's a totally different picture now.

Also: Who are the people in this age group who don't use either network? I know it's a harder metric to measure, but it's significant - I have just as many friends who use other, less evident networks, or don't participate at all. Is this where the true non-conformists are?

The thesis here seems pretty weak, in part due to the lack of real statistics and research, but also due to the obvious ommissions with regards to comparisons between the services themselves.

In many respects, Facebook offers a superior product to MySpace. If you follow tech blogs, you'll find the majority of bloggers and readers comment more positively about Facebook than about MySpace (whether it's thanks to better spam control, easier poeple searching, or other factors).

I don't doubt that there is somewhat of a class division between users of MySpace and Facebook. However, I expect this has a lot to do with free time - in that users with more leisure time, who tend to be more computer literate - migrate to the social network they know to offer a better service.

At least this thesis would be backed up by the fact that the average Facebook user spends more minutes logged into the service than the average MySpace user.

People of every economic class like to get more for less. If the positive buzz continues about Facebook, even the less computer literate surfers out there will eventually migrate over... At least until the next big thing comes along and it all happens again.

Hmmmm...interesting....let me make a very class conscious comment since America is not so "class conscious".

I always thought that my space is for the redneck.

I made this opinion even before Facebook came into the scene.. Ha ha ha !

SNS is the highest form of narcissism. To think that "the world" is somehow interested in your life is just..

I'd be interested to see statistics of people that know about both FB and Myspace; but choose to not use a SNS and for what reason.

Cell phones don't work anymore?
Your instant message services are down?
You forgot your email password?

Why people have the "need" to post their lives publicly at all is what interests me.

"People of every economic class like to get more for less. If the positive buzz continues about Facebook, even the less computer literate surfers out there will eventually migrate over... At least until the next big thing comes along and it all happens again."

Bingo.

tish, I believe that one day there will be protocols to share profile information across services. OpenID and other technologies will assist. There is an opportunity for some entrepreneur someplace to do a great deal of good by figuring out the path. Somedays, everything looks like a re-invention of AOL :(

This was a really interesting read, and as someone who has profiles in both MYspace and Facebook, I can tell you that I know exactly what you mean. I will be doing my own ethnographic work, and if you have time, I'd always enjoy talking to someone who has already done it. Thanks.

Interesting read, but above and beyond the constraints of language, I really think there is more complexity here than meets the eye. I am a University student whose social group is an art collective of musicians, visual artists, computer programmers and thinkers. Nearly all of us have both a MySpace and a Facebook - but for the most part, we consider ourselves upwardly mobile burnouts. In addition to the skills that we have artistically we are haunted by alcoholism, the threat of financial collapse, and drug use. I think that kids "like us," who I tend to term bourgeois bohemian, are generally herded into one or the other category here, because where we "belong" depends on which day of the week - or with which surroundings - you happen to catch us.

Apparently you have forgotten that Facebook was originally for college students and all military officers are college graduates, while almost no enlisted are college graduates.

Your research and knowledge are poor and your conclusions are questionable.

Spelling Correction, first sentence in the seventh paragraph from the end:

"People often ask me if I'm worried about teens today. The answer is yes, but it's not because of social network sites. With the hegemonic teens, I'm very worried about the stress that they're under, the lack of mobility and healthy opportunities for play and socialization, and THEY hyper-scheduling and surveillance."

I believe THEY should be THE?

Thanks for the great read!
Blaine

I’m not sure I agree completely with the conclusions re: the military ban. I suspect part of the concerns there was the illogics of our government, the avoidance of possible P.R. ramifications, and for legitimate security concerns.

I have a friend who has been interviewing for some government positions that are information sensitive. If you have any sort of online journal they won’t hire you, and if they find out you have one, they’ll fire you. Even if all you talk about is your thoughts on a movie you recently saw, and a new recipe you came across and tried for dinner. They have a zero tolerance policy for this.

Now you might then point out MySpace was banned but Facebook wasn’t, well that’s also true for other sites like livejournal, etc. Since when does something the bureaucrats in the military/government ever make complete sense?

But I know there’s been talk about completely banning any sort of site like this for anyone in the military currently serving if they would have any interface with non U.S. military members.

I bet alot of it had to do with the realization of 'oh shit, look at all the bad press MySpace has been getting, and look what sites our soldiers are going to... do we really want something to come back and bite us on the ass and cause yet another P.R. nightmare?'

Having grown up with my phone lines always tapped cause of Dad’s security clearances related to his work and travel with the current P.o.t.U.S… I know first hand the illogical practices of the government. :P

I must say, I'm completely disappointed with this article.

First, you never care to provide any solid statistics to back up your claims. You never describe what your sample was, and how many different user profiles you have looked at. This lack of scientific methodology is quite disturbing considering that you are a PhD candidate in a tier 1 university

Second, as Rabsteen mentioned a couple of posts earlier, Facebook was created explicitly to target members of educational communities. Thus, your "study" basically reflects the difference in social class between College students and Non college students.

Finally, I must say that the logic of your argument is flawed. I cat may have kittens in an oven, but that doesn't make them biscuits. If you look at your study in perspective, you realize that you are jumping to conclusions based on a very oversimplifying vision of a more complex issue. Therefore, you contribute nothing to a better understanding of social networks.

Interesting read, even as thoughts-in-progress. I see that perception, the split of the 2 services, played out in my networks on MySpace and Facebook. Thanks for posting

When the original Planet of the Apes movie was being made in the late 60's, the make up and costumes that the actors portraying apes wore took so much time and trouble to put on that they could not remove them when they all broke for lunch.

During the lunch breaks, the actors who were dressed up as gorillas all sat together. The actors who were dressed as chimps all sat together, and the actors who were dressed up as orangutans also all sat together. No one told them to do this, and no one expected it either. Because of the make-up and costumes, the race/ethnicity of the actors inside them was hidden. You would have white, black, and asian gorillas, chimps and orangutans all sitting together.

Human beings self segregate into communities. This is human nature. There is no "fix" for it, nor can there be. Attempts during the 20th century to create classes societies failed miserably. Not only did they result in even deeper class divisions within these societies, they directly led to the death of some 100 million people, and lives of profound misery and poverty for countless millions more.

The factors that determine the composition of the various communities within a society vary from setting to setting. Race is usually a very strong determinant, but only to the degree to which it signifies ethnicity. Religion is also another very strong determinant, and is often synonymous with ethnicity. Wealth is a very poor determinant, especially in societies with a healthy socio-economic situation where opportunity and upward mobility are the norm. In these situations the divide between the have's and the have-not's has more to do with what is between a person's ears than what is in their wallet, as the former generally determines the latter. The strongest determinant when it comes to community identity is ethnicity, which is just another word for culture. Individuals who share a common culture are going to band together.

Culture, like most things in life, is a choice. Just because you are born into a culture does not mean that you have to stay there. This is why subcultures that are typically described as disadvantaged tend to do so poorly on standardized assessment tests. Bright and capable individuals who are born into these cultures come to realize the folly of their neighbors, and quickly make an exit. Multiply this over multiple generations and you have a self-selected population of sub-par individuals.

My family was not very well off financially when I was growing up. My mother is an intelligent woman, but she came from a very humble background. She married young and chose the wrong man. My parents divorced when I was 3 and my mother was stuck with having to raise my sister and I alone. Without a college degree her financial means were very limited. She easily could have qualified for welfare, food stamps, public housing, etc, etc. But she did not want us growing up in that kind of a culture and that kind of a community. She always made sure we lived in nice areas with good schools where the culture was healthy and functional. We lived in places where achievement was expected and where "everyone" went to college. The values and beliefs that we grew up with were ones of personal responsibility, a strong work ethic and an extreme emphasis on competence and sticking to it.

Today my sister and I are both college graduates and we both have professional careers. Some of our relatives on the other hand did not turn out so well. One of my cousins on my father's side is in prison and the other is hooked on crystal meth and will surely join him in due time if the graveyard doesn't claim her first. Their father can't hold down a job to save his life. On my mother's side I have one cousin who is 23 and has 4 children by three different men. Her mother is an amateur prostitute. She has a regular job in a textile mill, but she trades sex (mostly oral) for money on the side as well. None of them find their behavior the least bit strange or problematic, and they really don't like it when you call their attention to it. Needless to say I don't see my relatives much.

It has been said that character is destiny. This is true of individuals, but it is also true of groups. Whether you are talking about a club, a community, or a country, character is destiny, and the character of a group is defined by its culture. If a group enshrouds itself in a culture of failure, then failure is what is in store for it. If a group instead defines its culture based upon principles and values that lead to success and happiness, then these will be achieved.

A perfect example of this is the Cajuns. When the ancestors of today's Cajuns first arrived in Louisiana, no one wanted anything to do with them. They were forced out into the swamps and that is where they stayed. For the longest time Cajuns were considered to be less than nothing, the lowest of the low. They lived in abject poverty and wretchedness for generations. Yet today Acadia parish, which is the heart of Cajun country, has more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country. The schools there are very good, while the schools in the rest of the state rank are among the worst in the country.

The factor that led the Cajuns from poverty to affluence is culture. Their values, beliefs and behaviors were ones that led to beneficial outcomes. The only thing that was missing was opportunity. Once that was in place they quickly lifted themselves out of poverty and never looked back. There are other examples of this in the world, such as the Ashkenazim, but you get the point.

If you liked Learning to Labor, there is another book that you might also find insightful: http://www.amazon.com/Life-Bottom-Worldview-Makes-Underclass/dp/1566635055

Total 'duh'...

These different groups don't hang out together offline, as everyone with a brain and a pair of eyes already knows. Why would you expect them to hang out together online?

But go ahead, wrap it in some academic-speak and collect a few brownie points for documenting the obvious.

As someone considered geek, "art fag", and gay from a lower-middle class family who prefers Facebook, I assure you that I prefer Facebook because it has better community features (news feed), better technical features (web apps), and doesn't allow users to use hideous backgrounds that obscure profile text or play music on without my permission. It's a matter of technical superiority and better user experience, not one of group identity.

Bravo! Nice essay. Don't be downhearted by the criticisms. Much sociological research begins by "a hunch" and informal observations. Keep going!

I don't know how stable the phenomena you're seeing are. I used to be able to go to facebook with my class rosters in hand, search for my students and download photos of two-thirds, maybe three-quarters of the kids in my classes, which gave me a head start in putting faces to names. This summer I tried the same trick and got less than a third (and my students this summer are all "regular" students, not kids parachuting in while they're home for the summer). It may be that facebook having opened up to everyone (including high school kids) has cheapened it in college kids' eyes.

Regarding the following:
"like "bling" come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued."
---

Minor edit: [insert: commercialized] hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued.
---

Commercialized hip-hop is a whole different animal from hip-hop where "bling" is regarded as a retarded phenomenon driven by record company execs hell bent on cultivating and marketing what they think hip-hop is all about and should look like vs. what hip-hop is really about.

the people that I associate with fall into two different camps and their usage on a given site is reflective of their class and education. My assumption, however, in describing WHY this is the case is because facebook only recently opened its site to folks beyond the school world and still holds a stigma of being higher ed only.

look at the names even - myspace describes a place on the internet that belongs to the individual customizable by them for them. Facebook is a book..... with your face.... the layouts read from left to right and are in 2 columns with limited photos, no video, no links, no music, and limited interaction. Until recently when they began to explore additional options.

I would also like to see data about user time for each of the sites. Do facebook users spend less time on facebook at a given time because there is little to actually "do" vs. MySpace having chat's, music, video, and the like to keep the user online longer.

I actually use both but I find there is nothing to do on there except talk to people I went to school with most of which I don't like. Once they opened it up to the work world I began forming more e-relationships with my co-workers, most of whom were already on MySpace.

Human-made systems will always recreate human-made conditions. First the people change, then the systems change.

I'm so glad you posted this, be it preliminary. I have also started noticing these social/class divisions. From my own personal data collection, I have noticed that media and news stories also portray MySpace in a more negative light. It is more likely to be mentioned because of the predatory nature and dangers. Whereas Facebook is mentioned less, and generally in a more positive light. I don't know who is reflecting whom here, but news stories overall tend to mirror the trend you have noticed.

I am curious to see where teens are (on social networks) in a few more years. More and more adults (parents, teachers, police officers, etc.) are permeating these social arenas, which is bound to drive teens away. How can these spaces maintain their youth-oriented cultural identities when so many adults are now present? It'll be interesting to see where it all goes.

Interesting stuff...bookmarked. :) The term "semi-permeable membranes" comes to mind when I think of what you're pointing at.

I'm still sifting through the comments, but it seems Jake Lockley is on the mark.

I'd also add that overall, highly cyclical nature of the website market applies here. As sites convert their user base into revenue via external capital (ad revenue, ownership sale, etc.), the user base tends to fragment (at least); the fragmentation forms the seed basis for the next round of "cool" sites (and many that will fade into obscurity). You might be seeing some of this effect as well.

Hi, I dont like that you named, ""burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids" - out of the dominant trend.

I wouldnt say there's one "trend" among kids these days as there may have been, or what may have been more apparent, 20 years ago. Nowadays, there's much less differenciation between a trend, and a social outcast.

After all, a kid may become "emo" as to be able to hang around with a girl he likes, this does not make him - "socially osticised", in fact it makes him part of this trend to achieve social commincation. I admit, I dont like what you've said, as I've seen it all differently, your research may be good on paper, as to who is part of the "normal" group of kids.

But in reality, there's no "outcast" for children mentally capable of social activity, just which trend they decide to latch on to or which group of people they decide to hang out.

Excellent Article. I understand that your focus is on youth culture, but a lot of this applies to my demographic, 23-30.

I think you UNDER-emphasize the importance of class in the difference between the two services. As kids grow up and get beyond college, the "hegemonic" v. "subaltern" dynamic falls away completely.

I grew up in one of the country's most affluent suburbs. For about a year, I've been telling people that "Facebook is where I catch up with my buddies in Grad School, Myspace is where I catch up with my buddies who dropped out of High School/College." I can think of multiple instances of "hegemonic" kids on MySpace and "subaltern" kids on Facebook. The break-down depends on what they are doing now rather than what they were doing then.

I find this less troubling than you seem to. It's a hell of a lot easier to get a facebook membership than a country club membership. If people get more of an exposure to the norms and manners necessary for success in such a diverting form, I can't think of it as anything but a good thing.

that working class teens will reject hegemonic values because it's the only way to continue to be a part of the community that they live in.

Having spent the first ten years of my life along the Pennsylvania steel mills of the Ohio River, then moving to Arizona , I came to the realize the "East Coast" vs. "West Coast" life styles difference. But things may have changed since the 1950's, but you still have on horse towns where if your father worked in the mill, then it is very certain that you will work in the mill. So how can you be surprised when your classmates are in jail or dead because there was nothing else to do?

Danah -

Thank you for another provocative piece. While I'm sure there is quite a bit of fair and constructive criticism here [and I'll be the first to admit I'm out of my depth when it gets rigorously academic in nature], quite a few of the comments strike me as people who want you to know that they do in fact have their arms firmly wrapped around the tree in front of them while you're overhead suggesting that you see a forest.

Your timing of publishing this is uncanny as just this weekend I was reading Forrester's recent report How Consumers Use Social Computing and made notes to myself to further explore the A18-24 users of Facebook and MySpace, wondering what meaningful similarities and differences I might find.

I'll be looking to see whether comScore can shed further light on the subject via reports on usage patterns [both of the sites themselves and of other sites, to see if there is anything interesting re: which sites have relatively high duplication with each of these two SNets].

@Ken, in this regard I think you are right on. Certainly there is overlap across sites, but actual usage patterns will help clarify which of the two accounts is most integrated into one's life/lifestyle. In particular I would be interested to see how site usage and length of site membership correlate with Danah's hypothesis. Both of these sites have such mass that you can unquestionably find among their registrations some people from any social cohort you care to name. But who are the heavy and moderate users and how do their profiles/backgrounds synch with the hypotheses here? That's where the real story gets interesting. Many will sign up for both sites, but who persists over time with each?

@Deacon Jones - would you prefer to engage with a completely pedestrian but grammatically perfect paper than something thoroughly thought provoking with the occasional typo?

@everyone else yammering about this hypothesis not being proven to the standards of scientific journals -
(1) that caveat was included in the second paragraph, and
(2) I think perhaps in the time it would take to get something vetted to your standards the next 5 social trends would likely have already come and gone. There's something to be said for raising the issue while it's still relevant, even if it's only 85% baked.

