Letters to the Editor
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My God, What Nonsense!
Having buzzed around Facebook, and been a member of MySpace since 2005, I can confidently state that the former is made up of snobs and the latter is made up almost entirely of creative, talented and sometimes simply amazing individuals and groups. There's a reason that MySpace is approaching 200 million members, and it's not teenagers swapping MP3 files and "pimpin'" their pages. It's because MySpace, unlike Facebook or, God help us, Friendster, offers the tools one needs to create a home page that expresses one's creative essence, to share music, video, photographs, artwork, and writing both literary and journalistic, with an enormous community of like-minded, like-talented people.
Facebook can't and probably won't touch that any time soon. Add to this the fact that MySpace is manifestly easier to use and, like Google, is constantly adding new features and improving old ones, and the idea that Facebook is superior and/or will "overtake" MySpace is, again, nonsense.
The friends list of my MySpace page is filled with genuine artists, working musicians, outstanding comedians, talented (and working) filmmakers and just plain friends. It is, in effect, my cyber-shingle, how people can get to know my talents, skills and beliefs. I can't imagine bothering with the insular world of Facebook.
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My Space are more interesting.
I have been to both just to browse. I have never actually became a part of either. I am a middle-aged woman with a graduate degee, and I find that My Space is much more interesting. I like the flashy visuals. I like the odd to-hell-with-convention people. However, maybe there is a class divide. I was born working class and have a working class soul. I hate snobs and people with presumptions of class and power. I guess that makes me snobbish in my own rebellious way. To me, most of the creativity in this country is flowing upward rather than downward. The Olsen twins wouldn't know how to get dressed if it weren't for street life.
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huh
I think that’s a division that might fall down a little once you leave America – unlike the ubiquitous Myspace, Facebook isn’t really internationally well-known. I don’t even know anyone who has one. Everyone I know has a Myspace (if they've got one at all), whether they’re my high school/university friends or my family and primary school/neighbourhood friends.
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What is class?
What is surprising about this thesis--I need to read the full article to find out if this is what she's really saying--is its unusual notion of class, one that's more cultural than economic. For boyd, class isn't about your income and prospects in life but rather about your tastes, preferences, and lifestyle choices.
Are "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" really from different socioeconomic classes and from the preps who supposedly use Facebook? Apart from Latino/Hispanic teens, aren't "punks, emos, goths" often from the very same socioeconomic class as their friends on Facebook, only part of different lifestyle groups?
I don't think these cultural distinctions--say, the difference between a goth and a prep, both of whom attend Harvard--are very interesting in their own right--it's quite natural that different social-networking sites would cater to different segments of the market. I would be much more interested to see how your income and prospects in life correlate with social networks. After all, that's part of what wealth affords you: a good network. Whatever turns out to be the case, I'd say we should take care of class differences (the socioeconomic ones), and the social networking sites will take care of themselves.
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I mean My Space is more interesting.
If I go on like this I will be saying "children is learning." :0
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Facebook should've stayed college students-only
Call me a snob, but Facebook was so much better before it was opened to the general public. Facebook has a clean, organized interface, and it was populated by people who generally met some minimum standard of intelligence. In contrast, MySpace seems to be populated by 13-year old girls and perverts trawling for them. MySpace reminds me of Geocities circa 1998: every page has horrible illegible fonts, retina-burning color schemes, and some loud obnoxious mp3 blaring on the page.
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@Lee who said: "After all, that's part of what wealth affords you: a good network."
I suppose that depends upon how you define "good," doesn't it? Are you using the term network as the sort of place that gets you a well-paying corporate or professional job?
For others a good network might just be like-mined folks who like the same music.
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Connecting within your college
class divisions crop up even when there are no physical barriers to integration, that freedom to associate with whomever you want online doesn't liberate you from the psychological limits of association bred into you offline
Facebook has been open to the public for less than a year. When Facebook started, you needed a .edu e-mail address to register. It was exclusively for college students. Even when they began to open the site to more schools, at first, you could only join groups within your own college network. You can still only see profiles of people from your college, unless someone adds you as a friend. So there were, in fact, "barriers to integration" for most of the time that Facebook existed.
I will always consider facebook a site for college students. Even the name refers to a student facebook. They have tried to make it "for everyone" and to add more features in order to catch up to sites like myspace, but it started out as a way to connect with other people at your own college.
When it started, Facebook was a way to share photos and groups with friends at your school, and you could feel safe knowing that only other students at your university could see it. Your profile was open to strangers, but only strangers at your school. It seemed like an ideal compromise. You could meet friends and get dates by allowing strangers to see your profile, but your parents and your employer would never see it. That's why college students joined facebook, and that's why they continue to dominate Facebook demographics.
I'm sure their are other examples of class based communities online, but considering the origins of Facebook, it's a bit ridiculous to paint the Facebook / MySpace divide as an example of people choosing to associate with people within their own social class. If networking within your college means that you are elitist or classist, then I don't see how joining Facebook is much different than actually going to college or joining an alumni network.