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American Class Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace
Jamie found this paper earlier about American Class Divisions and Facebook and MySpace. The paper talks about the history of the two sites, what groups tend to use what site. They also talk about what proponents of each site think of the other. It's actually an interesting read and worth your time.
As my signature would indicate, I actually prefer Care2 over MySpace and Facebook. Care2 is a social networking site that caters to socially aware causes and who's users actually want to try and make some sort of impact in the world. Even at 7 million members, it's amazing to me how few of my type (the geeks) are aware of the site. Neither MySpace or Facebook really have much "purpose" to them (well, MySpace users may claim that it caters to bands, but the connection to me is pretty shallow). Facebook doesn't really have any "purpose" either. Not that there's anything wrong with that - just that I figure if I'm going to be part of a social network, why not be part of the one that aims for something respectable?
A community-oriented lyrics site
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
If it wasn't for Taco I wouldn't know what was worth my time and what wasn't
And Myspace contained all the rest right?
That wasn't too hard was it.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
I don't quite agree with the premise of class divisions through web sites. The difference between signing up for either is whose registration forms one uses. Socio-economic class divisions are most certainly harder to jump across than just using a web site. And, on the internet, what's to stop someone from being a member of both Myspace and Facebook?
/. differ from Something Awful which differ from Newgrounds which differ from Myspace and so on and so on.
IANAS (I Am Not A Sociologist), but I think the might mean cultural divisions. Posts to, say,
Is it because the community that forms around the site, which was ultimately created targeted at a demographic?
More Twoson than Cupertino
Most Myspace users are illiterate and lower class.
Most Facebook users are educated and middle class.
I was just telling my sister yesterday: "Facebook is Myspace for people who actually graduated high school."
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Formalise "The old boy network". The purpose is to use contacts to improve employment and earning prospects.
Deleted
The spelling and grammar in the paper is very poor. I can't take any of the fact finding seriously when the spelling and grammar is that bad.
If the author wants anyone to take her work seriously, she REALLY needs to avoid sentences like "It's so not that easy."
After reading that nugget, my interest in the topic waned almost instantly.
"She (Nalini Kotamraju) argues that class divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than with income. In other words, all of my anti-capitalist college friends who work in cafes and read Engels are not working class just because they make $14K a year and have no benefits. Class divisions in the United States have more to do with social networks (the real ones, not FB/MS), social capital, cultural capital, and attitudes than income." -- There is something to this where people decide to put their income and in what circles they run effect greatly their perceived class. This is not just a matter of being frugal but a matter of using money as a tool and the difference between how you use that tool. I have friends who make 50K who own a boat, two cars, a motorcycle, and their home. They are also constantly in trouble with their debt. If one did not know them and looked at them they would see upper middle class family. even though they are on the cusp of losing everything. I have another set of friends who make less than 20K who rent an appt but have been steadily building assets and paying off student debt, one looking from the outside would see them as being impoverished but in reality they are living sustainability have a ton of time together and live a very rich life (though no boat). When a scientist, especially a social scientist, trys to say this is what class is they are going to be wrong (just as I would be wrong) because being a mamber of a class can relate to any aspect of our being. I am a white male (that puts me in a class), I make $Salary that puts me in a class, I own a home, I am in a mixed race relationship, I have two kids, I take the bus to work, I'm 30, ... All of these things put me in a box and some of those boxes conflict with others...
"MySpace is still home for 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. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers."
I think this is indicative of those who were "tech savvy" as much as having social issues. Myspace was a runoff of all the rating sites, minus the ratings. When the "misfits" found something to not be judged by, it became very popular.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
"eager sociologists" and their colleagues have somehow gained the stature in society that permits them to make wide generalizations and un-methodological extrapolations about their social surroundings. This sort of report reminds me of exactly the sort of thing a bunch of stoned college youths would discuss while slouching on their living-room couch, which, if you permit my own generalization, this "experienced ethnographer" probably is. While her wordy explanations and liberal use of the word 'kinda' are certainly appreciated, I really can't see any compelling evidence that myspace and facebook are the symbols of American class division (even though I have seen enough anecdotal evidence myself to agree).
I never understood the whole appeal of MySpace, other than it's a free blogging site. I also have the same feeling. I had an account once, but if felt more like a place for kids to have fun, than an adult. It was more geared toward "Would you ever kiss X, Y, Z" rather than topics more adult oriented like politics, technology, etc.
They both seem to fit a niche, so more power to them both. Just not my cup of tea.
Beatles vs Stones.
/. poll ]
or...
[ insert recent
New generation, new divide, I guess.
It's actually an interesting read and worth your time.
Only if you're into Social Networking sites. If you're like me and you aren't, the article is just as worthless as the SNSs themselves.
But because I did take your advice and read the article, here's one little bit that summed it all up for me:
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. Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it's not the SNS of choice for 18-year old soldiers, a group that is primarily from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace.
If Facebook is "extremely popular" then it would be used by the "grunts" and not just the officers as the author claims is how it really works in the military. While I personally believe that anyone who uses MySpace is generally a fucking retard that doesn't mean that the "unwashed masses" use only MySpace. I know plenty of intellectuals that love hiding their dirty little MySpace secret.
