American class divisions through MySpace and Facebook

Source: Danah.org

Date: June 24, 2007

Author: Danah Boyd

70-80% of teens have a profile; the percentage who are truly active is more like 50.

• Hegemonic teens are the good kids, in fact white kids doing bad things.
• Subaltern teens are all the others communities.

Facebook was primarily made for college students but now you can find college students and also high school students who are planning to join a college.

Danah Boyd also points out that the “good” kids are shifting to Facebook because its design style is cleaner, more “fashion”.

I think that internet will re-create networks and areas for specific cultural classes. Indian networks are driven by casts, the society works around separated communities in the real life and it will do so on internet. Internet had to be a free space where differences are cleaned up but finally the human nature and the real life come back quickly.

I bet that if you create 100 new network sites they will all be populated by a specific community: Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, …

The fact is, we had only one network site for teen: MySpace and at the beginning everyone enjoyed it. But now it’s time to provide specific portals to specific communities and not only for teens.

I’m not so surprised that the hegemonic teens have been the first to be separated, they always have been. You are part of the “cool” guys or you are not, and it’s not only the case in US.

It’s very interesting to see so much people moving from one service to another. I suspect it will be the same among each new social network creation.

Danah said that “Social networks are strongly connected to geography, race, and religion; these are also huge factors in lifestyle divisions and thus "class."”. For me the next splitting will be geographical, in fact Europe is more and more on MySpace and Facebook and even if MySpace is creating a MySpace.FR, I’m pretty sure that the French community would prefer his own web site.

In my case, I haven’t found a SNS which fits. Maybe I’ll create it 

Anyway, we are not talking about class divisions but community divisions.