Here's some **very rubbery** figures for comparison based on ISP logs and ISP demographics.

http://www.quantcast.com/facebook.com

http://www.quantcast.com/myspace.com

Take with a grain of salt . . .

Greg-

I feel you are missing a glaring point: Facebook's appeal was not in its 'clean' aesthetic, but strictly its _functionality_. I could use it to very quickly find that classmate that knew what the assignment was, his number, email, aim, whatever. I can assemble guests and schedule an event with remarkable ease. These are what made facebook stick for me, even though the photo tagging is just training the government facial recognition system... (your face, all lightings, all angles, all weights, facial hair configurations, haircuts, read Facebook's privacy policy, you'll quake).

My cursory examination of myspace was that it was awkward to navigate and that it served no purpose beyond an online personal expressive place. Thats fine, but I don't need that. The utility I needed was what facebook provides. Now that facebook added all these bs apps, I'm kind of annoyedl I feel they have missed the very same point that you missed.

Thoughts?
-td

Sorry, I'm at work and I have to rush this.

I read the first half of the article carefully, came to a conclusion about the division described, and scanned the last half to see if it gets mentioned prominently. I didn't find a mention, so I'll just blurt it out here.

Bear in mind that I just finished reading John Dean's book describing the Bush administration, authoritarianism, fascism, and the Republican party, so that's my context.

The division of MySpace and FaceBook might track closely with politics.

That's it. That's my big insight.

There are always going to be people who have deep-seated problems with the conclusions reached with serious academic work. To other academics the idea of American class division is really nothing new, and yet many Americans will react with dismay and aversion if they ever so much as *imagine* the term class applied to the United States. So it saddens me a bit to see a perfectly capable observer of online culture flounder for words over things that are very real and which ought to be made clear to everyone.

I'm just an undergrad myself but I've been watching these sorts of dynamics carefully and I can say the following: whether you expect detractors or not, be extremely careful with your observations and the conclusions you draw from them and say what you see and what you believe with precision. I think that being precise with your claims rather than merely cautious helps not only to strengthen the trajectory of your research but also with addressing blanket charges that ignore the constraints on your own claims implied by your methodology.

There will always be people out there who simply don't have the inclination to reason through careful arguments. The tighter your thinking is on a topic, I think, the easier it'll be to collapse all those wordy, ivory-tower sociological examinations into words that anybody can understand, and learn a lot from the engagement. I don't mean to be patronizing, you probably know a lot of this already. :)

Good luck with your studies!

This is a really interesting article. And even though it seems obvious to me now, I had never really thought about it as I log on to MySpace and Facebook on a daily basis. I had just always thought of MySpace as being more messy in layouts than Facebook. (I blame all those web design classes I took in college.)

However, I never really saw the social class division as a problem. Or any kind of division for that matter. Yes, it does become a huge issue when prejudice and hatred overcome individuals in different classes, and violence ensues, but the division still is common sense.

People will always be attracted to others that they have more in common with. They want to be able to talk about their experiences with someone who can understand them. And someone in a completely different social class, most likely, won't.

Granted, there will be people who are interested in someone who is completely different than them, but that in itself is not really the instinct. At least, that's what I've found. Your first instinct is to find your own kind, whether it be gender, race, sexuality, or any other type of social division. It's only after you've found it, that you go out looking for people who are different because different is interesting. But at the end of the day, most of your friends are most likely going to be people you have most in common with. And that's people who are in the same types of social class as you.

So in the end, is it really that big of an issue?

Just my two cents. =)

great article. as an "original" member of facebook (my friends went to harvard and invited me along...) i agree wholeheartedly with what you've written. when i saw more and more schools getting added, i was initially happy, as i have friends at other schools, but then they added *gasp* state schools, and community colleges, the horror! i became a TOTAL elitist, and i went to public school, mind you ;) even now when ppl ask me about facebook, i just roll my eyes. i feel like since they've opened it up to everyone, it's become less of a homey, safe-type networking system. as one of the comments stated MOST ppl on facebook use their REAL names, (ALL my friends do) and MOST ppl also use their REAL faces. facebook is just easier to translate from online to offline. myspace is like a fantasy land...

Interesting analysis. You might be interested to read Jilly Cooper's _Class_ (isbn 0552146625) for a (UK-centric, but adaptable) ontology of class.

Anecdotally, I have encountered many more creative-types (generalized: artists) using MS than FB - and while I can see a link between subaltern and creatives, I think this is one area that cuts through the "upper"/"lower" distinction. Creatives have just as often come through the hegemonic systems as from the subaltern ones.

Just a corner obersvation not meant to contradict your points, just to expand on the admitted blurry area.

From Julie Bettie's "Women without Class: Chicas, Cholas, Trash, and the PresencelAbsence of Class Identity"

-- begin quote --
"Notes toward class as "performance" and "performative"

On the one hand, embracing and publicly performing a particular class culture mattered more than origins in terms of a student's aspirations, her treatment by teachers and other students, and her class future. On the other hand, class origins did matter significantly, of course, as girls' life chances were shaped by the economic and cultural resources provided at home

Because of the imperfect correlation, I came to define students not only as working or middle class in origin but also as working- or middle-class performers (and, synonymously, as prep and nonprep students). Girls who were passing, or metaphorically cross-dressing, had to negotiate their "inherited" identity from home with their "chosen" public identity at school. There was a disparity for them between how their and their friends? families looked and talked at home and their own class performances at school, As I came to understand these negotiations of class as cultural (not political) identities, it became useful to conceptualize class as not only a material location but also a performance."
-- end quote --

From my dealings with Facebook in the UK I have to put forward that I think you're right but not because of the social divide in Internet users more in the way that Facebook was made accesable. When they started over here they made themselves exclusive to the "Red Brick", more established, older universities. The Universities that were more likely to house upper and upper middle class students and the fortunate few who worked hard enough to get in (not me). Its only been over the last 6 months that it has been accessable to everyone and in that 6 months I have seen more and more of my middle class and lower middle class friends adding themselfs. Because they now can.

I'm middle class and I have had many an argument with a couple of friends of mine that went to red brink unis and the class divide is there, its only sensible then to presume that this divide is going to replicate itself through the use of a social network.

As for mySpace, I find it hard to use. Thats the reason why I don't use it.

Hi, to expand on myspace's alignment with subaltern or marginalized youth I am commenting on social network's relationship to the justice system. Recently, there have been several convictions in which the myspace profiles that Danah Boyd describes as considered 'bling' or 'gauche' to upwardly mobile youth have been singled out to aid in court convictions. One example is a young woman who was convicted on a manslaughter charge, based on her highly decorated glitzy myspace site depicting herself and friends drinking and socializing at bars. She had been involved in a fatal car crash due to her driving while drunk. The visual semiotics of her myspace page, with pictures of her drinking uploading after charges were brought against her, convinced a jury to send her to prison. I wonder what the socioeconomics of myspace versus facebook mean for how youth are tried in court? What examples are there of youth being given harsh sentences based on their facebook pages, rather than myspace sites?

Damn danah. I've been reading you for years, this is the first time I've heard you get props on Marketplace! Damn!

Very interesting, and probably right. I agree with most of your observations about today's youth. I, too, am saddened by the same things you are, but I'm not at all surprised by them. I've been working with teenagers for close to 15 years, and at least in this aream there are serious, self-imposed class divisions between (just for starters) the kickers, the freaks, the rappers, the hiphoppers, the preps, the emos, the goths, etc. The divisions carry over into myspace, for the most part (I haven't been using facebook long, so can't address that). FWIW, the Austin area is slowly having more racial divisions as well. Sometimes progress isn't.

Hey there,

I haven't actually read the paper yet (I say that to my professors too you know). But here's my .02 cents;

I agree that Facebook offers a more "trustworthy and austere environment" let's say. And it's genealogy is middle class: Facebook went to university, MySpace is the love child of a dating sites and spam-marketing.

However, I actually think that the interface of Facebook is much more equitable than MySpace. For one thing it won't crash your computer, so people running shittier machines can probably log onto Facebook and go find their friends without worrying that they'll have to reboot their machines in 10 minutes.

The user interface is easier; my bestie who hates technology figured out Facebook in about 20 minutes which is a world record as far as she's concerned and actually seeing as they have the shittiest computer I have ever been forced to use, the above point also holds true.

I agree with one of the other commenters who suggests that the way people friend on Facebook invokes different relationships. I have made it a policy on FB not to friend people who are asking me just so they can advertise their music, not a policy I would use on Myspace. It's not necessarily a class thing, it's a use thing? I don't want to commercialize what I use as a meaningful social tool?

Anyways I am sure that's all been said already ;) have a good summer.

POV: Older, non-academic with academic sociology background.
1. Class is very important and downplayed. You are right to be concerned. After WWII, climbing the pinnacle of empire, the US created a large comfortable middle-class. Today there is a clear trend:
- a disappearing middle economically and in outlook (obvious through observing housing patterns or reading the stats on income and wealth distribution).
- reduced social mobility (still plenty of it but less every day and it looks like it will continue to diminsh
- a big semi-digital divide (digital issues are part but not all of it). good paying unionized or public jobs or even formerly common low-level managerial jobs (at utilities, etc.) are largely gone. well educated digitally fluent youth (your hegemonics) have terrific prospects even if they for now work Starbucks. for the others...it's grim

The divide runs through what you have identified. It is not only a person's soocio/economic/cultural class today, but their aspiriations and possibilities. Where they are today and where they expect to be.

I see little on the horizon that seeks to change this (maybe Obama?).

I live in a small town, transitioning to suburban. The divisions among the high school students (as you put it, hegemonic vs subaltern) feel like they are getting sharper over the 20 years I've been here. And the subaltern seem angrier and more depressed, bleaker than they used to be.

Good luck in trying to craft what you feel and sense into the clarity and academic writing you wish to achieve. I'm guessing that your exposure to the large older but unsatisfying sociological literature on class is limited. It is not clear how useful it would be to you - some stuff has not changed; a lot has.

Your essay is a very interesting read.

I guess it is natural for any forum to eventually mirror society, as much as we'd like our new technology to create a level playing field.

I come from the working class (UK) who jumped out of the drudgery and become educated. It came about because by grandfather was adventurous and travelled, an inspired aunt, and thoughtful and caring parents.

That said, I still consider myself working class, and still find myself failing to understand much of the 'networking' and social constructs of the elite.

This means that although I'd consider myself a good and well rounded engineer, I'm never going to make pots of money, and to be honest am not really interested in doing so.

Reading about MySpace and Facebook was an eye opener. Although submerged in technology as part of my job, this was just not on the radar.

Good stuff

John

You know what's the most scary thing about this article? Your "hegemonic" kids are ones who get educated and your "subaltern" kids don't. How hard is it to teach a hegemonic kid? Someone that hangs on your every word, does everything they can possibly do, to influence you to give them the best grade you can: so that they can get into the best college? Versus your subaltern kid, who views the hegemonic kid as a "brown-noser" who gets rewarded for their behavior, and rejects the whole institution of education as a result? Are the hegemonic kids smarter than the subaltern kids? I would guess not. There is probably an even division of intelligence between both "slices" - maybe even more intelligence in the subalterns - less "lemming" effect. And yet we deny higher education (where the leaders of the next generation will come from) to the subalterns. That's scary.

Posted by Elijah
June 25, 2007

Where exactly did Boyd get her statistics? I don't think there's any accuracy in her "report." She is demeaning, racist, and homophobic. MySpace has been a success, and continues to be, because it is a diverse social networking site, not a site that promotes segregation, as Boyd seems to suggest.

Posted by Justin Fox
June 25, 2007

Here's Boyd's explanation of her methodology (from the end of the essay I link to above):

"I have been engaged in ethnolographic research on social network sites since February 2003 when I began studying the practices that emerged on Friendster. I followed the launch and early adoption of numerous social network sites, including Tribe.net, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Dodgeball, and Orkut. In late 2004, I decided to move away from studying social network sites to studying youth culture just in time for youth to flock to MySpace.

"The practice of 'ethnography' is hard to describe in a bounded form, but ethnography is basically about living and breathing a particular culture, its practices, and its individuals. There are some countables. For example, I have analyzed over 10,000 MySpace profiles, clocked over 2000 hours surfing and observing what happens on MySpace, and formally interviewed 90 teens in 7 states with a variety of different backgrounds and demographics. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. I ride buses to observe teens; I hang out at fast food joints and malls. I talk to parents, teachers, marketers, politicians, pastors, and technology creators. I read, I observe, I document...."

Posted by Laura
June 25, 2007

Hmmm. Maybe the reason facebook attracts more college bound students is because it started as a COLLEGE STUDENTS ONLY networking site. It was only opened to everyone a few months ago. Facebook tries to become Myspace every day with their new additions and changes.

I agree with Elijah on his opinion of Boyd and the report.

Posted by Elijah
June 25, 2007

We should keep in mind that Facebook used to be accessible only by students, so there is probably some sort of correlation there. MySpace has been available, since the beginning, to all kinds of users. Facebook only recently opened up to non-students.

And what purpose, exactly, does Boyd's analysis serve? I think erroneous studies such as this one help to perpetuate discrimination in our society, especially among teens. How are these statistics useful from an economical standpoint?

The danger of offering information without proving its significance is that it could cause further disparities between particular groups -- an "us" versus "them" mentality that's very harmful not only to Facebook and MySpace, but to the real world that young people already live in.

Finally, I also find it rather convenient that Boyd's report appears during this "Facebook vs. MySpace" battle that has recently erupted.

Posted by YMM
June 25, 2007

Ok, I started off writing a really long rant that I had to stop and reread it before I got it. The essay, if you can call it that, is purely anecdotal, and personal. I was really taken aback at first but her lack of quantitative detail to support her premise. It's clear to me now its really more of an opinion of what she has seen without all of the necessary statistics to back it up.

Ok so Justin, do you know of anyone working on academic papers considering the idea of socio-economic factors impacting the usage and adoption of social-networking sites? I can think of a couple of interesting concerns that would arise, say, who is graduating to LinkedIn - the importance being, continuing to build and develop connections into a professional experience, and become part of the larger business community.

Just a thought, curious if you see anything interesting out there to read. This one...is ok at best...

Posted by Justin Fox
June 25, 2007

I don't know of anyone doing this kind of work other than Danah Boyd, and I agree that her stuff can be kinda impressionistic. So if anybody finds anything better, let me (and YMM) know.

Posted by Ken Roberts
June 25, 2007

When I read this story on another site, I immediately wanted to yell out that Facebook started as a website for COLLEGE students. Only a few months ago did it start allowing in the teens. Of course people who go to college tend to value certain cultural elements over others. If we were all freaks as the writer suggests MySpace users are, then we probably wouldn't have made it to college in the first place.

This article is very insulting on many levels. First of all it labels Facebook users as "teens", whereas most college students are not teenagers. Then it refers to people who use Facebook as "hegemonic". Are we trying to dominate people now? Jeez!

According to this writer, the world is simply made up of homogeneous successful people and a diverse array of freaks. You cannot simplify a population of people like that! It serves no purpose, is inaccurate, and divides people.

Posted by William Hija
June 25, 2007

How undermining of others. What kind of ignorant fool would generalize on such a matter? Ill tell you who, one who is spiteful on the inside and believes they know all. I was in football and NJROTC and I have a myspace. Im going to college too. So I guess basically what I am trying to say is, go to hell racist. Thank you.

Posted by Yadgyu
June 25, 2007

Danah Boyd = Pseudo Intellectual.

She is making stuff up to get attention. She really doesn't know too much about anything. She is another college student who is going to use the fact that she has a degree as a sign of intellectual superiority over others. She probably will end up writing a few books and will be on Oprah and other news shows to explain her "research" to drones who like useless information. Anyone, including me, can state an opinion and throw in some random generalities and present it as fact. This chick should just run for office already. Her lies and trickery would suit her well in Washington D.C.

Posted by Juan
June 25, 2007

As a Latino/Hispanic individual I find this article to grossly misrepresent the tendencies of ethnic groups. It has already been stated in previous comments that most students using facebook are college students due to the fact it was previously open only to those attending college. I may not have taken a large sample as the author did, but in my experience every hispanic I know joined facebook upon entering college. Looking at the pages of facebook members it is probably more appropriate to label the members as being "hegemons" by virtue of their attendance in a higher learning institute rather than their social status.

