Social Websites Expose Class Divide
Bobbie Johnson, Technology correspondent
Monday June 25, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Social networking websites are increasingly splitting along class lines, according to one prominent academic.
In recent years networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have seen remarkable growth and become some of the most popular destinations on the internet. But Danah Boyd, a researcher at the University of California and internet sociologist, said populations of different networks were now divided on a rough class basis.
Her evidence, collected through a series of interviews with US teenagers using MySpace and Facebook over the past nine months, showed there was a clear gap between the populations of each site.
Article continues"MySpace was the cool thing for high school teens and Facebook was the cool thing for college students," she wrote in a paper available online. "The picture is now being blurred ... it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class."
Typical Facebook users, she said, "tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are primarily white, but not exclusively." MySpace, on the other hand, "is still home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens" as well as "other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm".
MySpace, which was founded in 2003 and bought by Rupert Murdoch two years later for $580m (£290), has enjoyed huge success, particularly among young music fans, and recently became the most visited site on the web.
But in recent months Facebook, created by the college student Mark Zuckerberg, has started gaining ground on its major rival. Figures released last month suggested it had more than 3.5 million users in Britain alone.
A number of high-profile individuals, including Prince William, have joined the service, and established companies have approached Mr Zuckerberg about buying Facebook. The dotcom pioneer Yahoo! is reputed to have offered $1.6bn for the company last year.
The class difference between the two websites could lie in their origins. Mr Zuckerberg started his service while studying at Harvard and until late last year membership was limited to university students and individuals with an email address from an academic institution. This, said Ms Boyd, had given the site higher value among aspirational teens.
In the paper she also conjectured that a recent decision by the US military to ban service personnel from using sites including MySpace showed evidence of social fissures in the forces.
"A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there's a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook."
According to Ms Boyd, Facebook is not used by young soldiers, who are generally less well-educated and from poorer backgrounds, and there is an element of social conflict in the ban.
"The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. I can't help but wonder if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in the military are leaking information or spending too much time online or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage."
