MySpace vs. Facebook
I have been following a discussion around a PhD student's study (complete study) on the perceived class divisions between MySpace and Facebook users. The study's developer is PhD student Danah Boyd from the School of Information Sciences at UC Berkeley.
Language from the BBC's website (full story) and interview with Boyd:
Broadly, Ms Boyd found Facebook users tend to be white and come from families who are keen for children to get the most out of school and go on to college.
Characterising Facebook users she said: "They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities."
By contrast, the average MySpace teenager tends to come from families where parents did not go to college, she said.
Ms Boyd also found far more teens from immigrant, Latino and Hispanic families on MySpace as well as many others who are not part of the "dominant high school popularity paradigm".
Wow. Is it true? Has cyber-space become a reflection of our socioeconomic class system? If so, how do libraries respond to this?
posted by Todd at 9:58 AM
1 Comments:
Being a person who has used both MySpace and Facebook, the aspect of educational differences doesn't surprise me--probably because Facebook was initially designed for college students while MySpace has always been open to anyone.
I think our economy is designed so that *everything* in our lives reflects socioeconomic status, and that certainly extends to our cyber-lives. Libraries can respond to this in the way we always have: persistence in providing every patron with the same quality of service as the next, whether they come to us to check out a good book, or the MySpace scene.
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