Posted by Nora
June 25, 2007

I like how people reflexively jump all over this woman's assertions on class divisions in this country. They are her personal opinions on a very touchy topic (and boy, some people do really have their class/socio-economic panties in a bunch if one were to go on the comments on this thread). She made it crystal clear in the beginning of her article that what she was doing was sloppy and impressionistic, that it was simply anecdotal. She never said that this was definitive and backed by hard stats; her constant apologies over the inexactitude of her essay actually got rather bothersome. That being said, she brings to light some good points. Firstly, of course Facebook is college based. The question here is not to dispute that very obvious fact but to underline an interesting dynamic: WHY was a college-based internet network set up in the first place? The whole modus operandi of Facebook, from its very inception at Harvard, was to be elitist, to be the anti-MySpace. Only until recently has that not been the case. So it would only stand that those people who seek to differentiate themselves by class would be attracted to a network like Facebook. And differentiation by class need not be a consciously malicious action either, which some people here implied. You can be a poor Hispanic military guy and still go on to Facebook because a) your college friends are there and b) it's such a tiny action that it really doesn't register in your head. Yet that's what's so interesting, and sometimes so insidious, about class-based decisions. They're so hum-drum and blase that they really don't register. Only upon making a cumulative number of decisions (or those decisions being made for you) do you end up in whichever "class" you presently find yourself. And in this society, those decisions are very much predicated on the income you make, on the wealth you have. Since Facebook and MySpace are just so much of the cultural flotsam that surrounds us every day, we never really think about the class-inspired factors upon which their existence is based. It is in highlighting that reality that Danah did a good job, and so good in fact that plenty of you reacted like she had killed a baby seal or something. Oh, and I am a Hispanic lesbian female, if any of you wondered about my "allegiances".

Posted by Yadgyu
June 25, 2007

Facebook should go back to being for college students only. Those "lower class" members scare me.

Posted by Elizabeth
June 25, 2007

It's unbelievable how quickly this posting spread to other media outlets such Guardian Unlimited UK and BBC News. All this buzz around an amateur paper written by an amateur "academic." Folks, this could've easily been a homework assignment turned in by an uninformed high school student.

A college-originated network will naturally have more college-educated users. Further, I think your cafe-working, Engles-reading 14K p/year friends have colored your view of the world a bit too much. You've compared an apple to an orange through the forced lense of "class".

One thing is for sure: That this paper should be heralded throughout the media as some sort of definitive "study" does harm to all of academia.

I think one of the most important things to note about Facebook (and the hegemonic group of teens, period) is that they *want* to be separated from the sub-alterns. Even if the sub-alterns come into their SNS of choice, Facebook, they will still be shunned by the hegemonics. It isn't just a matter of each group choosing the SNS that appeals to them; the "upper" class in this case is trying to keep Facebook to themselves.

These are some interesting observations. I think you make too much of the good kid/bad kid "societal approval" distinction. To state the obvious, social networks grow via social networks- whether it is being invited to join online or whether you hear about which site is "cool" from your real world friends. Given that Facebook started in college-educated circles, it seems obvious that as it expands, its users will systematically reflect the demographic differences between the college-educated/college-bound and society at large. In other words, real world social networks precede online social networks. As others have commented, I think you also ignore the differences in utility between the two sites. I think that many who adopt Facebook over MySpace do so because of Facebook's greater utility. I started using social networking sites after graduating from college, so I think my decisions were based more on personal utility than societal expectations. I first joined MySpace, and then Facebook within a couple months. I found that the recent activity updates on Facebook and the subsequent development of applications like marketplace gave me a reason to keep logging in, whereas MySpace was mostly static. This could reflect a subjective understanding of utility given that I was not interested in making "friends" with random people on the internet, but rather enhancing my real world trusted social network with internet capabilities. For someone who is a loner I could see how MySpace might provide greater utility in being able to connect with a virtual community. I think the demographic differences are largely be explained by 1)a legacy effect of Facebook's origins and 2)differences in subjective utility

Hi danah, I saw this article linked to on MetaFilter today and as I was composing a reply to point out the differences between Canadian trends in MySpace and Facebook to the ones you described it turned into a much longer piece, wo I posted it to my own blog.

Userbase Fragmentation in Social Networks in Canada.

Just so as not to beg for blog hits, the gist of what I wrote is that in Canada Facebook's roots of strong institional identification aren't as strong. While MySpace did become popular first, it was limited to Indie Rock fans ans people who identified with a particular subculture, but one that did require even some small amount of creativity to participate in. Meanwhile Facebook became incredibly popular with people who never otherwise would have wanted any kind of online presence, these people get on the site to get in touch with friends, but don't use it as a platform for self-expression the way MySpace suers intricately arrange their Top Friends to reflect their personal tastes and friendships.

So in Canada Facebook is used by almost everyone, MySpace is still used mostly by people who have something to share. An x-factor taht doesn't fit well into the class strata of the American users.

my own research agrees with the thesis.

simply put, I believe the division observed is due to how the userbase grew -- myspace was free for all, facebook was only for school kids with verifiable school emails. Further, MS tended to be 'messy' while FB reinforced consistency even after it opened its doors to all. For these same reasons you see a similar division between MS/FB and LinkedIn/Plaxo users -- the latter thought to be a professional network with many more professionals/executives than the former. You could go further socioeconomically if you put http://asmallworld.net in the mix.

Hi Danah,
I read this essay, and I noticed the way you used words like classed, problematic, hegemonic, and subaltern, and I thought, "wow, she really belongs in Brown modern culture and media." And then it turned out you were at Brown. I've often thought that elite schools are interchangeable in terms of the type of people that they produce (generally even brighter, harder-working, and more liberal than when they entered), but perhaps there really is something unique about a school and the culture it imparts to its students. Although I suppose it's possible that you didn't take a single mcm class at brown and picked up this vocab at some later point. I found your essay thought provoking. Big up yourself.
-Josh

You said myspace was dominated by fringe kids (among many other things). The thing that struck me was that those fringe kids aren't necessarily socio-economically different - but they are the creatives.

And that would make sense - myspace allows much personal expression visually and aurally, while facebook, to date, doesn't. So the kids who want to connect first flock to facebook, while the kids who want to express themselves (and connect, too) use myspace.

Just a thought...

"I have analyzed profiles from all 50 states (and DC and Puerto Rico). ...I do not have access to Facebook profiles..."

Just a couple quick comments. I grew up on Guam, the US's other territory, and I thought you might be interested in PFG (People From Guam), an old SNS that was for reconnecting people on the island with friends who had lived on the island and moved away, or vice versa.

Also, you do have access to FB profiles - get an account, join your local network (most college kids will be in the network for their school, and one for the area they grew up in), and start surfing profiles. Also, once you're on FB, you could probably take advantage of the SNS power available to you to collect further information (I believe FB now has a polling application).

danah -- totally fascinating stuff, as your long, long list of commenters have noted. i'm curious whether you think that the people behind the sites have had much control over how this split has happened. clearly, myspace isn't excited about being the scary social networking site filled with lurking pervs, but maybe subalterns have marketing advantages for them that the preppies lack? time has showed the SNS sites without flexibility sink. it'll be interesting to see whether how myspace reacts to being banned in certain places, and tainted with the classist assumptions that go along with all the bling. facebook, too, has expanded so far beyond the first ivy networks that its growth makes it too unwieldy to steer. the proprietors of the sites will have to deal with the changes you've noted, and how they do so might be revealing.

Very interesting writeup, though I do not completely buy in to the need for a clear stratification.
(Much of my thought about such issues has been influenced greatly by Amartya Sen[1]'s writings and lectures on identity, culture and the common mistake of 'classification' of intrinsically diverse and many-faced people. The notion of universally pervasive diversity, and the need to validate any sort of classification by making sure the identity of people is not understood in a one-dimensional sense.)

Aside:
You mention a class stratification within Orkut as well. Could you post some information about that, maybe the next time you visit this topic? Class is a different beast altogether in the Indian context, and I'd love to know what you have observed regarding class formalization in the internet social networks of the Indian subcontinent(Orkut is the behemoth, as I understand).

1: Expounded in Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, and oft repeated elsewhere in his work.

"Munchy", Tall Style.........I liked it. Made some good points - it was weird. I'm 31 - I've had a myspace acct for about 2.5 yrs. Just got a facebook acct. I had heard about it about 6 mo. ago - but figured -its the same damn thing! But, for highschoolers - that shit matters.

I support Bush, and the war. I found your take on blocking Myspace by the military thought-provoking. The sad thing is though, is that you listed a bunch of legitimate reasons - some ok, the bandwidth - which I can see being an issue, and the disillusionment from being at war with an enemy you can't see until you've been fired upon for so long, knowing that your enemy has the luxury of a press that IS willing to give them the benefit of the doubt; with no end in sight an equally legitimate excuse - I hope its wrong, and it is the bandwidth, but its something that will have to stay on the radar. We'll never know the truth about that one. But still, a clever insight.

Also, I think as we age and mature we understand our surroundings and environment better. Stop worrying. Were you so worried when you were their age? Thats the curse of experience I guess. We don't have any when we're young so we're ignorant of what can go wrong so we just plow ahead anyway.

What happened to the blacksmith when Henry Ford came along? Remember the A&P? Nobody does - they were the corner grocery store in urban areas at the dawn of the 20th century. Stop worrying about McDonald's and Wal-Mart. Maybe everybody's ass got big all of a sudden because people are starting to figure out how to use this new fangled technology and don't have to do manual labor, or better yet, have fun on their computers and thus don't take a walk, or grow a garden because of the shift in how we use our free-time. Thats the beauty of capitalism - we can build and destroy without the blessing of an autocratic bureaucracy continually worried if the next technological breakthrough threatens its survival. If anything, you should feel better about teens using this technology to forge a community. "Back in my day" we didn't have this shit!

We've always use something, anything to differentiate ourselves, and bind with others, we something to define us along the trip.

I really enjoyed your paper. I'm always interested in a good class breakdown!

Well done.

Great post Danah, definitely opened up a controversial "can of worms"

When the facebook craze first hit colleges, it took them about 6 months to add my school to the network. Up to that point, I had joined myspace because all of my friends who didn't go to college back home were very into it. Up until recently, (and I'm 22) I had left the page do its natural defaults out of protest against the "bling" culture as you noted and also as a symbol of my "sudden" ineptitude with a new "technology" (I started a software company when I was in middle school). Your paper highlights themes that I have noticed with increasing alarm. I work in urban community development. I've worked extensively to fight racism for years now and I'm beginning to notice that while inequities along racial lines are still clear, they are beginning to follow lines of class rather than race. Continue your great work. I wish you the best of luck. If I can in any way help you, you have merely to let me know. Thanks a lot.

Good stuff. I think tribalism is inevitable but technology will reduce the walls between online communities — my blog will collect responses written anywhere.

Two typos: "It's popularity on the coasts" and "lack of worth ethic".

Great post. But Facebook was limited to those with a college/uni email address before so you would expect to find more graduates on it. Could that explain the "class divide"?

I just wanted to say this was a really interesting read. Any article that includes the phrase "le sigh" is automatically tops in my book. Hehe.

I didn't really read through the above comments... So this may have already been mentioned... A few years ago I took a class called Inequality and Society. One point that I took away from this class was the idea that we are all basically taught that we are middle class. It lulls us into this sense of being normal, average, etc. It also keeps us from feeling the ever growing divide between the people who have resources, and those who don't. It's just another way to distract us from the REAL goings on in the nation. Perhaps that's some of the disconnect/discomfort you are feeling in speaking to these people. Maybe it's more that they don't really KNOW.

Nonetheless, I definitely enjoyed reading a sociological analysis regarding the internet. I think it's a whole new world (almost literally) that is not really at the forefront of study. Thank you. :o)

Very innovative approach to this competition between social enviroments. I enjoyed it alot.

Thank you for an insightful perspective on today's teens.

Did you talk to homeschooled kids at all?

Greetings-
I just read an article on bbcnews that referenced this essay and your research. Within that BBC article it didn't mention whether you had looked at the marketing tools of facebook and its origin. Seeing as how it began as a college online yearbook of sorts, it only makes sense that wealthy white students are represented. The founder happened to be attending Harvard at the time, clue? Facebook is very much a representation of the statistics of college-bound America. While the site has opened to high school students, it is still very much seen as a college networking site and on. High school students who are planning on attending college (students who take honors courses, are more active etc) are likely to choose Facebook based on its history. Your observation seems merely an observation of America's numbers.

Hi danah. Fascinating; thanks. You probably know of this ref, but if not you might be interested -- it's another of the efforts to parse the fairly unacknowledged American class system. It meshes with your thesis pretty well, and might offer some shared language to describe your work. It's often painfully true, and often funny as well.

Paul Fussell. "Class: a guide through the American status system."

Thanks. But ouch. I suppose it was inevitable.

"Americans aren't so good at talking about class and I'm definitely feeling that discomfort. It's sticky, it's uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don't have the language for marking class in a meaningful way."

Uncomfortable? Discomfort? Similar to that which you feel when you try to ignore an elephant in a room?

Your analysis is slightly flimsy (you get too far up your head), but good. Staying away from class critique, however, renders it superficial.

I print out your essays using my office computer and read it during office hours. So listen, have them in black and white because, eventually, my boss will find out! ;)

But you do realise that facebook was very very targeted at first before eventually opening up to the public. so that might/could explain some of the "class divides" to a certain extent.

Very interesting article, Danah! I don't find the findings very surprising, though:

As choices by my peers do effect my desision making, even a slightly higher chance of liking something because my friends do can have a dramatical impact on the overall affinity of different groups to different networks. It's therefore only natural that members of different sociodemographic groups making choices in dependence of the choices of their peers are a perfect example for power laws at play, resulting in the divide witnessed. Even a minor skew of the early adopters within each network towards a certain sociodemographic (which clearly existed between Facebook and MySpace from the get go) is therefore very likely to result in a permanent skew in the sociodemographic affiliation.

This is extremely interesting. And I do think your attempt to document the MySpace/Facebook divide is novel, even if some individuals think it obvious. This is definitely the first time I've seen or read anything about it.

I wanted to note that what jumped out at me in this article is the racialization of the phenomenon. You mentioned briefly that hegemonic kids are mostly white; that doesn't seem to surprise me, as high SES and whiteness are very highly correlated in this country, and low SES and racial minority status are very highly correlated. I've always felt that the root of this stratification is racism and historical discrimination, but that these trends are now being perpetuated and self-reinforced. Poverty is, after all, a vicious cycle (which your cafe-working, Engels-reading friends are not actually stuck in, hence your observation that they're not actually working-class or poor).

Anyway, given that SES is sometimes just a proxy for race -- especially in academic literature -- I just wanted to suggest the possibility, perhaps more explicitly than you did in the article, that a lot of the Facebook exclusivity may come down to racism, plain and simple. So perhaps racism, and its associated stereotypes and assumptions, might explain why Facebook, and in turn, MySpace have developed the way they have.

Just a thought. And again, very interesting -- thank you for bringing it to light.

I have used your studies in workshops I help lead on good youth development through online social networks. I personally engage young people through both of these social networks and see things slightly different from you.

This recent work of yours seems to completely abandon the notion of what you have called in past studies "identity production." If by there programed nature the two sites differ in ID production abilities this maybe what you are seeing.

An example from my own work. I volunteer once a month as a part of my job at an LGBT (Lesbian,Gay,Bisexual and Trans-gender) teen center in my city. These students hands down use MySpace. They completely snub their noses at Facebook. When I asked them why they liked MySpace over Facebook the answers where all the same. "Facebook profiles are boring." It is well documented that the need for identity production (online or off) in LGBT young people can last well into their late 20's. This social group needs the ID production of MySpace more than they need the networking capacity of Facebook. It has nothing to do with economics as a majority of the young people I work with at this center come from white, suburban, upper-middle class homes.

When you look at the development stages of young people their need for identity production is more common between the ages of 12-16. Which is why those that work with high school juniors and seniors will commonly hear from them, "MySpace is so Junior High." Juniors and seniors, college bound or not, are in the life stage of wanting to hold on to those that for four years they have considered "bff's" and at the same time are looking for the adventure of what future relationships will bring them. For them, identity production becomes insignificant and networking capacity becomes paramount. This is a relationship issue for the students not a socioeconomic class struggle.

Your assumption that Facebook/Myspace usage is an either/or decision is over worked. Our organization recently did an online survey and found that over 68% of respondents used both social networks. We do see as students get older there is a transition in the amount of time spent on each network, but there is still time spent on both. Personally when I look at the percentage of users who return daily to these sites (50% FaceBook, 15% MySpace (self reported of course)), I wonder who really uses MySpace at all.

I do think there is stratification of users on these two sites. I just personally believe it is between the need for identity production and the need for network capacity.