Don't bother believing the blurb that it's worth a read. It really isn't. This "article" is nothing more than an attempt to push their political slant/POV. They seriously could have left out the non-sense about the Walmart Nation, etc as it has absolutely nothing to do w/the rest of the article.
-1 Political Troll
Up until recently Facebook only allowed people with .edu emails to sign up. Then, they added corporations. Only relatively recently did they add the ability for anyone to sign up, and use geographical "networks", etc.
Anyways, its fairly obvious comparing the two sites that one is oriented towards people who are more mature. The site is, for the most part, very structured. There are profile fields, and unless you get into the seedy underbelly of groups, its hard to get any kind of ridiculous "self expression" on Facebook. MySpace, on the other hand, is highl customizable and lends itself much easier to stupid "rebel conforming non-conformist" teenagers and others who never really grew up.
Its not some evil class division or whatever. duh.
By 3rd I don't mean "lower" or "poor". I mean the 3rd class who doesn't use either or gives a damn about either site.
~Vexed and loving it!
grep hegemonic | wc -l
The essay seemed to suggest that subculture adoption was more influential than socioeconomic status is in determining what sorts of people frequent each site. "Punks goths and queers" typically inhabit myspace according to TA, and so far as I know there isn't any barriers preventing affluent youth from joining ranks with "outcasts". To that end, there certainly isn't anything preventing at-risk youth from aspiring to higher education. Mixing up class with arbitrary clique preferences is a dangerous ground. Besides, do you have any idea how much a pre-torn punk t-shirt costs at the mall?
Class isn't about how much money you make or your ethnicity. Class is all about one's relation to the means of production. If you own a factory, then you exploit labor in order to make a profit--you're a capitalist. If you are forced to sell your labor power for a living, then you're working class. "Middle class" is an invention that tries to segment the upper-income portion of the working class into a separate group and argues that they have different class interests than other working class people--which isn't true (although it doesn't preclude "middle class" people from having false consciousness--holding ideas that they have more in common with the capitalists). All working class people have an interest in a clean environment, safe working conditions, free universal health care, an end to war, equal pay for equal work, better education, jobs, etc... The ruling capitalist class has no interest in those things because their interest is in gaining more profit.
Five paragraphs into this 'article' and it became clear the author needs to rethink college and stay in MySpace.
I'm looking for an anti-social site where members lack friends or interest in socializing with the opposite sex. I'd like a journal in which to exercise my shallow narcissism, a site with a technological bent and anonymity in discussions (a definite plus).
Does anybody know of such a place?
Uhm? I don't understand. Did you use html-tags to illustrate something, because in that case (for someone that is part of the slashdot crowd and knows the difference between html and plaintext), you should use html entities. No, really, they are very nifty to actually display greater than and lower than signs. Try this the following time > for >, and < for <
And as for the "modded naked PC", there is weird stuff out there...
"their lack of interesting in having HS students"
.edu email in years.
Such quality journalism.
Also, let's consider the class of people who were out of college by 2005 vs the class of people who are in college as of 2005.
I haven't had an
My twitter
What if you have both? I have a myspace and a facebook.
Today's Tomorrow is Yesterday's Future! --- "Where Ever You Go, There You Are" -- Diablo 1
That paper does nothing, as others have already said, but tell us there there are social classes among people. It's a typical high school social experiment with the different cliques. The paper does nothing of any value beyond giving a short and over-simplifying explanation/history of MySpace and Facebook.
For real social commentary and study, I would have been more interested to see a multi-year study that showed a group of high school students from all social cliques that tracked usage and content of the personal sites over say 6-8 years to see how far in to life those social cliques extend.
All this article has done is reinforce the fact that people congregate with other people with like interests. So naturally, if I'm a "freak/geek" and all of my friends are "freaks" and "geeks" and they hang out on MySpace then why would I want to hang out on Facebook with a bunch of "jocks" who have dissimilar interests and little in common with me? This is common sense, not a ground breaking social study.
Furthermore, the author continues on to use this "disparity" in common use between several sites to show demographic trends which really don't correlate at all. Especially since the author is trying to use the information and "collected data" to show how different social classes use different websites. This is not really shown at all. There is no basis of evidence that the "freaks and geeks" that use MySpace are in a lower societal class. Nor do they show that Facebook has provided a higher earning and networking potential for uses to validate the claim that they are from a higher social class. The author is using inference falsely to show a class separation with no factual support other than essentially "The people on MySpace are weird and not as "beautiful" as the people on Facebook so they must be poor." It's an asinine argument and if that paper was written for course credit, I hope they didn't get a decent grade. If it was written as a professional document for a publication then "ethnographic research " is either a joke science or someone needs to read articles submitted for publication more carefully.
I feel dumber for wading through that article and I honestly want those 10 minutes of my life back.
I thought I'd have something cogent to say about Myspace vs. Facebook and sociology, but really all I can come up with is that I like the design of Facebook much better. It seem like someone actually sat down and planned out the user experience. Its an Application. Myspace seems like a pile of crappy HTML mated with a music player and produced a million offspring, each subtly different. Myspace is a glorified homepage, much like the geocities homepages of days gone by. Homeplages Plus spam! That being said, as with Instant Messengers, I have accounts on each because I have friends on each. My friendships respect no class or social netowrking site boundaries.
