in her essay “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” a few months ago, danah boyd offered her observations on the dichotomy she was seeing emerge in user-demographic trends on myspace/facebook. a dichotomy that involves such ethnographic aspects as lifestyle, heritage, even aesthetics, for instance.
MySpace became popular through the bands and fans dynamic before the predator panic kicked in. Its popularity on the coasts and in the cities predated Facebook’s launch in high schools.
MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.
The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.
Many hegemonic teens are still using MySpace because of their connections to participants who joined in the early days, yet they too are switching and tend to maintain accounts on both. For the hegemonic teens in the midwest, there wasn’t a MySpace to switch from so the “switch” is happening much faster. None of the teens are really switching from Facebook to MySpace, although there are some hegemonic teens who choose to check out MySpace to see what happens there even though their friends are mostly on Facebook.
Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.”
today it occurred to me that this pattern sure seems to mimic the whole urban flight phenomenon that happened in the US after ww2, when the newly invented “suburb” was touted as the sophisticated refuge from the overcrowded, unsanitary, dangerous unwashed masses of the city. interestingly, this phenomenon also happens to be known as “white flight.”
from wikipedia:
White flight is a term for the demographic trend where working- and middle-class white people move away from increasingly racial-minority inner-city neighborhoods to white suburbs and exurbs. The phenomenon was first named in the United States, but has occurred in other countries as well.
without time to go into a whole history of urban anthropology (urban decay, levittown, etc.), it still makes for interesting food for thought.
extending the analogy, it makes you wonder what the online social network version of gentrification might someday look like.