A few quick thoughts & questions on an excellent "pre-draft" essay. I completely agree that Bourdieu is the lens to explain this, as it seems that the issue is only partly class in terms of economics, but more in terms of cultural capital and habitus. Based on your discussion, kids choose a preferred SNS in part based on where they are now, but more based on where they want to be in the future. A poor but upwardly-mobile teen might go to Facebook to create an imagined community beyond their face-to-face scenario, using the site to gain cultural capital. Your barista friends may not be mobile, but they imagine themselves as part of a cultural sphere beyond their economic means.

So how does this all relate to the classic rhetoric of imagined identity surrounding the Web 1.0? If "nobody knows your a dog," how does an SNS allow for a different self-construction that's more directly tied to your "dog-ness"? (Hope the stretched metaphor is clear...)

And how do the actual coding interfaces impact these distinctions - is the freedom to self-design your site on MySpace a way of enacting a freedom that subaltern teens lack in other spaces? And might the recent opening up of Facebook's API to allow for more "blinging" change these dynamics?

Finally, I'm really curious about how these sites function as metaphorical geographies. Are there parallels to RL spaces that are similarly classed & culturally stratified? I'm thinking of suburban malls vs. urban shopping areas, auto shop vs. school music rooms, public vs. private recreational areas, etc.

I look forward to reading (and teaching) the essay as it evolves!

Dear Danah,

I've summarised and linked to your article "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace" on Social Networking Watch at
http://onlinepersonalswatch.typepad.com/social_networking_watch/2007/06/is-america-spli.html.

Please let me know if I can be of assistance as you work on future articles covering the internet dating or social networking industries.

Mark Brooks
OnlinePersonalsWatch.com
SocialNetworkingWatch.com

Bio: http://301url.com/brooks
UK: 020-8133-1835USA: 212-444-1636

Umm, to you idiots questioning the methodology of the paper... did you even read the bloody thing? It's stated pretty clear that it's based on rather unscientific observations.

if you're going to criticize, at least read. Idiots.

Another text that I'm vaguely remembering is Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style, if only because it seems to me from your post and from the comments that follow that the aesthetics of MySpace figures quite importantly in the choice of SNS provider. Like punk or other rebellious genres, the purposeful aesthetic repulsion of a dominant culture (as defined vis-a-vis that subculture -- it could be class, generational, etc) seems to be one of the attractive features of MySpace to what you term "subaltern" youth.

One thing I appreciate about your and related lines of research is your rejection of technological determinism. Culture, economics, etc. remain powerful forces, and those who proselytize a techno-utopian future had better work a lot harder at understanding the multiple currents that drive us apart in addition to coming up with neat but idealistic ways of bringing us together.

I read over your article, but haven't read many of the responses wanting to give my response fresh.

One thing you seem to have overlooked is overlap. You give a cursory glance to the division between ages. MySpace is much more centered around entertainment and consumption whereas Facebook is much more about networking. It's not just an aesthetic thing but an usability thing. I am 29 years old and I recently joined Facebook because an organization I am working with needed to do networking, and it is much more efficient. If you want to send out an invite you just invite everyone in certain categories, like i can invite everyone in my network from New York. With MySpace I have to click each person individually, it's a pain in the ass.

Another thing that you seem to have is this idea that one class is distinctly better than the other, that if given the proper tools the subaltern class would rather jump to the hegemonic class because it has better opportunities, but that is not necessarily true.

You mention that you did not do much research in the rural categories. I think you should look into this, as there is a much greater networking culture in urban areas, regardless of class distinction than there is among rural folk.

"I've been trying to figure out how to articulate this division for months."

Snobs. The word you're looking for is snob, dear. Snobs setting up artificial walls between people, the way snobs have always done.

Maybe you want to actually TALK to the uneducated riff-raff and ask them whether they've been to prison, or even know anybody who has, before you start making judgments that everyone who hasn't been to college is inferior to you.

People in these comments are missing the fact that those born to financial privilege deliberately reject people who will not benefit their careers.

They avidly seek out "imposters" who are "Just trying to use my (important) family."

They believe, as so many right here in the comments section seem to believe, that wealth and intelligence are correlated. That one would never be an intelligent, liberal, kind, cultured, tasteful technically savvy person unless one can AFFORD an elite university.

Fact: I was accepeted to elite private colleges, but my family could not pay for them.
Fact: Financial aid does not cover the expenses for most children in my position.

Fact: Many people who did not attend elite, expensive universities are being harmed lifelong, kept from making social contributions or decent careers, just because "times are tough, competiton is high, we may as well arbitrarily favor the well-off, oh, it's embarrassing to feel sorry for those people or GUILTY, so.... we don't really want to befriend people who are not going to reciprocate benefit for us!"

So -- why not justify it with the LIE that naturally all capable, healthy and kind people can afford the very most expensive schools, in fact, that the upper class is created from those who are TRULY superior as INDIVIDUALS.

Blame the victim: Divide and conquer: unite with your clique and RULE

The fact that individuals from disenfranchised and disadvantaged groups have made vital contributions in the cultural and techinical realms, again and again and again --- oh, ---- well.......

I'm always excited to see discussions of class (and its explanatory power) problematized, particularly when it comes to ICTs and the Internet. I would like to clarify Danah's gracious characterization of my research of lifestyle and class.

Income definitely matters, in and of itself, as well as a component of class; in most societies, it matters a great deal, explaining people's ability to survive and flourish. However, income alone is not class (most scholars/observers of class, of course, know this, of course, and it is the point Danah mentions in reference to her Engels-reading, cafe-working, $14K-earning friends). I just wanted to make sure that danah�s readers didn�t think I argue for the irrelevance of income, far from it!

My dissertation work (to which Danah refers) argues that while class (income, education and occupation) explains a great, great deal about people's technology-related behaviors, it is not the only way to think about similarities and differences between people at large (much less users of Facebook vs. MySpace). People�s lifestyles (their leisure behaviors and attitudes), even when controlleing for class and other demographics, explain how people in the U.S. and Canada, use technology, according to my analysis (article in progress).

In part because class helps us understand and explain much of social life, it�s no doubt important in understanding the distinction between Facebook and MySpace (of which I know nothing). While I sympathise with, I don�t necessarily share danah�s heartbreak about the class divide being reflected and reproduced in this arena. The Facebook vs. MySpace difference provides an excellent opportunity to ask difficult questions of how people see themselves as like or unlike other people (and when and how that matters), and while class is unquestionably one answer, it cannot be the only one.

Forgive me if I repeat some comments from previous posts. I just could not get through the whole bunch! I did thoroughly enjoy your piece! Thanks!

First comment:
Facebook is becoming quite big here in South Africa. Myspace seems (to me though i'm sure it isnt) almost nonexistent. This is weird when you first think about it because you would assume South Africans to be 'subaltern'. However, I think the reason for this is that current usage of social networking in SA is based primarily on access to internet. Since 'subalterns' dont have access to the internet, there is no one to choose myspace. The people joining facebook are the white South Africns and primarily highly educated black elite (black is used here to group together "African", "Coloured" and "Indian" South Africans).

Second comment:
I found Jake Lockley's post a bit offensive especially when he referred to more intelligent people using Facebook. Though I'm sure he didn't mean it, he should have at least put intelligence in quotations.

Third:
Although I agree with most of the essay, I dont think that class divisions have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than income. I think that ignores the reality that income is the primary (though definitely not the only) determinant of a person's lifestyle/social stratification. The example of "anti-capitalist" college friends (and/or "hipsters") who make 14,000 a year ignores the fact that their parents are from a wealthier income bracket. It was partly their experience in that income bracket that determined their choice of lifestyle. In fact, they in many ways choose to make 14,000 when they have the ability and connections to make a lot more. So I would say that these 'alternative' college students are still within the upper income bracket because of their parents' income. I would caution you to not put to much of an over-reliance on the idea of 'social capital' which tends to mask the reality that culture is dynamic and one of its determinants is income.

Fourth:
Its very scary to see such a divide online - already. Its proving the concern many of us have about all the talk of how Web2.0 is going to fix all our social ills and how its supposedly the great equalizer. I do think that Web2.0 will provide us with a lot of tools to bridge social divides, for activism, and to reduce our dependence on the markets control over us (such as an independent media). However, I dont think it is the great equalizer. In fact, I think that the ideology behind Web2.0 mirrors neoliberalism in many ways. Because its 'free' its supposed to allow equal access to everything. However, we all know (or should know) that the market actually produces inequality just as Web2.0 is likely to produce inequality. I dont think this means that Web2.0 is bad but it does mean that we have to manage, restrict, and make sure it works for the benefit of the 'subaltern' and the 'oppressed'.

I wanted to post this as a lot of my friends in academia and life have been sending me over to this page. Danah, you're right on the money, but I'm surprised this late:

"There's a PhD candiatde at the USC Annenberg School of Communciation (which is up there in my book) by the name of danah boyd. (That's right she doesn't capitalize her first and last name.) News broke out today that her paper, "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace," is right on the money. You know what? She is, but she's late to it. The PEW Foundation for the Internet as well as her own university's Digital Future center have detailed this "hegemonic" phenomenon one year earlier. I started my own project 8 months ago and came to this exact conclusion, using HARD DATA. Her "ethnographic" approach is believe-by-words only. Here's what she says:

The practice of 'ethnography' is hard to describe in a bounded form, but ethnography is basically about living and breathing a particular culture, its practices, and its individuals. There are some countables. For example, I have analyzed over 10,000 MySpace profiles, clocked over 2000 hours surfing and observing what happens on MySpace, and formally interviewed 90 teens in 7 states with a variety of different backgrounds and demographics. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. I ride buses to observe teens; I hang out at fast food joints and malls. I talk to parents, teachers, marketers, politicians, pastors, and technology creators. I read, I observe, I document.

danah, please amuse me and present the hard data. I have mine right here for you:

Despite the growth in connectivity of Americans, not all groups (older Americans are much less wired than younger Americans; minorities are less connected than whites; those with modest amounts of income and education are less wired than those with college education and household incomes over $75,000, those with jobs are more likely than those without jobs to have access, parents of children under 18 living at home are more likely than non-parents to be online and rural Americans lag behind suburban and urban Americans in connectivity) are on the same level.

...the website was originally intended for a select audience of college and university students along the Northeast United States coast. Users generally came from a rich, suburban and white background. Although Facebook.com has expanded its demographic base, users of this sort still entail a high proportion of site traffic.

If you want to read what I researched, take a look here (http://www.scribd.com/doc/100515/Virtual-Interactive-Communication-A-Bicultural-Survey-Through-the-Lens-of-Web-20). I leave you with words of wisdom from "fintheman" off Digg:

"This research is very flawed as there are no true polling samples, only assumptions made.

Please, tell the author to learn how to actually collect data correctly before trying to throw around words of "socio-economic divides"

Anyways, if he was able to accurately assess that data, he'd be a millionaire just for having that kind of information as it is very valuable to any marketing company out there."-----BINGO

edit: there's no right way to characterize the demographics of online communities, but there should be a balance. i believe qualititative and quantiative data are the means to this end.

danah:

does this tie in with your post about email/IM distinctions? To me, it feels like Facebook fills a gap for those who went online before ICQ, particularly late in high school or college, which accounts for the big thirtysomething takeup right now. To me, it seems easier to gravitate from being 'email generation' to Facebook.

I enjoyed your essay.

I'd like to add my own perspective, as an avid Facebook user.

I noticed that Facebook was for the "cooler" kids from the start, when in April its name had started being thrown around my school. I'd heard things, even seen the site, but could not register without being invited. I was hardly associated with any "cool" kids at this point, and since had no way of gaining access to Facebook, until, through a friend of a friend, I was invited. That was the start of my own experience with others in my school; before I was rather isolated from the other groups and clicks within my high school. Upon joining Facebook, I had quadrupled my ability to see what was going on with them, nonchalant and non-intrusive. I connected and reconnected with classmates and friends on Facebook. It opened up an entire world for me, and in a much better way than Myspace, which I think is probably part of the attraction.

I think that before Facebook was open to the public, a recent member would gain a level of respect from fellow Facebookers.
When they saw that you were also on the site, they realized that you were "in"; one of "them" had considered you worthy of the "club", as it were.

And even within Facebook, there is social class separation. Your rank in society is often subtly based on if you are in a city network in addition to a school network. It also depends on what your profile picture looks like, even down to the quality of the image (i.e., if you had a high-quality digital camera, and etc.), and how many pictures you are tagged in on Facebook - the more pictures, the more of a "life" you have, because people are taking pictures of you. Even the pictures you upload of yourself count - it shows that you have the digital camera, and the ability. This is spawned from the famed "myspace pose", the phenomenon of taking dozens of pictures of your self at a certain angle and posting them on your profile. Often a characteristic of your "subaltern" labeled members, specifically "hardcore" or "emo" kids.

And as far a unanimous opinion of Myspace goes, its considered "trashy", "ugly", "tacky", and all-around, in a sense, just low-rent. Also, it is considered as "middle-school", because it is flashy and immature. Additionally, you have to be in high school to be on Facebook. So really, Myspace is a less superior social networking site, because there are less requirements. You don't have to be anything on Myspace, whereas on Facebook, you have to meet an age requirement. It gives Facebookers one up on a younger generation.

(Though not to say that there aren't people on Facebook that fit those characteristics; if those aspects of Myspace were available on Facebook, many would abuse them like nothing else.)

So this, if nothing else, is a larger-than-intended rambling regarding my opinion of the Facebook/Myspace "rivalry", as it were.

Hi there,
I "reprinted" your article in my MySpace blog and am getting some interesting responses. Thanks for stirring the pot!

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=81817452

I found your observations and basic premise very interesting, especially in the light that you did not stay just with civilians and the young. That there would also be this division in the military, and that the military would ban the platform used by the enlisted and continue to allow officers access to Facebook shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.

Until I read your essay I didn’t even know there was a difference in the profile of subscribers.

Thanks for putting this essay out there, and thanks to all who have provided further input.

There are several problems with broad assumptions based strictly on numbers analyses like this. First of all, it doesn't take into account users who are on both networks, such as myself and most of my friends (who are all of the college crowd). Second, it makes broad generalizations that don't even come close to being true a significant amount of the time. For example, my parents did not go to college but I prefer Facebook to MySpace, and I'm sure there are plenty like me. Additionally, there are plenty of 'burnouts' and 'alternative kids' on Facebook. You forgot to take into account that Facebook includes city networks in addition to just schools, and that among the school networks are a majority of community colleges that would probably overlap the 'lower income' families which you claim to populate MySpace.

In the end I don't see what purpose numbers like this can hope to achieve. I'd be willing to accept that as a general rule, MySpace is populated by lower income children and offbeat kinds of people, and Facebook is populated by college educated folks. However, as I said, I fail to see any useful purpose to having that knowledge. Unless there is some constructive use to which this data can be put, it is nothing short of useless to make broad generalizations that run the risk of being very innaccurate just to slap labels on the social networking giants.

danah, this is a fascinating article. I can't wait to see more hard numbers and the background research on the topic.

Also, I hope that you plan to revisit the question again in a year or so - Facebook has been actively marketing to a different/larger demographic, and this will probably impact (a) who has access to it and (b) who/what drives people there.

As someone who has only recently signed up to Facebook (in my 30's, swore I'd never sign up for yet another social network, but am encouraged to by other people in my peer group who are hanging out and trying to do business there), I'm also interested in how the different technological capabilities of the two systems encourage certain behaviors. Myspace seems to be a geared towards people who are driven to creativity, whereas Facebook is more about presence.

That there is possibly / probably a class-based distinction between users of Facebook and MySpace--and what may be reasons for this, is very interesting. And, that these two sites have such huge numbers of members / users makes this more interesting than the demographic distinctions that might be observed between any two membership-oriented websites.

But, I wonder how much the difference seen in people participating on each site is the result of the purpose of each site, i.e., Facebook is designed for a certain type of person, and MySpace is desgned for a different type of person.

The types may be more generally "role" oriented than identity oriented. So, it's not like one site is for surfers and the other for tennis players, but one site is for people who want to do X and the other for people who want to do Y. It's possible that there are significant Xs and Ys, relevant to users, that are not specifically social connecting.

If you generalize to "types" of people, while the types may map to class and other demographic distinctions, it may also reveal other significant drivers (in motivations towards membership) than social networks. Two obvious examples are the relationship between Facebook and the role of student, and the relationship between MySpace and the role of "fan" (of a band).

In general, maybe a big role distinction is between people who want to perform the role of "student" (Facebook), and those who want a site where they perform not-student roles (MySpace).