Teenagers divide into cliques and label themselves and each other, even online! Film at 11.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
..and I can't imagine that it's worth my time to do so.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
I'm pre-Web 2.0, so I really don't know the answer to this one.
Does every high school and college student use MySpace or FaceBook these days? Sure, there's probably some Luddites out there, but is the penetration in the 90+% range?
Has it really become that huge a phenomenon? I've seen some goofy MySpace pages, but didn't realize that _everyone_ had one.
Stuff like this really makes me feel like an old fogey. Don't people realize that no one cares what you ate today, who your friends are, or what kind of car you drive?
The author posted this paper to a mailing list yesterday, here is what she said:
. html "
"I've been trying to write an essay for a while about the class
dynamics around Facebook and MySpace. I finally gave up and realized
that I didn't have the proper words for talking about this issue so I
wrote an essay with caveats. I offer it to you to tear to shreds in
the hopes that maybe some good can come out of it. (I didn't include
the full text here because it's long - i hope the link doesn't
discourage folks from checking it out.) Feedback is *very* welcome.
Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions
( can't you illiterate 'Mericans get your geography correct?)
courtesy of the actions of your Military-Industrial-CONGRESSIONAL Complex.
Sincerely,
Kilgore Trout
I find Facebook to be a much simpler interface both to use and to understand once you get past the gated-community-esque security.
MySpace, to me, feels like Geocities with marginally better hosting capabilities and a wall to post on. The fact that it's being marketed as a 'social network' seems trite when all it's really doing is focusing on the lowest common denominator. Admittedly, I'm sure it's that part that's scaring people, but only because the internet has a much lower barrier to access than it used to back when places like Tripod and Geocities were king.
I suck at grammar, syntax, and sometimes punctuation. So when I notice just how shitty a job someone has done on all three, we've got a problem. Of course there is always the possibility that this just looks like it was written by a ninth grader.
"They've got plenty of purpose..."
I've yet to see this so-called purpose defined, outside of some abstract "all my friends use it" comment. Use it for what? Out of all the "friends" I've had that have pointed me to their myspace, etc. page, none of them have had a defined "purpose". The one's I've visited have left me with a who-cares attitude (and a vague deja-vu experience relating to geocities hosted websites from the 90s).
American Intelligence Divisions Through Facebook and MySpace
MySpace started out as a place for people to put up their band music/stuff. You can be on MySpace and achieve some kind of useful outcome without having a zillion 'friends'.
FaceBook, on the other hand, is pointless without a group of 'friends'. The only people on FaceBook are those who want to network. My daughter, for instance, has to be on FaceBook or miss out on all her friends' group activities. None of them phone each other to go out to the pub anymore.
The question that the study seems to raise is about which people network more.
From TFA: I have analyzed over 10,000 MySpace profiles, clocked over 2000 hours surfing and observing what happens on MySpace, and formally interviewed 90 teens in 7 states with a variety of different backgrounds and demographics. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. I ride buses to observe teens; I hang out at fast food joints and malls. I talk to parents, teachers, marketers, politicians, pastors, and technology creators. I read, I observe, I document. Ok, that's worth something, but it's not enough to substantiate the claims (90 teens = high margin of error). According to her website, she's a PhD candidate -- hopefully she has better evidence for her thesis.
I know it's common practice here for the moderators to pimp up the story, and the crowd tear it apart bit-by-bit. I guess something about thinking that you're smart leads people to be overly critical, but I digress.
I found the article interesting in that it was an insight into a world I really just don't have time to study -- tweeny and college-kid social sites. It does appear from the anecdotes that the sites are experiencing some kind of market segmentation, but I found the writer limited by her own concepts of what the market segments should be.
So instead of analysis we kind of meander around, with her explaining her observations and fears and how all muddled it probably is and what a poor job she is going to do imposing a class structure onto American society. The reason this is true is somewhat obvious -- there are real market-led forces at work here. FaceBook has an image of being for older, better-off kids, partly because of it's roots as a college application. MySpace is more pedestrian.
And that's why the piece falls apart: the writer simply does not have the appropriate tools to be talking about her subject. Market segmentation is a mature field, and you could draw all sorts of parallels and lessons-learned. Instead, she seems (to me) to be mired into psycho-babble and fuzzy-headed sweeping generalizations about our society which are ill-supported.
I did find it very interesting, though.
This is a whole bunch of speculation and personal value divisions presented as if it were a research paper. The problem is, there's no actual research. No data, no information, just a bunch of semi-large words used semi-correctly. The author makes a quick handwaving about how difficult it is to discuss class in America, but actual academics don't have nearly the problem with it that the author does; perhaps the reason the author finds it so difficult to use their data in an academic fashion is not so much about the difficulty of the topic as because the data was never taken in the first place .
This paper basically says "white rich kids who want to get into college go to FaceBook because they heard MySpace was dangerous, that FaceBook's college social networking was valuable and because they're tired of the gaudy graphics in use there." I'll wait for the book - maybe there'll be something other than guesswork and one writer's nasty stereotypes there. Y'know, like actual evidence.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Saying Facebook/MySpace have no purpose is kinda like saying e-mail has no purpose. You could similarly argue that the postal system or the telephone system has no purpose.
