Facebook and MySpace class distinctions
danah boyd recently wrote an interesting article on “viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” She points out that class divisions have emerged and are being played out through aesthetics in Facebook and MySpace. I think this is one of the most interesting points in the article because I tend to “judge” the quality of social networking sites and the people on them just based on the looks of the site. I prefer Facebook and LinkedIn over MySpace and Hyves because of their clean aesthetic looks. The extremely messy look of MySpace and Hyves and it’s abundant use of smileys and animated gifs make the sites look “cheap and unprofessional” to me. I tend to see Facebook and Linked as professional sites because of their clean, elegant and crisp looks.
Do you also judge sites by their looks? Do aesthetics influence your choice in joining a social networking site?
I definitely judge websites by their appearances! But for the MySpace vs. Facebook debate, my preference for Facebook has just as much, if not more, to do with functionality.
MySpace is so aggravatingly klugey I can barely touch it without getting annoyed–but Facebook is a pleasure to use.
But I guess I can see why teens might be more concerned with where their social group is and the reflection of their self-identity than with performance. Did that sound really condescending? I’m sure there are Facebook-loving teenagers who like it for the usability too.
But what I’m saying is this: I was probably one of the less “socially obsessed” teenagers in my high school (or at least I like to think so), but I joined the German Club, even though I took Spanish and couldn’t speak a lick of German. I never joined the Spanish Club. Why? My best friend was in the German Club and I didn’t like any of my Spanish classmates.
I think identification is definitely an issue. You identified with your friend instead of with your Spanish classmates. This issue of identification might take even bigger forms as Tony Hung from Deep Jive Interests points out in “Will The “Danah” Report Be The Kiss of Death To MySpace’s Valuation?” Does Yahoo want to identify itself with the MySpace outcast?
Ah but your aesthetic judgement is in turn at least partly shaped by class (see Bourdieu).
dailykos had a piece up on democrats being mac users and republicans pc. people get very touchy about these things judging by the comments to that article.
@anne surely the danah report isn’t telling myspace and facebook anything they don’t already know. their whole existence is built on knowing what, if not who, their users are.
I haven’t read the report but can’t imagine that this is much of a surprise, given that facebook was for college-kids only for so long (and didn’t myspace grow so fast because of its association with alternative music?).
The interesting thing that while this all seems “obvious” and isn’t “new” knowledge it is currently one of the biggest threads in the blogosphere. On top of that some of the comments danah boyd has received are far from “friendly” to say the least.
I think it’s interesting to see that something that we take for granted is spreading like it is the newest all-revealing meme.