Hehe, I'd just like to say I'm a complete nerd, farthest from mainstream as there is and definitely not a prep, and Myspace disgusts me, the minimalistic UI of facebook appeals to me much more.

I can't picture myself adding to that huge conversation, but I promised I would do a peer-review grade comment on your coming papers (to prove blogs were just the right technology for academic discussion, and you just need to encourage your readers in making sound critics).

I'm very happy that 90k people had access to a quality writer as yourself, and, as a charted statistician, I can assure everyone what you do is science, amazing and refreshing--and this is a great essay. I can't imagine how you cope with all what was written here; if it can help, I'll send you any form of crêpes or whatever you fancy. Two brownie points for the author of the tree & forest image: it made my day.

Regarding the reference format: I asked for such elements, because whether you like the tone or not, this is the best paper on a certain relation between class (a major social construct) and IT, and it might remain so for a while; I will want to point the (few) readers of my own academic work to the best available explanation on what is happening there.

1. I've seen class effects on other networks in France (namely an instant adoption by a portion of the leading class that is trained since 14 y.o. to establish, structure, judge and use social ties) and I was. . . well, not happy of course, but interested to see more. I thing, though you focus on USA that you could try to classify all such mechanism to tell apart whether technology drives class, or if it the other way round; the reason to do so is to have cases with more or less explicit classes.

2. The network effects are selecting a very limited number of SNS, two so far; are these two behaving like the two benches in the British parliament that lead to a two-party political system, or are they revealing the elephant in the room? Once again, I would be leaning in favor of an international comparison. How to build the paper without having you go against the only frontier in your work so far? Historic, maybe: would you know of a similar case where youngsters of another generation had to choose between to social tool and it revealed class (or not) in the USA?

3. The Bourdivine arguments from _La Distinction_ are obvious (it's a book in English too, right?); I would like to come back to that key point because I thing you touched something essential there without making as clear as needed, and it was understood very differently in your comments so far:

- Social dimension in USA are: earnings, race, education; Marx, Bourdieu and others spectacular contribution was to say that those correspond to social ties, frames and behavior ; fine. That was last century social science masterpiece.
- You mention “Hegemonic” and “Subaltern” as two possible “classes”. Though I love your two words, I'm not sure those are “classes” (neither that casts are for that sake; both are “social strata”: normative, exclusive, almost covering groups)
* “Subaltern” from its etymology means “below and other, different”: that is the best word ever to describe you uneven bundle of “queers, art fags (etc.)”! It's normative and still maintains a somewhat more decisive horizontal distance. It's not just inferior, and that is what to love about it; it's the ideal epithet for “sub-cultures”.
* “Hegemonic” is not just normative per se either: it means dominant, but with a conquering, “I'll force-feed my social frame onto you, no what how insensitive this proves I am” dimension that only XIXth century Colonization and that Good-Ol' Red U.S. of A. are able to do. This is beautiful because it encompasses the jocks, “good kids”, grammar nazi in one form of narrow-minded dominance.

You two groups are -- of course blunt, etc. -- but about attitude more then parental revenue or skill color. People go to FaceBook because it's nice, and to MySpace because it's ugly [Franck Z. 2006]; they are part of the same accepted, normative meta-frame: some force it onto everyone, other react to it--so we have a strength-induced, normative relation, but not the exact Marxian class struggle, neither the Bourdivine cross-race for the hype: people are simultaneously and consciously running into different direction.

You paper is not about two classes that appear in America (though you have elements to do that, and it would be of historic importance in itself, and it would also be of historic importance that social science manage to isolate a phenomenon a generation in advance by observing the “siblings”, etc.) it is about two coherent, nation-wide semi-transparent loose pseudo-groups that are distinct by they attitude with the norm and, more importantly the others:
- the Hegemonic Pilgrims that are Right and have the Sacred mission to Save the World from Indigence, non-WASPy-ness, spelling mistake and Lack of Features ;
- the Sub-Cultural Rebels that are Cool because they are Against the Dominant Mainstream that is Uncool.

I might have been over-interpreting. But I believe you should either consider the attitude to the social norm, or resolve to use “inferior” and “superior”.

Whether mentioning it helps resolve the issue or not. . . It's an important question. I believe understanding the problem is the first step of a long, political process whose issue is always difficult to forecast. This might induce MySpace into opening its service by allowing people to befriend accounts from other SNS--something I've been arguing for, for a year now.

Facebook started for colleges.

Myspace started for musicians.

Learn history.

Fascinating post.

A few random comments:

As I think you realized you've got 2 divisions going on here.
The first is in upper middle class schools between the straght-n-narrow kids and the alterna-kids. Because the latter do go to college- Yale, Oberlin, Bennington- those aren't jocks.

The second is between the upscale kids, who are early adopters of trends like Facebook and the downscale kids who find out about it a year later. Graphics, etc. are probably not the reason-- the fact that MySpace is "so 2004" for the yuppies-in-training is more likely the reason.

Interesting note about class not being tied to income. Check out the very popular new mom's message board called urbanbaby.com. Class warfare in spades there since it attracts a very wealthy and very educated audience. They've coined a phrase: BPP (Bitter Poor Person) whose definition goes something like this: someone raised in an upper middle class family who attended a better college but is currently working in a low-paying white collar career (e.g. journalism, teaching, social work) who harbord intense resentment towards his/her peers who work on Wall Street and make 100 times as much money. Particularly because the BPP was likely a better student and more intellectual than the wealthy Wall Streeter.

Back on track though-- I suspect that as soon as the "downscale" kids discover Friendster, the Preppies will find a new social networking site to flock to. Again, I suspect that access to technology and living in a family/town/school where people are more tied in to trends is the deciding factor there.

great article.

for the past year i've been involved in various guerrilla marketing campaigns on myspace and on facebook. in marketing to these two different demographics, i defined them the same way you did. my bosses had quite the hard time believing that this difference in users demographics existed, but since the campaigns were successful they came around.

on a side note, there were similar observations made about the blogging community, in regard to the fact that bloggers were mostly white and male.

and looking towards the future: i sincerely hope that technology and access to information will serve to overturn class, gender and race divisions instead of furthering them.

Scrolling through the comments, I've noticed the people who have the biggest problem with the paper based on their personal experience tend to be old enough that Facebook came out only after they graduated. Considering how the essay is focusing on how young people express socioeconomic-class identity via their Facebook/Myspace use, these people's criticisms aren't really relevant. This demographic was outside the dynamic of the paper. Similarly, if when VH1 first came on the air and a sociologist was interested in how teens and college students broke down in their preferences for either MTV or VH1 and how their expected life paths affected this, the fact that people 28 and older found that their experience with class, education and watching music videos differed from younger people's experiences would also be peripheral to the main point and rather irrelevant.

Excellent essay. Very well thought-out indeed.

There's no escaping human nature. We have social behaviors deeply embedded into us and so we congregate where others like us are.

There's a lot of comments about how the functionality is different between the two sites, but only technologists and maximizers would think about these sites this way. Without forcing a user to do research, both these sites appear similar in functionality, and sufficing users will ask first and foremost "which one are my friends already on" when considering one.

All networks reinforce themselves by nature. To this point, Marketing is the part that worries me since these environments are designed to appeal to a certain group, and then those systems wall those users off into systems that don't let them communicate to others unless they are also in the system. People are intentionally drawn in by the stuff they already know or already like. Close-mindedness has always been *the* social enemy of our times, and it is implemented as the aesthetics and content of a closed and marketed system.

To ask someone to choose one system over another is to make a decision on something that has real social implications in terms of which friends are getting left out, what image is being promoted by the site, how outsiders view the users of the site and more. Unless these sites actively market and cater to all audiences equally, it makes perfect sense that class would ultimately get echoed into these systems.

danah,

I haven't read the essay yet, but I worked my way through the comments. Here's a few preliminary observations.

If you were quoted correctedly as follows:

"there's something so strange about watching a generation splice themselves in two based on class divisions or lifestyles or whatever you want to call these socio-structural divisions."

Then I have to pick a nit about vocabulary. "Splice" means to join together. "Splice the hot wire to the high beam headlight wire". "Slice" means to sever. "Slice that carrot into strips for the salad arrangement".

Aside from that, I am very happy that you have chosen to tackle the important subject of class considerations in online behavior. I have long felt that the study of online activity was inappropriately weighted in favor of the priveleged. Thank you.

The storm of discussion around this article appears to have emerged because you chose to speak on a subject which is important, underdiscussed and emotionally volatile. I have noticed in the past that you sometimes appear to be sensitive to criticism - especially when it is unfair. I urge you not to let that bother you. Saying or doing anything that makes a significant difference will generate enemies for you. Choose your enemies wisely and wear them proudly!

As to conceptualization of your two groups (couldn't you have just called them uppers and lowers, or even tops and bottoms?), I have an idea. Years ago in my sociology classes, it was fashionable to express theoretical constructs with two-dimensional grids of 4 boxes. The two dimensions would be social variables of interest and the 4 squares of the grid would be labeled with the four possible high/low permutations from (high,high) to (low,low). Then each square would ger a name that was supposed to be evocative.

So, for your analysis you could have one variable that would correspond to conventional notions of class. If you wanted to actually make up a metric for it you would probably have to pull together elements of family income, family occupational status, education (including educational background of parents and academic orientation of the subject) and race. This dimension (maybe just call it class) would represent how the subject is situated with regard to the larger society. It largely consists of elements which are beyond the subject's direct control.

Then the second dimension would be one of cultural style and would relate to how the subject's social identity is constructed by self and others within the peer milieu. I envision the high and low ends of that dimension being conventional (e.g. preps and jocks) versus oppositional (e.g. goths, stoners, punks...)

In this regard, I notice you quoted as saying something I think I've seen you say before which I disagree with. You identify the "goody two-shoes" kids as part of what I'm referring to as "conventional". My perception, which may be out of date, is that adhering to the conventionally expressed norms of adult society (e.g. sobriety, chastity, obedience...) does not win points among a teen's peers, but will get him/her looked down upon.

(However, the rise of "Christian" as a salient teen social category is new since my day and may complicate that observation somewhat.)

But, back to the grid, if you like the dimensions, then think up evocative names for the four boxes and fame and fortune will be yours :)

I'll try to comment more after I read the essay.

You go, girl!

-Steve

Haven't read any of the 187 comments yet, although I probably will soon. You practically need commenter moderation when you post something this popular.

23 year old gay (kinda bi) male computer science major at the University of Texas here.

I think you're incorrect to include queer kids in the subaltern class. We're in both, and not even necessarily more in the subaltern one, although maybe the kids who are out in high school are, since I can't speak to that. Certainly the vast majority of my gay friends are relatively spoiled rich kids like me, and mainly on facebook like me. But I do keep myspace around, largely for a couple of hot friends who aren't on facebook and aren't rich. The often promiscuous and often closeted gay male subculture reaches across all sorts of divisions, and gay rights has come as far as it has as fast as it has largely because wealthy, powerful men like Roy Cohn kept coming down with AIDS in the 80s. As far as I can tell, the survivors and the estates of the departed have been bankrolling all sorts of things very quietly ever since, from the DNC to ACT UP.

You compare facebook to Pottery Barn and myspace to Vegas, but I don't think the comparison fits, because unlike Vegas decor and signage, flashy myspace pages actively interfere with communication. Plus, spam, Windows vs Linux servers, a coder founder-- myspace is inferior in very real ways.

As far as watching intertwined populations go online and continue to despise one another, you're right, it is depressing. But there is hope. The groups already mix, people already switch between groups, and semi-anonymous online browsing, and having plenty of separate online identities, allow a whole lot more of that.

In general, this article was fascinating and thought-provoking, and I thank you for it.

If you want a window into facebook, I'd be willing to reset my password, turn it over to you for a while, then take it back and reset the password, although I would prefer that you use it read-only instead of posting anything. More to the point, I think very many others would do the same after reading this essay, although the ones who would and wouldn't are a major selection bias, and if you get too large and open about recruiting them you might even draw the ire of the Terms of Service enforcers.

Will Warner
electronwill at gmail

Late to the party. but still chiming in!

interesting ideas, looking forward to a bigger work!

and I'd like to openly mock all the obsession with "hard data" (ooh my) and all the blather about how without numbers it's not real research and we can't learn anything with it.
talk about "le sigh" - I'll take one for the team here..

Numbers can lie or be misinterpreted. In themselves they are no more or less true than other data (including anecdotes). Numbers can be derived from faulty premises, manipulated in the research process, or simply misrepresented at the end. Criticizing qualitative research for being qualitative is just plain silly. It's as if hundreds of years of qualitative social science work does not exist!

Qualitative research is real research. As was pointed out above, ethnography is a valid method, people, get a grip. And in specific studies it's about validity, not replicability.

also, Jake Lockely? scary. intelligence = class? intelligence - taste? What century is this? now that's some sloppy science..

and, yes, I think Bourdieu would be a theorist to apply.

and whee! thanks for stirring the pot.

What makes anyone think well-educated digitally fluent Engels-reading youth working at Starbucks have good prospects? The idea that they'll fit well into a well-paying advertising, marketing, entertainment, or artistic job later? They aren't likely to get rich from switching to jobs in farms or factories, or elsewhere in the service industry. Or perhaps you mean they could go back to school and become engineers or lawyers, or get jobs as civil servants on the basis of their knowledge of history, current events, and written English, but I have my doubts about those possibilities.

In fact, I think this is the most important and most overlooked point here. What if Engels-reading baristas aren't poor yet upper class, but are instead one component of the American middle class's slide into poverty? What's their health care like? What will it be like? Will their parents really leave them much wealth? Will they have kids? How educated will their kids be? Are we creating a whole multigenerational subculture of mostly-white educated poor people? Or is this just some brief slacker phase, and as they get older they really will find high-paying creative jobs?

OK, I've now read all the comments, and organized my replies in order. Brace for a marathon post.

Greg: Good point about facebook restrictions on whose profiles you can see and who can see yours, and demanding a real name. Those policies are snobbish, a response to predator panic, and irritating, and this is one of the few things myspace did right and facebook did wrong.

Jake Lockley: You are wrong, and I don't like your tone of voice. The things you describe are the result of skill and education, not intelligence, smarts, or "quality." Facebook is not in any way less restrictive than myspace, but is instead better because it prohibits arbitrary html. (Admittedly, facebook users avoid ASCII art, which can't be prohibited easily, so you do have a point. You just overextended it.) Claiming that "the masses" are "ruled by subconscious and emotional thought process" falsely implies that you, I, and danah aren't. AOL and myspace/facebook have allowed idiots to create webpages, but also smart people who aren't nerds. I defy you to give me a solid argument that the "Jackass generation" has any fewer intellectuals than your generation. Your claim that the net used to be respectful is belied by the grand tradition of the flame. I don't know about yours, but if my internet were a real place it wouldn't be disgusting and intolerable at all, but rather quite congenial, because I spend time at sites I like and not at sites I don't. Finally, your whole post carries the stench of the writings of generations of bitter, immature, rapidly aging rich white boy intellectuals whose lives are such disastrous failures that they aren't even polite and subtle about their snobbery, as they would be if they were successful rich white boy intellectuals, working as bankers or some such. Your misanthropy is socially acceptable, but your gross and irrational bigotry on the basis of age, education, and nationality is not. It is not too late for you to learn more and behave better.

However, you do have an interesting point about outgrowing myspace and facebook. My friends seem to have switched from facebook to blogs and email sometime after graduation, and I'm curious how widespread that will be.

James L.: I think you mean cachet.

Karl: Myspace's friend system is open.

ian: I think facebook has emphatically been a dating service from the very start, even for my straight friends, and a homepage too, and is becoming more of a blog as well lately, although that one's not working so well.

Karl: You're right that the patterns are changing fast, but if danah had used past tense and said that subaltern highschoolers that have gone to college have gotten facebook, and those who have gone to community college or none at all have not, I think it would have been a quite solid statement.

Mark Federman: I agree wholeheartedly that what danah's doing is valuable. Frankly, I think it's the academic equivalent of good immersion journalism on subcultures-- remember Thompson's "Hell's Angels". But it would be better if it was backed up with statistics as well, and it looks like danah may do that and then publish. Immersion is deeply prone to bias, and statistics can help alleviate that problem, although the best solution is probably reading multiple independent researchers as they write about the subculture and one another's work.

Alyssa Gorrell: Please don't take personal offense that the conclusions about mass behavior patterns don't match your individual experience; you may well simply be an exception to the general pattern. Misguided, scattershot post.