I'm not so quick to agree that Care2 is automatically respectable just because it links to a bunch of political stories and has petitions and fundraisers. A MySpace user can still contribute to the world by giving blood, recycling, participating in local events. A lot of people do these things, and they don't need to write about it on the web. They deserve as much respect as anybody on Care2.
What was once a geekdom, turned into NYT gossip column.
Social networking sites have a life cycle, like nightclubs. They open, they get some cool people, if they're successful they get more cool people and become the place to go, they get greedy and let too many people in, they become uncool and fall out of favor, they limp along in obscurity for quite a while, and finally they close. Formerly-cool social networking sites include AOL, the Well, Geocities, EZboard, Nerve, Tribe, and Friendster. Myspace hasn't grown in a year, and Facebook is still on the way up. See the relevant Alexa traffic ratings.
As the article points out, the early adopters tend to be in the 20-30 age range, and over time, usage of sites filters down to college and then high school students. The article points out that this happened for Myspace and is happening to Facebook. But they see this as a "class" thing, not a life-cycle thing, because they didn't look at enough sites and their history.
The next generation of social networking will probably be phone-based. Helio, the expensive "don't call it a phone" device with Myspace integration, should have Facebook integration instead. Look for an iPhone-based social networking system.
Somebody is going to do phone-based social networking well and make billions.
If Facebook is "extremely popular" then it would be used by the "grunts" and not just the officers as the author claims I'm trying to find a way to point out what's wrong with your "logic", but I can't seem to think of anything that would reach a mind that would formulate that reply in the first place.
Still... I'll give it a try:
1- The author did NOT claim "just" the grunts. The dyke says the grunts mostly use MySpace instead Facebook.
2- "As the author claims"? Stop implying she's flat out making this up. The chick's got data, dude.
3- It's a study of class division, you can't get more divided than brass and grunts. Why would you assume that the division does not manifest in cyberspace?
etc.
You can't take the sky from me...
Facebook, Myspace, Friendster... they're all the same, but they'll always change. As what is "Cool" changes, people will continue migrate to this week's Big Thing. Kids always think that what they happen to be doing at the time is revolutionary.
I don't respond to AC's.
social networking sites network people into hierarchies
news at 11
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Where do the 30-something-year-old professionals fit into this worldview?
We are too old for Facebook, since we think of that as a hangout for college students.
Be seeing you.
scott
You know, this paper could be extended into many different areas.
As this paper says, class is very hard to define in America - in the United States, class can be more about culture and lifestyle than income or job description.
I'll give you an anecdotal example. I'm a college student, but during summers, I work in factories as a laborer. In the cafeteria, I look more like a supervisor than a laborer. My car is old, but perfectly clean, inside and out. I keep my clothes as clean as the work allows, and my shirts are usually ironed and tucked in, my boots clean, my hard hat clean. Most of the laborers, who are living on a HIGHER wage than I because I'm usually a temp worker, do not. What is important to them is not their aesthetics - especially at work. What is important to them is enjoying their lives. Work is secondary, and not really enjoyable. I'll agree with them on the second part, but where the division is in the importance of work. They have a job, not a career.
This "paper" hits on this. If your work is important to you, you have to follow that work. I haven't read the book by Paul Willis that the paper sums up, but it's true. I am a high school dropout, I planned on joining the military as an enlistee, not as an officer candidate. But his summary is quite correct in my case. I made that "class jump" - I'm not made to do mundane labor 60 hours a week, I have a brain and I need to use it.
Now, when I DO go to my hometown, my old friends are, well, not my friends anymore. They don't understand how I can value paying 250% of my yearly income to go to SCHOOL, how I can spend months preparing for a fifteen minute presentation, much less fathom seven years of training for the ability, not the guarantee of a job. They don't see the point in dedicating oneself fully to the "system" because they think it will stick them in some sort of hierarchy and force them to follow rules. What they unfortunately miss is that the blue collar circle sticks them in an even more restrictive hierarchy. You don't do consulting work as a press operator!
This certainly fits with the division seen between MySpace and Facebook. MySpace allows one to do whatever they want with their page - conventions be damned. Facebook, on the other hand, has a set style and layout (or did. The applications are slowly changing that). But when push comes to shove, the "hierarchy" and layout of Facebook gives users a bit more useful information - try finding someone's AOL s/n on MySpace if you've never seen their page before, and then try the same on Facebook!
Interesting thoughts. But the first part about class not having to do much with income makes little sense to me. Marx operates with a class "in itself" which is a class due to objective indicators (As measured through their relation to the means of procution) and a class "for itself" which is a class that is aware of the fact that it has common interests. Just because the latter does not exist in the US very much at the moment does not mean that the former disappears.
The other part about income groups and lifestyle seems to be taken out of a Weberian analysis -- not really connected to any kind of anti-capitalist theory.
Danah's usage of the word "sticky" and "stickiness" in the first and second paragraph may cause some confusion. I gather she means uncomfortable or 'hard to differentiate' rather than the other meaning of stickiness, which pertains to websites and the amount of time a visitor spends on the site per visit (YouTube is a stickier website than, say, last.fm because visitors spend more time there).
Other than that, great read, and very perceptive.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
I'd read this article, but I think all Facebook users are gossipy snobs. Yes I am in my 20s, yes I like to post random bulletins, and yes I visit MySpace 15-20 times a day.
Someone let me know, was I spot on or what?
The paper makes dozens of claims with absolutely no data substantiating them. No studies, no population surveys, no facts on how people choose to use a networking site, and tries to make a "MySpace is for artistic people, Facebook is for boring people" division case based purely on, apparently, how she classifies her friends.
There are geeks on Myspace? Really?
How can anyone with any appreciation for coding -- or, for that matter, aesthetics in general, at all -- go near MySpace? Every time I go there (and I do this every few months, just to see if it's changed) it's like some circus side-show of bad design.
The whole concept is flawed; the site takes what's inherently repetitive, structured data, and just lets people dump it into tag-soup HTML pages. Facebook's approach is far more elegant, not to mention pleasant to view.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"1- The author did NOT claim "just" the grunts. The dyke says the grunts mostly use MySpace instead Facebook."
OP never claimed the author said that. Are you so fucking stupid that you'd flame someone else and then make such a basic fucking mistake? What OP said was
"If Facebook is "extremely popular" then it would be used by the "grunts" and not just the officers as the author claims"
Which, when translated for stupid people like you means "If Facebook was as popular as the author claims, then grunts would be using it too, instead of Myspace".
That's nothing remotely like your first point, but don't worry, I suspect you're too fucking stupid to grasp the difference.
You're an idiot. Never post again.
Between the childish writing technique, this offered me an insight; America is far more class bound than I thought (far more class bound than the UK).
As a person just leaving sixth form (last two years of "high school") in the UK, it seems to me that the reasons behind using myspace/facebook here in the UK are different. Most people I know, inside or outside of school and work have a myspace. A few people have a Facebook, but that's more to do with being frustrated with the poor design of myspace than social class. I don't see any link in which of my social networks sign up to facebook, except that once one person in a group does, it normally happens en masse. It is true, however, over here that myspace has a strong connection to the music scene (I enjoy the local music scene where I am, but find bands on myspace obnoxious).
Obviously, this is totally anecdotal, but I've moved to and from state, private and public schools (ie, the free kind, the pay for kind, and the pay for kind with the pretentiousness) and so have a mix of contacts from each.
Here we are at two topics that I'm very interested in: The American class system and social networking. The first because of my politics, and my own constantly shifting class background. The second because of my work on Appleseed, an open source social networking web software that uses an open, distributed model.
I have a number of serious issues with this analysis, not the least of which is the idea that social capital is more important than actual capital in determining class relationship. While I grant that social capital is very important, to say that it is more important is to fail to recognize that income and benefits will greatly affect social capital over a lifetime. So, while that $14k a year barrista who reads Engels and hangs out with upper middle class intellectuals may not be working class because they're set to inherit a million dollars from their parents when they're 30, they may just as well be from a trailer park or a rundown city block and simply enjoy reading German anti-capitalist literature. As their life goes on, the experiences they have in relation to the experiences of those who were born middle or upper class will diverge. In many ways, college will become an abheration as the reality of student loans and possibly medical bills and other situations in which non-familial social capital can be pretty useless, sets in.
And as the poster above pointed out, the discussion about class in this greater essay falls into a common trap that, oddly enough, many anti-capitalists fall into, which is the concept of essentialism. That people are defined by simplistic, singular ideas that represent them completely. This is why, in my opinion, bodies of work such as Critical Race Theory have some of the best analysis of the American class system, because it wholesale rejects essentialism as a unified method of categorization.
I also find the lack of analysis of how these walled gardens affect the social relationships to be disappointing. This might even be the best approach to such an essay, since Facebook in many ways represents a "gated community" which has just recently opened to the public. Myspace, for better or worse, represents the seemingly common space, not-so-secretly owned by private interests.
How a distributed, open source social networking system will affect these networks is something that (at this point) can only be hypothesized (given that the Appleseed network is only a few dozen sites at this point), but at some point this will change, and social networking will become like email, interconnecting between servers easily. This allows great potential for sociological and anthropological studies which, I think, will more closely follow society itself.
Or maybe it won't. Maybe it will reflect it's population more than the society they come from. Maybe Myspace and Facebook, with it's privately owned "commons" and it's gated community with education and career requirements (respectively) is more representative of society than a distributed system would be.
Do they correlate with using Emacs and Vi though?
"It's actually an interesting read and worth your time." That's one of those statements that, as soon as they are said, invalidate themselves. I'm sure there's a word for it but I don't know what it is...
If you judge a book by it's cover, you're not righteous enough to receive the teachings within.
You can't take the sky from me...
LinkedIn is a professional networking site. My sister made me join it.
Most of the modded-up comments so far are of the "Nothing new here" meme. These demonstrate the problem of even getting traction on a vocabularly to discuss class issues in America. People tune it out, perhaps think its always been as it is now so why even discuss it. But it hasn't always been this way. The last time such a high proportion of American wealth went to the top 1 percent of the population was just before the Great Depression. America used to have much greater social mobility - the likelihood that a kid from a poor background would become rich and socially respected - than anywhere else. Now America has slipped behind most of Western Europe in social mobility - behind even such more-obviously class-based societies as the British and the French, and way behind where America itself was in the mid-20th century.