Jessica Margolin: Well, I like to think we can reject "the system" enough not to be dishonest or abstinent until marriage while still being part of "the system" enough to hold a steady job, vote wisely, and generally try to grow liberal American culture. You're right that kids seem to be separating somewhat less now, though, which I think is an ironic and unexpected result of email and the internet, and cheap long distance phone calls.

(Another) Greg: Oh, if only, if *only*, the sites would publicly publish their aggregate demographic info on their users. But I suspect that information is more expensive than the combinations to most bank vaults.

Daniel: Yeah, why do people choose to act like star-bellied sneeches on the basis of things they can easily change? It's an outstanding question, and a hard one. I think the best answer I can supply is that any group has its negatives as well as its positives, and so when kids choose to join the emo crowd and despise the jocks for being tasteless, or join the jock crowd and despise the emos for being weak, they're both valid criticisms. To some extent, cultural differentiation is a matter of taste, and that can even include choosing a high-stress high-paying job or a low-stress low-paying one. On the other hand, no one ever chooses a boot on their neck, so it's worth watching for subtle coercion, and not just constantly insisting that things are exactly as they should be. (I'm looking at you, Thomas Friedman, you boot-licking Pollyanna.)

Karl: It's a good point that myspace's layout problems derive from some users, while other users stick to the nice, clean default (including me and somewhere around half of my myspace friends). However, the site is mostly the sum of its users, so it's fair to say that if half of myspace's pages are unreadable, the site as a whole is pretty awful, and there is a big policy difference coming right from the top about whether to allow arbitrary html in user pages. I think it's warranted to blame myspace's admins for its look.

Jess: Again, remember that general patterns do have exceptions. Thanks for letting us know the military blocked facebook too though; that's good to hear, in fact.

Oh, and since there have now been several people vehemently offended by the thesis, I'd like to interject that I think the thesis, that facebookers tend to be richer and more educated and myspacers less so, is sound and fits my experience.

Steve Petersen: Good point. And although the "rebels" fret about image in the sense of being sure to do a few things that make them look cool, on penalty of their friends not being impressed, it's a very different thing for the "conformists" to fret about image in the sense of being sure not to do anything that makes them look rebellious, on penalty of missing out on a job.

John: Must be a stifled creative impulse driving students to these sites. Not enough fingerpainting in colleges these days. Seriously, though, you just read and commented on a blog, and that kind of entertainment is a lot of the appeal of these sites. Additionally, I've found facebook to be better than any dating site. And it's superb for sussing out whether some prospective friend has religious or political views that bug me, even if I've just met them and only very briefly. Which is creepy, I know-- I've lost count of the number of times friends of mine, usually women or gay guys, have described doing similar things and then called facebook "stalkernet" with a nervous little laugh. I'm guessing the straight men don't dare make that joke.

Lee: What a great story about the Planet of the Apes crew! However, even if Soviet Russia was a flop, there's still a big difference between a mostly middle class society like Canada and a society like Brazil with a few aristocrats, many peasants, very little middle class, and awful barriers to people moving between classes. So even though self-selection is part of the story, our actions can still increase or decrease other people's social mobility, and it's worth increasing. People can control some things about themselves and their lives, but on the other hand they are unable to control other things except with outside help.

Rob: Ah, but we crazy liberals are ambitious enough to want to abolish "the norms and manners necessary for success," so success is based entirely on actual performance and productivity and merit.

shadeofmelon: Remember, the similarities that friendships are based on can just as easily be a love of a genre of music or a particular author-- as long as we don't let class differences turn into a rigid caste system.

For those who're appalled by how elitist Facebook is, check out aSmallWorld-- it'll blow your mind.

Roadkill: Gotta be careful to distinguish between progress and mere change.

notes on Lisa's post: Elijah: MySpace and facebook are both indeed diverse, and do not *promote* segregation. But if the segregation is happening, surely pointing it out is not "demeaning, racist, and homophobic," but quite the contrary! Were you one of those people who helped shut down America's discussion of race in the 1990s by screaming "Racism!" at the top of your lungs every time the subject was mentioned? Falsely and sensationally reporting a myspace/facebook split could indeed produce a split. But what evidence do you have that danah's reporting of the split is false? She has massive firsthand experience backing her claim that it's true. And if there's a myspace/facebook "battle that has recently erupted," doesn't that also support her thesis? Ken Roberts, about half of all undergraduate college students are indeed teens, and now that facebook has opened itself to high schools, teens make up an even larger percentage of users-- and these were the users danah focused on in her interviews. danah's work does simplify things and divide people, but isn't that the way all sociology must work? It can't be perfectly accurate, but it can be fairly accurate, and serve the purpose of demonstrating important divisions and distinctions within the set of all people. William Hija: You're taking a scholarly study of masses of people as a personal insult, you have entirely failed to understand sociology, get out. Nora: What a relief your post is. Well said. Thank you.

Jeremiah: I think two social networks are very much apples and apples, but you're right, this is an essay on the basis of interviews, not yet a study. Reporting it as otherwise is a sad commentary on the way modern media rushes sensationalism into the news cycle with a stunning lack of careful, patient understanding.

reyhan: It seems to me that the admins have steered the two networks by the way the policies they set at the top affect how each user interacts with the site. Facebook chose a minimalist, tightly controlled central design, whereas myspace, now owned by News Corp., enthusiastically welcomed in collaboration from users and third-party web design companies. Facebook is headed towards the myspace model.

chad: We're worried about McDonald's and Wal-Mart because we're not sure if we should loosen regulation and allow them to sell ground rat meat labeled as beef, or tighten it so much that no business can have more than 10 locations nationwide, or what. I'm just joking with those examples of course-- we don't want regulation to be anywhere near that tight or that loose. But it might be better for it to be tighter than it is, for example requiring a higher federal minimum wage, or clearer warnings about health risks from McDonald's food, same as cigarettes, or higher tariffs on Chinese goods that are made with prison labor and compete with US factories that pay decent wages.

Byron Sonne: The paper's been edited since the first comments went up to address spelling and grammar errors, and add explanation of methodology. Tricky situation, that-- maybe you could post a quick comment here each time you edit the original essay, danah, saying that you've edited it? An interface showing the changes made would be fantastic too, like the one wikipedia uses, but that may be too much hassle.

Tommy: But aren't you curious? Don't you wonder how people move around in society, and associate, and group themselves? Won't the knowledge help you understand where people are coming from better when you meet them, and teach you how to move between groups if you choose? I mean, who would mount a serious defense of ignorance for its own sake?

Bertil: Interesting question about whether kids have ever before had to choose between using a rich social network and a poor one. I think mostly in the past they've been unable to make any decisions that drastic, and have simply gone to the accessible physical location. Rich people in urban areas can go slumming, but I'm not sure of any other examples. Most places have never had this option before, and although I don't want to exaggerate, I think that's a good new thing enabled by the internet.

Steve: I don't think the "good" kid distinction is really about chastity, sobriety, or even perfect obedience, so much as the ability to fit into a middle or upper class environment, get decent grades, and make similar friends-- in short, a more general obedience of their parents intense demand for them to develop the ability to earn money in the corporate world.

Finally, it's wonderful to read all the fascinating stuff many of these posters have to say, like Alice, seb chan, drew, David Brake, albert, E.C. Hopkins, Theodore, Larry, Alana Perlin, mir, Roger, Gene Koo, and Noah Mittman.

I really enjoyed this and have some small observations from my own use of those spaces. The class distinction between FaceBook and MySpace is, I believe, well noted here. But I've seen yet another with the PeopleSpace.com site--more minority folks across the age spectrum seem to be going to PeopleSpace than the others. Though there may be some other aspects, one that I think tends to contribute to this is the group vs. individual one: MySpace seems specifically self-centered for all of it's links, while PeopleSpace is more group centered.

FaceBook is, I think, removed from this distinction because the educational part is more defining.

Response to Essay:

"For the academics reading this, I want to highlight that this is not an academic article. It is not trying to be. It is based on my observations in the field, but I'm not trying to situate or theorize what is going on. I've chosen terms meant to convey impressions, but I know that they are not precise uses of these terms."

That's totally appropriate for where you're at with this work in relationship to the larger context in which you work and any academic that doesn't get that is either a quantitative type who you'll just have to put up with or a qualitative type who isn't up to date and should be avoided. On a related note, I don't buy into the quantitative/qualitative split but the reference is one academics should understand.

That said, if you're going to use terms like "hegemonic" and "subaltern", you really ought to say a bit more and link out cause most academics wouldn't even know what you were talking about.

"She argues that class divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than with income."

Haven't read the essay to which you link but your take leaves out the issue of access to capital. I'm one of those brainy underpaid people to which you refer but I was never homeless because of friends and relatives with more money than I. I guess that could go under social networks but it seems more specific and important than the larger categories you mention as alternatives to income.

I so wished you'd mentioned the Methodological notes at the top of the page. That would have changed how I read this essay. Rather than wondering how you knew all this, I could have focused a bit more clearly on what you were saying.

You're doing excellent work. The discussion of class has been marginalized in the States and many of those who do discuss it use outdated frameworks. I know you don't need me to tell you to just keep going but, please, just keep going.

You may already be familiar with George E. Marcus' Ethnography Through Thick & Thin. There's some nice work in there about the necessity to focus on descriptive work during periods when established terminology and theory just won't do the job anymore. It will give you some ammo for those who can't follow your quite reasonable response to ever-changing conditions.

Great stuff, and really appreciate the way you're not afraid to communicate your uncertainty.

Your ideas definitely resonate in terms of my 15 year-old cousin, who is such a great example why economically-based class labels don't work. He's from an affluent family, spoiled, but identifies with the gangsta subculture, which in his community is definitely an outsider group. Materialistically, he's got everything he wants but socially is almost certainly a "bad" kid. Context is everything! It wouldn't surprise me if he never heard of facebook.

I share your worries about teens especially in terms of my cousin. We're all concerned about what he'll do when he gets out of high school. My guess is he'll live at home until he's 30.

Interesting reading.

Not surprising that you're catching a lot of flak in the comments, of course.

I have accounts on Facebook and MySpace, but I rarely, if ever, check into them. MySpace is full of spam, and Facebook is too restrictive.

There is another SNS called Tribe.net, which is much more about "community building", and is the place to be for fringe/freak types (by the way, my classification scheme is "freaks" and "mundanes") such as pagans, artists of various stripes, Burning Man aficionados, goths, etc.

Anyway, thanks for the article.

Thanks for the article, danah. There's not enough discussion along these lines, I think, and you've provided a great forum for it here!

The aspect of your post that popped out at me the most -- but it seems that it didn't so much for others, from their comments -- was not that the demographics of MySpace and Facebook are different, but that one is considered "safe" and the other not in a way that discriminates along socio-cultural lines. I'd call this out even more strongly -- I think it's a very important point. There are differences in the technologies themselves, of course, but it's also true (but so often overlooked!) that innovations, in themselves, often just reinforce inequalities that are already present. You've described in other posts just how much the MySpace scare is overblown. Why hasn't there been a (comparably overblown) Facebook scare, when the real risks probably aren't that different anymore (arguments about "open" and "closed" systems aside -- for instance, Facebook-stalking just within one's network provides a wealth of profiles)? Could it be another instance of the infallibility of the "good" college-bound kids of the middle-class? Anyway, I'm very interested to see this develop further, and thanks again for stirring up such an interesting discussion.

As part of my teacher education, I taught in high schools all this year. What I saw was consistent with your report.

At one high school, where the majority of students are immigrants and living in poverty or near poverty, most didn't even have access to a computer. In fact, for one of my classroom activities - an "I am from poem" one of the categories is "items in your room." More than one student said "nothing - I have nothing in my room." This is very different than the affluent high school where I taught my second semester. These are the same students who can afford to hang out at Starbucks (what I call their "fake apartment") and drink 5 dollar coffees - everyday. These students have it all. And Facebook allows them to show that off - as well as their social and cultural currency.

One key difference is how Facebook privileges material socioeconomic status - having "tastes" is precluded by having stuff. Most of the kids I teach do not own their own copies of the books they read. And now that students are rarely allowed to take novels home (they don't make it back to the school and the schools have little money for books as it is), it's even harder for students to feel "ownership" - for their learning or for culture (as culture is defined by ownership and ownership defines status and participation).

Myspace is quite different. Students can access that music via youtube. The at-risk students I've worked with here in Toronto - even those who are living in shelters, take part in myspace. So where do they get their "taste" - many use Youtube to listen to music. One student I worked with lives in a shelter and doesn't own any sort of musical device, doesn't OWN anything for that matter. This student would spend all off hours at school listening to music on Youtube. That was his only experience of popular culture.

Thank you for a very interesting read. And thank you for giving me another pointer to something I was unconsciously interested in but never know until I now stumbled over it: ethnology.

Amazing observations of yours and even if your statement is not formally academic I would still regard it as highly relevant. In some fields of research your work would actually already be regarded as precise enough.

Keep up the good work!
_Wolf

Hello, I found your article very interesting even from a German viewpoint. You may know that we have also a newly inspired debate about the 'Unterschicht' which means the poor, mostly jobless, and excluded from school and the idea of upgrading. When the conservatives hit the elections 1983 there were about 1.2 million poor people and today we have 10 millions.
I think you know what is meant by the term 'Entfremdung', not very good translated to alienation. This Marxian term describes just what I feel when I am in contact - a lot of my clients are from th epoor side of the spectrum.
The people get no qualified school termination and will wait for the rest of their life for a job which gives their life a sense and besides enough money to feel acceptable in social relationhships.
As you see what happens in the U.S.A: could you draw some political implications ?
thanks for personal answer
J. from Germany

Hi there,

Extremely interesting essay. Great minds thinking alike? I blogged about this on the 22nd here http://mad.beds.ac.uk/nmrg/?p=60

I'd love to chat further with you about this - I'm turning mine into a longer piece right now.

Best

Jason Wilson

Hello there!

I wrote something similar, though not as eloquent, as this on my site a few days ago from the standpoint of someone on the fence between class and privilege. I, too, recognized the divide in the summer of 2005 while observing the diversity section of resident assistant training on my college campus. Now, I see things are quite different. As my peers and I take our college knowledge back to our neighborhoods and as Facebook has opened its doors to the world at large, there seem to be considerable shifts in the class divide. For one, high school students now have access to their own network on Facebook. Also, the new Facebook application platform may work as a way of introducing previously uninterested people to the world of programming and computer science. It's quite fascinating and I'm glad to have found someone who's been super interested in it for a while. I wish you the best of luck with the study and dealing with the media.

Interesting. I wonder, what about the kids who use both?

I've noticed some people commenting are saying things like if you start with myspace, then graduate to facebook, what happens after facebook?

- maybe nothing. facebook in my situation at least has become more valuable of a tool since college. initially i thought i'd outgrown it, but it has turned out that there is no easier way to keep in touch with the friends from college and start building a network in my new city.

it's even kind of reassuring - as a total stranger to a new area, i can physically see the progress i have made into the network here by looking at my regional friends list.

of course, this wouldnt be possible without the trust factor also discussed above. the use of real names and locations and only assigning profiles to people - not bands or venues or restaurants - makes this kind of trust possible. facebook itself supports it - when you add a friend, there's a section that you can record how you know them. one option is "i've never actually met this person" to which facebook responds, "then why are you friending them?"

in short - a great essay. it voiced a lot of the trends i had been suspecting but didn't have any data to confirm or assume. what comes post-facebook/myspace and if there will be a post-, and what that will mean sociologically will just have to be the next chapter.

Thought-provoking piece, danah - thank you. Two quick responses to Scott's thoughtful comment up there (6/24) on the censorship being promoted in social-networking "orientation" at colleges (not to mention in school assemblies in middle and high schools): "I find this emphasis on censorship disturbing. Instead of learning the 'good' things we (the hegemonic students) are taught to mask the 'bad' behavior. I find this masking much more troubling than any of the 'bad' actions being masked." Scott, it's not just happening on university campuses; "masking" is being promoted by the online-safety field too.

I think it's a reflexive reaction by boomers and maybe Gen X-ers to how public behavior has become. Teens (all of us, for that matter) have always masked our "real" selves to an extent in social situations to different degrees, depending on who our audiences or publics were. Suddenly we all had social tools (SNS and other Net technologies) that gave our selves super publics as danah has written. "Diaries" and parties were no longer private. Youth didn't find this particularly concerning (maybe in the early days of MySpace partly because they felt their public was only their friends anyway), but parents were shocked about this cavalier approach to privacy as well as the "behavior" exhibited. The latter was nothing new, parents had behaved "that way" when young, but it was all on display, and meanwhile a predator panic was under way. So masking was the knee-jerk protective measure promoted. What parents and online-safety advocates don't yet realize is that 1) it's a bandaid that can easily fall off and doesn't accomplish much, and 2) the public nature of the social Web can actually and ultimately contribute toward problem solving. It can teach us stuff - "us" being parents, caregivers, researchers, social workers, youth advocates, law enforcement, etc. Censorship works against that. Does that make any sense?
Anne

i'm from Chile and i've just read about your work in bbc news. i'm doing my thesis in the same subject, but using flikr and fotolog. To my surprise, it seems that the results of my work are similar in a lot of aspects with your work.

you got my mail so we can share our material.