This stratification shows up across the culture. But it has not always been here to the extent it is today. Economic historians claim that stratified societies - particularly those where children are locked in to the strata of their parents - are in the longer run neither so stable nor so successful as more egalitarian nations. America's own past success vis a vis Europe is cited as a prime example. If that's the case, we might want to take America back to a more egalitarian version. Back when America was more egalitarian there was a more unified cultural aesthetic - splitting more on generational than class fractures (which is to say, on direction of progress but still assuming that progress belonged to all). Now, if the fine article is accurate (I'm too old to know) there is a distinct split in aesthetic and sensibility, as demonstrated in the SNS's - one which favors acceptance of our new degree of social stratification. If we want to avoid developing a large permanent underclass, we should look at reversing that.
The article makes the useful point that social identification is not tightly linked to income. But the income equation is itself troubling for egalitarians: In the past 40 years the GDP per capita has doubled. Yet in that time the median income has stayed level. We're twice as rich, per person, as a nation. But those on the middle and lower parts of the income curve have seen none of the gain. This isn't to say that being median-income in the '60s was a bad life; nor that it's a bad life now. But it raises a very curious question of who has made off with all that gain in national wealth. And there's a corollary: How have our cultural institutions enabled them, wittingly or not?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
...into thinking you were dead huh?
Your definition of "class" is true. Its 100% true as Karl Marx described it. The only problem is he was wrong. There aren't just two classes. There are 3. His and your refusal to acknowledge that does not make you right. Yes those who own the means of production are the truly wealthy and everyone else works for them. But a "worker" who makes $250,000 a year has very little in common with someone who makes $19,000 a year. Their concerns are as different from each other as a middle class person's is from a deca millionaires. This is why Marx's foretold economic revolutions never took place. There's plenty for the poor to gain by revolting, but the middle class would have a lot to lose and so they declined to join in. Without the middle class participating the revolutions could not take place.
The failure of the old school definiton of class into two systems is that it tries to lump way too many people together under one banner. A doctor/lawyer/engineer/writer/executive who's making anyhere from $250,000 a year up to say $5 million a year lives in an entirely diferrent world from a school teacher/cop/fireman/factory worker/garbage man/retail clerk/fast food worker who makes anywhere from $19,000 to $130,000 a year. The former group lives in a better neighborhood, sends their kids to better schools, enjoys more travel and better vacations, has a much nicer house some with a second home, has substantial savings and a much better retirement plan and can make choices about where to work and who to work for. The bottom half of the latter group is working hard just to scrape out a living and make ends meet. They have few real chocies on what to do with their lives. They don't have adequate healthcare and no buffer of savings in the bank if they lose their job. Their children rarely go on to higher education.
The third group of course are the obviously wealthy. Those who are so rich that from birth they never have to work a day in their lives if they don't want to. This equals at least $15 million in the bank with additional money from investments/interest coming in all the time.
The two groups are not alike. They do not share class interests. They don't eat at the same places, they don't party at the same places and they don't live in the same places. They're extremely different from each other. Those who cling to Marx's distinction of class as being between only 2 parties are bitter, very very bitter, that the middle class actually exists. They want anyone who's not part of the "rich" class to team up together and gang up on the rich and take back whats "rightfully theirs" or some such. If this large nebulous class of "workers" is divided between the "middle class" and the "really poor" than that revolution can't happen. Not while our middle class is as large as it is because it means way too many people are satisified with what they have and know they have far too much to lose if they were to engage in an economy wrecking "revolution."
So to recap, there's an old school definition of class that contains only 2 divisions. Capital owning robber barrons on one side and ALL the people who work for them on the other side. The "modern" definition of economic class has 3 divisions. The capital owning class, the highly educated and highly paid middle class, and the working poor. Good luck with trying to get well educated and well paid middle class folks to consider themselves the same as a high school drop out garbage man or fast food worker. You've got your work cut out for you.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If so, it has a number of proof-reading errors that are rather embarrassing. Most importantly though, it has a serious p.o.v. issue that really renders it somewhat deficient. I prefer to see a little more poise and logical rigor exercised in essays.
Social networking is one of the more powerful concepts in life, both online and in the real world. It's how adults get jobs (ask any professional over 30 and you'll see that the resume process isn't so blind -- it's all about who you know). Myspace and Facebook are starting to redefine social networking ... little is known about how this will impact the more traditional social networking world, but rest assured that it will.
As to their uses today, this is more clear. Facebook is giving evite a run for its money within the under-30 crowd. Its stalker-esque features allow people to research others (I use it to look at potential employees), which often leads to a real-world friendship. Its groups allow people to be politically active -- you can bet Facebook and its peers will be quite important in the 2008 election (hopefully more of an impact than Howard Dean's campaign turned out to be). It even brings some order to YouTube and similar video sites with its "sharing" system (also has more sensible comments rather than the drivel comments on YouTube).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
What a waste of time, money and effort this research has been. Facebook was setup by Uni students FOR Uni students, and continues to mostly cater to this group. Myspace however has catered to anyone and everyone since inception, so of course it will have a lower percentage of people going on to further education after high school! Not much news here methinks...........
As TFA itself alludes to it, though in a way that's not helpful to non-specialists. From TFA:
The treatment of class in American sociology isn't a matter of just income, even in the older, less "critical" work that TFA is probably critical of. Sociologists doing quantitative research routinely use things other than income when they classify people by social class. For example, they often also use education and profession. A construction contractor with no education beyond high school may routinely get classified as "working class," even if he makes more than a Ph.D. in literature who teaches at a community college, who gets classified as middle class. The theory is that their social networks are quite different, and that this will be no less predictive of whatever variables the study is researching than income will be.
(Not a sociologist, but I've hung around plenty of social scientists.)
Are you adequate?
Really, it would be better to do an N-way analysis of variance and derive the most significant divisions within American society (there are many), although that would be well beyond the resources of a project at this level.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
FTFA: ...punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids...
Queer? Doesn't that describe ANYONE that uses MySpace or Facebook?
(And I mean queer as in "loser", not 'gay', even though that's probably what the author meant.)
Seriously, these sites are just narcissistic hug fests for losers. But what can you expect from the "everyone-is-special-touchy-feely" generation that followed the GenXers.
...it was intended for publication in Nature. Although the English could have been improved, the information is ultimately the important part of any project - the presentation is merely the PR, and any geek who puts PR above data is missing some rather important points.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What exactly do you expect us to think of you by saying that?
I certainly will grant one thing: TFA is very short, short on citations, and written in a very informal style, more so than what I expect out of academic work, and depending on the author's purpose and audience (which I don't know, I'll admit), I would suggest rewriting it/editing. But you, dear Coward, you're out of your mind.
Are you adequate?
Sorry, all of this sounds of grandiose buzz-word generating nothingness attached to a glorified web-site generator. We've seen it before with the advent of e-mail, web sites, etc.
... little is known about how this will impact the more traditional social networking world, but rest assured that it will."
"Social networking is one of the more powerful concepts in life, both online and in the real world. It's how adults get jobs (ask any professional over 30 and you'll see that the resume process isn't so blind -- it's all about who you know)."
True, however I think you overstate the importance of the online aspect and how shallow and meaningless it is 99.99% of the time.
"Myspace and Facebook are starting to redefine social networking
Please, this sounds more like an advertisement than truth.
Just like Wikipedia was supposed to be the "holy grail" for knowledge -- we all know how that turned out.
"you can bet Facebook and its peers will be quite important in the 2008 election"
Probably less important than you think. But then again, I may have a different opinion of what actual "importance" is.
"...Its groups allow people to be politically active"
How are you "politically active" using a website? Honestly, you are not "active" if all you are doing is talking about something.
"Its stalker-esque features allow people to research others (I use it to look at potential employees)"
Look at potential employees in what manner? I've done hiring before and nothing I've ever seen posted on any of these pages would be of significance in hiring for a job.
"It even brings some order to YouTube and similar video sites with its "sharing" system..."
And why do I care about YouTube? It's yet another grandiose concept attached to a system which is 90% constitued of videos of people being hit in the nuts and other mindless dreck.
----
Again, if 90% of the community using the site is not actively "engaged" in what you are defining as it's puropse, then does that purpose exist in reality? I'd say "no" and that people are decieving themselves.
Dude, you're missing something important. It's an early draft proposal for further research. And here you are, judging it by the standards of finished work. Tsk, tsk.
Are you adequate?
So... you have to write like you have a stick up your butt to be taken seriously? That seems like shallow thinking to me, not to mention old-fashioned. It's a preliminary take on the study, so what?
You're assuming, in effect, that Marx's theory of class is true or helpful in research, and using that assumption, claiming that TFA's treatment of class is wrong. Well, Marx's theory of class is very much under dispute, so your argument is completely out of place in context. It's easy to "win" arguments if you assume the points of contention.
But anyway, you got TFA's notion of class wrong:
Indeed, and TFA indeed claimed that class isnt' about how much money you make, but rather about social networks (in the sociological sense, not the technological SNS sense).
Are you adequate?
*sigh*
This just in: Antisocial people spurn Social Networking Sites. News at 11!
I found this to be an interesting and incisive piece. It will be interesting once XML allows us leaverage all the information that's out in the intertubes. The author would have been well served by data to back up their argument.
By the by... I joined slashdot just to comment on how well this article was written.
~Ral~
I'm in college and we all think of myspace as the trailer trash site of social networks.
Facebook has a lot better features and doesn't look retarded with every bodies !@#KRAZEY TOONZ!!!
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
"MySpace is still home for 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. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers."
None of these things equate. Sounds like someone has a queer axe to grind from being ostracized in high school and has an inferiority complex because her parents didn't go to college.
What the hell is this self-involved freshman comp dreck doing on the front page?
"Some of us purposefully use carefully constructed language designed to cause snobs to glance over our ideas, dude."
Sure you do. Keep telling yourself that's the reason. Meanwhile the rest of us who know better will continue to think you're an imbecile.
And we'll be right.
social networking sites network people into sites
FaceBook? For someone who thinks that verification of data is such a good thing, maybe you should try some of that yourself.
we used to call this email
...then I'd hate to see what you regard as "bad".
it was a damn good essay if only because she stated her assumptions up front
Indeed she did make some assumptions in the very title of her work. To wit: "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace". Her primal assumption is that there is a qualifyable entity known as a "class" in the United states.
pointed out what she couldn't honestly quantify
Actually, she pointed out what she couldn't qualify. What is it? It's "class"! Again, to wit (doesn't that sound snotty?): "In sociology, Nalini Kotamraju has argued that constructing arguments around 'class' is extremely difficult in the United States. Terms like 'working class' and 'middle class' and 'upper class' get all muddled quickly. She argues that class divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than with income."