Can't
Understand
Nothing
Though

You seem to have made one rather odd assumption here. The main issue you are indicating that I disagree with is that myspace has somehow attracted what you call as "MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers".

You need to look at something called the "-journal" types, (mainly livejournal and it's duplicates). It pre-dates myspace, Facebook and the blogging phenomena. It has remained the geeks, freaks and queers "enclave" in blogging and social networking.

I'm not trying to advertise, I personally use livejournal (or LJ as it's affectionally called) for the exact reasons I said, since people of that type are within a seperate social circle and simply more likely to use an LJ for real world to online world social connections. While facebook and myspace are still far larger, the idea that myspace is the place for alternative is more than a bit off.

Myspace is big now because it's the mainstream("whats your Myspace"). Now facebook is too it seems, but according to your work it's an upper edge. The alternative still is neither.

PS. For analysis, I'm about the graduate university and am likely to be successful in future. However, i'm in australia, where we have a somewhat less rigid class structure than the US.

Very interesting read. I wonder however, how many people who respond are solely myspace users?

I'm curious as to why this study took 4 years?

It's merely pointing out the obvious, then stretching those points to extreme ends, creating exaggerated common sense that inflames the reader with controversial word choice.

I like your article very much on my fast read I will come back again when I am not so tired to comment more and respond to some people's responses, of what I saw I agree with almost everything IO though your concept could use expanded its not just rich or poor or however you want to put it.

PS: I use facebook and myspace and its true when I first saw Facebook's streamline look or clean look I was eager to get in. This was at HS invite time.

Will: First, as I understand it, the four years of study in the field of social networking was a very broad and general fishing expedition for anything interesting, and this essay was just an off the cuff discussion of one aspect of the results so far.

Second, would it really have been common sense to you in 2003 that the differences between facebook and myspace mirrored larger class and cultural divisions among Americans? And even on the off chance that would have seemed obvious to you way back then, I'd point out that one man's common sense is another man's vicious partisan lie, and that's why we need actual research to prove or disprove it.

Myspace reminds me of when the internet was first getting started. Every time a new technology came out, everyone tried it and most of them failed and were no longer used. The problem with Myspace is, no one tells these people how annoying and completely messed up their sites are. I got fed up with trying to read pink text on a white background and having to click the pause button on every profile's music player and switched entirely to Facebook.

There are social barriers everywhere. The reason is because people do not take the time to understand one another. We believe our way is the only right way. That is what we grow up around. Sticking with the idea of "good" and "bad," if everyone stopped to think of why a person did a "bad" thing, the barriers would start to disappear. All conflict stems from misunderstanding. We have a paradox where everyone wants to be different, but no one wants to be alone.

The best we can do is to teach the people around us about diversity and to not react immediately, but to question what we do not understand.

Do not get too lost in your own little world.

My grown daughters both graduated from college and yet they are using 2 different networks. The older one was in college before Facebook became popular so her group of friends are on My Space.
The younger one started on Facebook as a sophmore and that's where her friends are.
A couple of years after college and both are keeping the same social networks.

I especially found the part about aesthetics interesting. I think it presents a question for designers of such websites that has worrisome implications: Do designers actually encourage class separation (and segregation)?

Interesting read -- but is it really about (some kind of) class, i.e. hierarchic/antagonistic structure, or isn't it more about different life-styles, target groups, the aesthetic side of every-day life, social milieus, or even, let's call it that, cultures (as in cultural studies?). In you blog entry, you write that your findings are disconcerting. I interpret this as: they are disconcerting, because they show that societal groupings, gaps and clusters can also be found in the virtual world. But why should this be different there?

Bravo to you for raising issues of social class in this land where social class is not supposed to exist. I'll really look forward to seeing this research develop.

Paul Willis has written recently about significant differences between "the Lads" and this generation of working-class kids, largely because of changes in work, consumerism, and a digital culture. You've spurred my thinking about the potential significance of social networking, given his concern about the challenges of identity formation among working-class kids when work is no longer a source of solidarity.

I've blogged a bit about this over at:

educationandclass.com

and would welcome more conversation about all of this.

I took some notes while reading you piece and I will share those as my response. BTW, kudos for an excellent writeup. And away we go:

I find nothing offensive or upsetting about your essay, perhaps because it echoes my sentiments. However it is also quite interesting that you felt it might be, perhaps because of who you are and where you live, that you live in a very "politically correct" bubble. But what you wrote is simply true and the intent behind the words were clearly not meant to be derogatory or offensive. You are merely quantifying an observation and it does not warrant an apology. Surrounding key words with quotations is more than enough to distance yourself.

Myspace military ban may have more to do with Instant Messaging capabilities within Myspace as well as the "Private Profile" factor which usually means that there is questionable content usually sexual. There is a liability there as the mility is certainly blocking websites based on content such as adult or peer-to-peer.

Transcending barriers -- A great example of this can be observed in the TV show "So You Think You Can Dance". Kids from all different types of backgrounds, whether classically trained or a break dancer from the streets, compete to see who is the best dancer. They are all forced to dance in solos and with partners in every possible style, not just their own specialty. What is clear is that ballroom dancers, lyrical dancers, and break-dancers can come from different classes where most people would have expected certain dance styles to be unique to a particular class or race. Additionally it shows that talent and versatility transcend race and class barriers as they do with everything else (intelligence, charisma, character, etc...). The class differences are only apparent when they speak, but when on stage, for those few minutes, everyone seems to forget it as the performance is all that matters.

The issue of judgement and taste - it would seem that there is a corrolation between the poor taste in the design and custimazation of the typical MySpace page and a lack of good judgement in that individuals personal life.

Unfortunately, today, it is cool for kids to be a thug. Even kids with better opportunities and upgringings seem to fall into this. However, as the middle-class dissapears both extremes seem to be gaining popularity. It is also cool to be a geek (and hopefully cool to be smart). Revenge of the Nerds was prophetic. Gates and Jobs and now the younger generation find it socially acceptable to be good with computers and excel in academics though the two can be exclusive. Video gamers are no longer the fat, socially retarded kid with poor hygiene any more either, and in many cases are fit and have a thriving social life with the "in crowd".

Popular music has shifted from Classical to Jazz to Disco to Rock to Grunge to Rap. This also should be an interesting indicator, and likely worthy of a well researched piece. It seems that further back you go down the chain the more elitist an audience you will find.

-Javier

hi Danah, something of a response to the discussion around this here: http://creativitymachine.net/2007/06/29/further-to-the-myspacefacebook-class-debate/

Ooops, of course I meant "danah", not "Danah". Sorry!

Great essay by the way on how the social networks reflect American Society. I riffed on what you wrote to discuss the Video Games Industry and China (which I'm part of) and how these same divisions explain a lot of why some people are not on FaceBook at this time. China has FaceBook clones but they are not really the same thing. Our version of MySpace is CyWorld or Tencent's QQ but a facebook model would work very well in the un egalitarian world of modern China and Asia for that matter.
-Frank

http://blogs.msdn.com/acid49/archive/2007/06/26/class-divisions-in-myspace-and-facebook-why-a-facebook-idea-will-work-in-china.aspx

"Unfortunately, today, it is cool for kids to be a thug."

I believe it's always been cool to be a thug in the 90s, or a greaser in the 50s, or a gangster in the 20s or beyond. Let's not forget Billy the Kid, either. Also, pirates.

The romance of being a rebel is about having control, about writing your own damn rules, and that's always going to be "cool." And rebelling is clearly something all kids will do regardless of class. It's a cultural reaction that deliberately cuts one off from the dominant social norm. The real challenge is understanding why someone would choose, or feel necessary to do so.

The only difference between the moral behaviour of social classes is their amount of “social face”. The higher up you go in social class, the larger the pressure on your “social face” and the more pressure there is to hide your negative moral behaviour. It is not “proper” to show certain behaviour publicly if you are from a higher social standing, but if you from a lower social standing it doesn’t really matter; it might even be encouraged.

Interesting enough it is exactly this lifestyle from the ostracized teens which is scaring the hegemonic peers (which also might place Danah’s critic in perspective). This lifestyle of becoming rich and famous by being in a band, creating a blog, etc. comes from the ostracized teens who have found ways of skipping the road of “hard work” which the hegemonic group teaches their kids. The hegemonic group’s kids now also have fallen for this “easy” road and it is rightfully so, scaring them. How to convince kids that they should follow the hard road and still maybe never becoming rich, famous, etc. is the million dollar question. Should we? Are kids getting disillusioned by the Capitalist system ans way of life?

I would have looked into Bourdieu's theory of "class". There are words created by socialogists that can help you more with differentiation of class and taste. But you still did do a great job I think.

Bottom line is... DESIGN.

There was not one word about DESIGN here whereas the main distinction between the two comes down to aesthetics, which is design. Development is a huge factor too, but function only becomes effective through design.

For more accurate judgements on Facebook, I think you really should have sat down with an avid Facebook user and went through profiles and really understood what is going on with it's functions and features. Plus now, since about a month ago, there are APIs for developers that allow applications to be inserted to facebook profiles for more customization and I guess more "fun" with new features to increase traffic I suppose. It would have been nice if you had researched that as well and provided an outlook on the future of Facebook with it's excessive attempts to conquer the web2.0 world for youth.

I would have also liked to see research on other social-networking websites that define class and taste such as TakingITGlobal and provided some solutions for alternative ways youth in the global perspective are networking and how that differenciates with the majority of Facebook and MySpace users' purpose to communicate and network due to "class" distinction.

Good work though.

http://www.no-art.info/_film/2003_goldman_lurie-en.html

this film is about art networks and the margin of society: I think it does directly speak to your article: it is the often ignored that within which, lives the found art of the moment.

Your article gave me an abundance of insight in which I gained a 'new' understanding about the truth which would normally be labeled as 'MySpace or Facebook - Make your choice'. You certainly illuminated my 21 year old south african mind (saturated I might add) with this enormously excellent article/citizen-report, a piece which with pride I added to my list of Favorites. There is no question that this article will keep me coming back for more. Please, do keep up the good work! Who knows, by following your work one day I might be able to write an article that would make an impression on you.

One of your super fans,

Werner Viljoen

Howdy.

I am a high school art/graphic arts teacher. I found your article very interesting, but want to share my simple conclusion about the overarching visual differences between myspace and facebook.

In graphic design a long-established principle is that, in order to attract a higher socio-economic class to your product, idea, magazine, whatever, your design should be simpler and include a great deal of white space (not necessarily white, mind you, but negative space). In order to attract a lower socio-economic class to your magazine, product, etc., you would leave much less empty space and try to cram in as much type and images as you can. Colors would be brighter when appealing to the lower socio-economic group as well.

Having spent a good deal of time on both sites (from kicking my students off them during class, or my own use of facebook to keep up with my former students), this principle is very much in effect on both sites.

Facebook's design is clean and uses a good deal of white space. Individual sites within it pretty much follow the same pattern, and while myspace-like functionality has been added, it still has the same clean, upper-class design. Individual pages have less design variation, and where colors are present, the colors are subtle, with a greyed blue dominating.

Myspace's home page, on the other hand, is cluttered and uses more bright colors. Type is placed closer together, contributing to a sense of claustrophobia. Personal pages are generally cluttered and filled with, well, whatever that person can shove on the page.

There is little wonder that lower socio-economic students feel more at home with myspace, while the upper level feels more at home with facebook. The designers of each site are using classic design theory to promote their site to a particular market.

Just my two cents.

D. Mitchell

An excellent essay with wonderful insight (at least, it concurs with my own experiences on Facebook and MySpace).

As a matter of feedback, I had a question about your underestimation of income levels in regards to class division. Your example includes "friends who are making $14K in cafes". My question is: how many of those friends, especially ones working at a "cafe", have parents or grandparents with larger amounts of income?

It seems that instead of just writing off income, it might be interesting to see how many familial degrees of separation that person is from a larger amount of wealth, or even a higher level of education. I guess I have too many friends far wealthier than I am (trust fund babies) who based on their clothing, their income, their job, etc. would appear to be in a poor or lower class, but in reality, are only a few years away from making that first inherited withdrawal, or are only a phone call away from getting financial help which would never show up on a W2.

I admit this is a minor point, but I think wealth, or at least, degrees of separation from wealth, play a far more important role in this class divide.

AJK: Well, no matter how much we reform and improve our systems of values to be more egalitarian, racially tolerant, sexually liberal, environmentally conscious, educated, thoughtful, and so on, as long as we want creature comforts, new scientific discoveries, and artistic masterpieces, there will be a demand for hard work and diligence, and the hard road will be "worth" following. The way to bring your kids on board is probably to tell them that, but more importantly, to control their social group and whom they imitate: first their parents, and later each other. So in short, parents who want diligent, hard-working, middle-class kids will band together and exclude parents and kids who don't particularly want that lifestyle. (Does my confidence in that answer mean I can have a million dollars now? Maybe if I use that idea to start some Meritocracy-ville 'burb and attract all the worker bee people to it, then I can make a million?)

D. Mitchell: This is fascinating. Any more info on when and where this distinction emerged and was first being taught to designers?

These are some great ideas, danah. Really looking forward to how this piece of research progresses. Thanks for your insight, as always.

I completely agree with almost all of your assertions. I write for a magazine that covers marketing trends and I've found there is a distinct difference between the companies that utilize MySpace and those that use Facebook for advertising. MySpace tends to be a place for movies, music, etc... (companies appealing to a broader, more urban audience) while Facebook is littered with ads from credit card companies and travel services.

As someone who was a college sophomore when Facebook first appeared, there is absolutely a difference in the people found there vs. MySpace. I think the reaction by users when Facebook decided to open itself up to everyone by including "regional" groups is proof enough of the elitist mentality.

I'm curious to hear what you think about the divide 10 years from now. Personally I think that because of Facebook's use of corporate networks, today's college students will continue to be segregated as they connect with people at work or when away on business. The popular employer networks right now like KPMG, Morgan Stanley, GE, represent upper-class. It would seem out of place for people who work at those companies to have MySpace pages, or at least to exclusively have a MySpace page.

Overall I think you did a great job of pointing out the divide and researching its origins, and I hope you don't stop here. The dichotomy in social networking can help explain so many societal questions that it certainly deserves to be explored further.

danah - I've posted my thoughts on your piece here.

http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2007/07/on-class-and-social-network-transitions.html

Have a nice vacation!

Fascinating - and troublesome on oh-so-may levels.

Danah:

I have to confess that I've been troubled by the same issues, which were flagged to me in the fall at your DIY talk in your use of images.

I was particularly sensitive then given my semester in Cory's seminar, but there is an apologetic tone in some of your work, like we should be sorry to point out that society is so messed up. Keep up the great work.

http://bluemandarin.blogspot.com/2007/07/racism-in-social-networks-oh-my-danah.html

I think Fred takes too micro a view. Technologies are tools, used by societies and American society is wrecked along coded lines. I've seen quantitative research and when immigration issues appear on "big news networks" message boards, the racist invective sky-rockets and "community web editors" find themselves not approving the most posts out of all type of stories.

I wondered whether the differing uses for Myspace and Facebook were more related to the identity management that the two systems force. Facebook seems far more linked to real life, real colleges, real workplaces: enabling your social life or your networking life to happen online. It feels very yuppie to me. I'm becoming aware of friends who have Myspace or Livejournal accounts developing Facebook profiles to 'fit in' at work.

Myspace, on the other hand, can accommodate a real-life or an online-dominant persona, although the questions it asks (to create the user profile) also position it as a certain kind of space.

I like your analysis but think that the difference between the sites is more than just who they attract. The sites serve different purposes. MySpace is a place where indidviduals can express themselves. Members have total control over their pages, can upload videos, music, slideshows, etc. What many see as blink or gaudy are individuals trying to disgintuish their pages. This tends to attract the artsy, emo, hip-hop types.

Facebook is pretty sterile. It's purpose is for making connections. It does that well but it's really not a great platform for self-expression.

Just another satisfied reader. I'm sure I'd have a little more to say if I read all the other comments, but that would be quite an undertaking.

I found your piece very interesting.

However, I am curious why you were not able to "see" any facebook profiles. Couldn't you sign up for facebook or ask people you interviewed to show you their profiles?

I am also curious about what the actual numbers you came up with were. There are still lots more people on myspace than there are on facebook. Do you think that it will become more of a 50/50 divide now that facebook is open to everyone or do you think facebook will remain "elitist" because of its network background. Did you explore the city networks vs the school networks on facebook? I am curious if there would be a gap there?

i think the advertising that apears on either site is something you brushed on but could help make a very strong point... i am sure the advertisers for each site have a very good idea of who is on either site...

Alright. Interesting essay, I think you have a few points, but it's hard to compare.

I come from an upper middle class family, and I am in a 4 year university. Just finished my freshman year with a 3.7 GPA. I have both a Myspace and a Facebook account.

Myspace I originally joined up to keep up with my high school friends, most of which stay out there. Along the way, however, I found this community of roleplayers, who would literally write novels and forth to each other. These people were college educated, literate, innovative, and came from all walks of life. Now my Myspace profile is entirely devoted to roleplaying and that is all that I do on Myspace. However, I do spend most of my time there. Keep in mind that the roleplay community on Myspace is vast-- and they are made up of different demographics than the rest of the Myspace users. I've had my share of perverts, stupid graphics, etc, on Myspace, but thank goodness I block all of those people. Now that I roleplay on Myspace, I find people with lovely looking, fast-loading profiles and literate comments with nary a glitter pic in sight.

My Facebook I opened for much the same reasons-- to keep up with my college friends. I rarely check in, but when I do, it's for pictures and see what others are up to. People here bemoan the bad loading profiles on Myspace, but I hate that I'm stuck with a generic Facebook profile-- I can't change the color or anything. It annoys me to no end. Also, Facebook is just built differently-- and I can't find any roleplay communities on there, because it just isn't built for that like Myspace is.

I think part of the thing is that Myspace was popular first-- all the spambots and everyone went there and now its saturated with those people-- as others have said, Facebook has only recently opened up to everybody.

Both have their pros and cons. I wish Myspace was a stable as Facebook, and would adopt some features. But there are users on Myspace that are not from the 'lower classes.'

Great essay, danah -- thanks for writing it. I suspect that one of the reasons it's so difficult to talk about this is the huge number of intersecting dimensions, including the socio-cultural dimensions (the importance of Bourdieu's perspectives shouldn't hide the fact that there *are* strong class distinctions in the traditional sense), existing societal power structures (Liz's point about how Facebook was designed to mirror them is excellent -- and in a different way MySpace's association with Fox is also important here), and the very real,technology and (contextual) usability differences. Much to think about here ...

jon

Hi Danah,

I am a reporter for El Nuevo Dia, leading newspaper in Puerto Rico. We are developing a special issue focused on social interactions through Facebook and MySpace, and we got a hold of this essay, and we were amazed. We are kids fom the ages of 15-18 and we have seen these differences between Facebook and MySpace users before.

We would like to speak to you to have a little more information for our article.

Please write me an email to manu_lopez08@hotmail.com with your phone number before tommorow Friday June 6th, so we can interview you, since we are short in time.

Thank You

Hi Danah,

I am a reporter for El Nuevo Dia, leading newspaper in Puerto Rico. We are developing a special issue focused on social interactions through Facebook and MySpace, and we got a hold of this essay, and we were amazed. We are kids fom the ages of 15-18 and we have seen these differences between Facebook and MySpace users before.

We would like to speak to you to have a little more information for our article.

Please write me an email to manu_lopez08@hotmail.com with your phone number before tommorow Friday June 6th, so we can interview you, since we are short in time.

Thank You

Haven't societies always been self-segregating? The reasons may have to do with socioeconomic factors, but the impetus to self-segregate has to do with personal comfort level or, as Kenneth Boulding put it, the image of self that underlies the actions of people, organizations, nations.

It would be interesting to see how much the Web has breached class barriers and made social distinctions less compelling. Some comments here that draw from personal experience seem to indicate that it's not quite the black-and-white (sorry for the pun) situation that your research seems to suggest.

My own experience in the enlisted ranks of the U.S. Navy was that officers weren't wanted--they were actually prohibited from entering--the Enlisted Men's Club. It had to do with self-identity and comfort level.

Have you read the Protestant Ethic? It's great. You'll love it. Your gut will tell you he's right. But without any empirical data to support your hypothesis, your analyzing 10,000 MySpace pages puts you no closer than Weber would be in explaining this phenomena.

Have you read the Protestant Ethic? It's great. You'll love it. Your gut will tell you he's right. But without any empirical data to support your hypothesis, your analyzing 10,000 MySpace pages puts you no closer than Weber would be in explaining this phenomena.

You probably know this already, but the Pew data set has socioeconomic information:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Privacy_SNS_Report_Final.pdf

They don't have the psychographic categories that you're talking about, but they do have household income, education level of parents, race and ethnicity, and age.

Like other folks commenting, I would be watching out for change. The demographics of Facebook changed rapidly when they opened it up. They are likely to change further with new applications. Maybe developers will add apps to Facebook that have more media and decoration features, so kids who want music and more pictures will be able to have those things on Facebook. Without more research, it's hard to say how much of the relative preferences have to do with overall visual style, vs. features, vs. preferential attachment. Not to mention, sns's are the subject of fashion, like physical clubs. What is considered "cool" will change in different social groups, too.

I don't see an increased concern about the creation of a caste system. People group themselves, that is nothing new. A person will go where their friends and perceived peers are. We're talking about MySpace vs. Facebook, so digital divide access issues are factored out. The percent of teens who have sns profiles are the same across broad family income categories (over and under $50K family income).

Free social network services have much less built-in stratification than: selective colleges; the ability to pay for higher education or private education; racial profiling in shopping areas and on the street; clothing; transportation; neighborhood safety... any number of factors in the real world that differentiate strongly by income inequality.

There are a lot of very serious concerns about increasing inequality and decreased opportunity for social mobility in the US. And if I was looking for domains to worry about it, Facebook and Myspace would be somewhere near dead last.

You probably know this already, but the Pew data set has socioeconomic information:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Teens_Privacy_SNS_Report_Final.pdf

They don't have the psychographic categories that you're talking about, but they do have household income, education level of parents, race and ethnicity, and age.

Like other folks commenting, I would be watching out for change. The demographics of Facebook changed rapidly when they opened it up. They are likely to change further with new applications. Maybe developers will add apps to Facebook that have more media and decoration features, so kids who want music and more pictures will be able to have those things on Facebook. Without more research, it's hard to say how much of the relative preferences have to do with overall visual style, vs. features, vs. preferential attachment. Not to mention, sns's are the subject of fashion, like physical clubs. What is considered "cool" will change in different social groups, too.

I don't see an increased concern about the creation of a caste system. People group themselves, that is nothing new. A person will go where their friends and perceived peers are. We're talking about MySpace vs. Facebook, so digital divide access issues are factored out. The percent of teens who have sns profiles are the same across broad family income categories (over and under $50K family income).

Free social network services have much less built-in stratification than: selective colleges; the ability to pay for higher education or private education; racial profiling in shopping areas and on the street; clothing; transportation; neighborhood safety... any number of factors in the real world that differentiate strongly by income inequality.

There are a lot of very serious concerns about increasing inequality and decreased opportunity for social mobility in the US. And if I was looking for domains to worry about it, Facebook and Myspace would be somewhere near dead last.

Fantastic essay--even if it is just an articulation of thoughts and observations made thus far. When/if this essay grows into a book (or part of a book), I would absolutley buy it.

While you include contextualizing factors and disclaimers when necessary, I think it would be worth mentioning and even investigating whether or not Fox's buying Myspace had anything to do with some of the "hegemonic teens" leaving/neglecting Myspace or not getting an account all together. It certainly explains the increased commercialization of the site (music videos, film trailers, themed page backgrounds on the login main page).

Myspace was purchased in 2005 and I remember web discussion boards across the net flooded with rants and rumours about it. They better not make us pay a fee! (for instance). I got a myspace account in 2004 and remember a kind of "haha, I had a myspace before they were bought" feeling.

Most of my college friends are on Facebook and many of them have Myspace accounts too--which they update less frequently.

The only reason why I got a facebook account (at the beginning of 2007) was because it was essentially the only reliable way to keep in touch with one specific college friend.

Greg's comments (posted June 24 @ 18:28) are right-on as well.

Interesting thoughts, although I am not sure that you are seeing what will really form a long term pattern. You comment yourself about the different origins of the sites, and a lot of the patterns that you see will stem, at least partly, from this rather than from some fundamental class divide. However, I am not sure that this is really the most significant problem you will have with this study.

More important is the fact that the web moves so fast that one, or both, of these websites will probably be old hat quite soon: as soon as something new comes along. Things are still quite compartmentalised. Yahoo, google, youtube, myspace, bebo, facebook, personal blogs and countless other things overlap in one way or another. Whoever is most successful at bringing things together - video, photo, blog, networks, applications etc etc will lead the pack and people will quite readily switch their allegiance. Especially if they offer consolidation of relict content at your old favourite site.

So, if you want to study class and the internet, how about asking whether there is ever time for the class structure to truly establish itself on the internet before things move on. Does the internet form the ultimate classless society? Does it facilitate social climbing? Are you essentially anonymous on the internet?

One last thing that I would say is that class is not the same as being a dropout or an emo kid or a jock. These are more like networks than class divisions because you choose to join them. Unfortunately, and this is why people are embarassed to talk about class, your class is defined by everyone apart from yourself. This is why class mobility is so difficult. Of course, class alone would be a fascinating topic for study in this day and age. The definition of class used to be far clearer, yet despite the fact that it has become murkier and murkier it still survives. Why/how/who?

Lots of stuff to be going on with I think!

I find that, though your article is interesting, it is incomplete. It takes into account only a very small portion of the topic, choosing to eschew factors for joining one site over another that are not class related. This may have made your article watery and making the focus on class nearly immpossible.
There is a large number of users who are on both Facebook and Myspace and your article did no research on these users. It might have helped to ask the users who were interviewed why they joined either site in the first place; this may have cleared up any gray areas about relationships between class and site usage.
An earlier commenter mentioned the "glitziness" of Myspace as opposed to Facebook, and this has drawn, in my experience, many users to use both, or to mostly abandon Facebook. Myspace has appeal because it is customizable, and Facebook now recognizes this by allowing music, picture wall comments and downloadable programs to customize your page. You simply can not change the "face" of your Facebook like you can on Myspace.
It was also mentioned above that Facebook caters to the longevity of established networks while Myspace offers the opportunity to MAKE social networks. It is open to all users and designed to make it easy to search for users sharing common interests, locale, or age groups and befriend them. Facebook, however, shuts members out if they are not connected to these groups, and, as far as I have learned, you can only be a member of two networks. I may be wrong on this, but I had to delete my college network from my profile so I could join my city's network, thus allowing me to communicate with others in my city, not just my college.
I think that this is a thoughful report, and I hope that you may consider including more factors in the future.

This might seem like a simple comment, but I believe its something absolutely left out of the article, issues of privacy. On Facebook, users have significantly more control over privacy. In fact, they can make themselves unsearchable by different categories of people, they can control the privacy of almost each and every line on their profile which makes it attractive to those who are interested in guarding their information but actively participating in social networking forums. Myspace has fewer privacy control features which makes it less attractive to those concerned with privacy. Another simple factor which can explain the choice, whichever a person is introduced to first. Maybe someone simply didn't hear about Myspace? Or didn't hear about Facebook?

The symbolism and analysis in the article are great, but sometimes I believe that academics [even those stressing that their papers are non-academic, but writing using academic terminology e.g. valence, theory, etc...features of a sociological essay] have a tendancy to ignore more obvious factors seeking only to emphasize nuance and their unique viewpoint. This runs the danger of ignoring more obvious points (which don't lose their explanatory value simply for being conspicuous!)

i think your article is interesting but that you really don't account for certain factors and you generalize about a lot of factors that you don't back up with statistics. for facebook you used to have to have been attached to a college or university to sign up. you don't anymore. also, when i was in college myspace became the rage. younger people today in 2007 often gravitate towards facebook. however, a lot of my friends and i prefer myspace and refuse to sign up for facebook. we view facebook as something for the younger generation. i should add that i am 27, graduated from uc san diego and have an mba from uc davis. i know i am not the exception because the majority of my friends have attended university and many are on myspace but not facebook. i'm sorry but, really i don't think it the fragmentation has much to do with socio economic class. i think that some young people prefer myspace because it is more familiar and all their friends are on it and they like the features. and i believe that some young people like facebook because of the creative features (for example people know every time you change your profile or status). keep in mind that many teens will also have BOTH a myspace and a facebook profile. i was an ethnic studies major and i see plenty of university educated whites and asians on both facebook and myspace. as i said, many of me and my friends prefer myspace and we are all have university degrees. please do more research before making potentially damaging generalizations.

this was an amazing article. i just hope that you can find actual figures to support your arguments. since there isn't much material on the source to begin with, that task would be very hard.

as a soon-to-be college student with a myspace account that i have weaned myself off of to develop my facebook. i find facebook more appealing for the exact reasons you mentioned, and entirely agree with everything you wrote here. i also liked the way you begrudgingly used generalizations. i realize that using them is harmful to fair perception, but they need to be used when addressing a population.

how did you end up studying and interviewing the facebook and myspace community?

this was an amazing article. i just hope that you can find actual figures to support your arguments. since there isn't much material on the source to begin with, that task would be very hard.

as a soon-to-be college student with a myspace account that i have weaned myself off of to develop my facebook. i find facebook more appealing for the exact reasons you mentioned, and entirely agree with everything you wrote here. i also liked the way you begrudgingly used generalizations. i realize that using them is harmful to fair perception, but they need to be used when addressing a population.

how did you end up studying and interviewing the facebook and myspace community?

By definition the future "hegemonic" class of the United States has always come from our colleges and the officer classes of the military. Given the origins at Yale (oops Harvard), the initial limitation to .edu, and the later limitation to invitees from .edu to college-bound high schoolers, there would have been an enormous selection bias embedded in who could actually get into facebook. Even with a later removal of such limitations, there would be an embedded 'tradition' from the legacy membership.

I'm a bit old for facebook, but I have had a MySpace account for over a year. MySpace is purely and simply a commercial endeavour. It is trashy, flashy, and as subtle as a neon lit strip in Las Vegas, Hong Kong, or Shanghai. It is designed to attract, engage, and sell. The fact that it provides social networking capability is almost coincidental. That is not intended as a criticism, but as an observation. Once again there is an element of self-selection involved. A person engages with MySpace to 'interact'. I find the idea of adding musicians, authors, and entertainers as 'friends' to be somewhat pointless. That said, it would appear that a great many MySpace inhabitants feel differently. The idea of building a massive network of 'friends' to impress others is also foreign to me, but not to others. People who are interested in building these networks, interacting in these ways, and showing off their connections and networks will be attracted to MySpace.

Overall, my initial assessment of the social layering you detect in facebook and MySpace is that it results from inherent selection biases, both initial and systemic. Facebook by intent was built upon the future leaders of the U.S., i.e. college students and the college-bound, and the people they chose (choose?) to invite into facebook. MySpace is promiscuous (technical, not sexual definition), commercial, and targets 'consumers'.

If you visited a college, and then visited DisneyWorld, and did a comparison of the people you met in each place, you might find the same sort of social stratification that you find in facebook and MySpace.

Hi Danah --

You've got a lot to say, and you do great analysis, and for the most part, you express yourself very well.

A good move for you, though, since you're an academician and a writer, would be to take a course on writing. Yes, I understand this wasn't a serious piece of academic research, and that it's more of a thoughtful informal essay. But for something as widely read is this piece is, a little more polish would have been a good thing.

A good place to start would be by keeping the term "hopefully" out of all your written communications. We all say it when we're speaking, but in written English at any level, it's bad news. It doesn't mean the same thing as "I hope," although people seem to think it does.

Your description of MySpace kids as "art fags" and queer kids is deeply offensive. I not that you didn't sau niggahs or kike kids however. A little typical jap slant. Grow up and read a book.

Just wanted to say, great essay! I go to a high school of MySpacers, and I'm in an orchestra of FaceBookers(?), and your observations confirmed many subconscious suspicions I've had about differences in the two groups. Also, thanks for keepin' it real, as it were, by using imagery more people can identify with rather than hard facts and figures that would be less informative on this subject.