If Begging the Question is the name of the logical flaw in which you make an argument which assumes the point in dispute, what is the name of the logical flaw in which you make an argument which destroys the point which is assumed?
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
This seems very similar to the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. The author declares that the traditional definition of the word "social class" is no longer valid, makes up a new definition that is now a synonym for "demographic" and then announces that the pages are segregated along class lines, as if that statement still had the same meaning.
This is a whole bunch of speculation and personal value divisions presented as if it were a research paper.
It's not a research paper, it's an essay. The citation at the top of the page even says so. Also, the author has done research (see "Methodological Background"), but this article isn't meant to be a presentation of that research. If you want research papers, she's written a few.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
So presentation matters to you more than content?
Presentation should not be an impediment to getting the content. Bad grammar that makes an article hard to read is an impediment to understanding.
Also, whether we like to admit it or not, our minds are tuned to have certain biases for and against styles of speaking and writing. If her way of writing makes her seem vacuous, it makes her arguments far less persuasive then if she had written it in a more scholarly style. You may decry that as unfair, but it's human nature, and she needs to adjust her style of presentation to accommodate that. Failure to do so is just ignorant or stubborn.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'm college educated, for what that is worth (nothing)
... I didn't finish my degree and I've got a better job and make more money than some Ph.D. candidates will. Likewise, my partner who never went to college at all will likely triple my salary this year. But it's not all about money. There are some professions where the slip of paper is truly important; namely, the slip of paper grants entry into the profession in question. I suppose the lesson to be learned is that your life is good and you should keep your chin up and start making good choices so that you can fulfill your life's dreams. Was your college education a waste? It doesn't matter! The true waste would be for you to let poisonous ideas like "college was a waste" keep you from flourishing as an individual.
Don't be so pessimistic. Not that I'm one to say such a thing
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
It said:
Toros)
go Toros go Toros go go go Toros
(Clovers over Toros)
go Clovers go Clovers go go go Clovers
(Toros)
our game is fierce
and we are hip
so get on back
you can't touch this
(Clovers)
Our game is bad
we're without peer
so get that weakness outta here
you're tryin' to steal our bit
but you look like shit
but we're the ones
who are down with it
Cheertastic!
(Oops! Sorry. Copyright Myspace for the moment but moving to any other Web2 type situation in the near future.)
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
The author is just some run of the mill freaky-deaky spacecadet from Berkeley.
Example: "...many people on the web know me because of my deep appreciation for the words of Ani Difranco and her power to make us all reflect on our identity and impact on this world."
Proving once again, "You can major in gameboy if you know how to Bullsh-t".
Race and Gender are what I would call "class limiting" factors.
They can deny you entry to certain social classes that you otherwise have the "requirements" for.
I know what it is like to be limited by one of these factors. I live in the rural southern part of the US. Many people have difficulty accepting that I have technical skills due to my geographic location. All one can do is to work with what you are given. To some I can prove that I am capable. Those who can never be convinced otherwise are not worth the hassle or concern.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Of this 'list' of people on FB and MS:
goodie two shoes
jocks,
athletes
other "good" kids
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
I belong to NONE Of them.....hmmmm...maybe that's why I'm not on Facebook nor MySpace.
Somehow, a combination of Congress and the IRS accidentally broke the classes down. The IRS created code 401(k), and all of a sudden, the middle class had an incentive to own wealth.
If you look at the social security reform debate, behind all the verbiage of "ownership society" or "risky scheme," at the heart of the debate was ownership of assets. If individuals own the assets, then they owned the means of production.
Compare a 401(k) account to a pension. In both cases, the money is tied up on stocks and bonds, growing accordingly. Economically, they appear similar. However, there is a crucial difference. The 401(k) owner actually owns assets, which can be passed along to offspring as an inheritance, or sold and used for their lifestyle. A pensioner receives a monthly check while alive, but owns none of the underlying assets behind their monthly check.
In modern America, there aren't "capitalist" and "workers," because the workers may own stock in the corporation through 401(k) matches in company stock, and the overextended managers may be using debt to finance a lavish lifestyle. Class in America is often tied to expenditures, not income, although certain "fields" are considered higher class. The upper-income Doctor or Lawyer will not see themselves as "the same" as an IT Consultant with comparable income, because the former tie their class status not to what they do but to their education. This is why Doctors are seen as higher "class" than lawyers, regardless of income levels, because the former has more education.
However, Marx's classes are gone. The class of the inherited wealthy is VERY small in the US. A wealthy capitalist has to divide his wealth amongst children, grandchildren, and palaces in his honor -- I mean buildings at Universities, which slowly dilutes the wealth. You rarely find more than 3 generations removed from the source of wealth still living off it, and that's for VERY wealthy families.
In terms of class, the Myspace/Facebook divide does inadvertently follow "class" in the US, not wealth. In the US, Class largely follows schooling, though wealth is correlated, it isn't direct. Studies show that the economic benefit of elite schools aren't a huge (if any) premium over that of state schools, but in terms of US class, it's night and day. If you are smart enough to get into Harvard, you'll likely do well whether you go to Harvard or state college, but in terms of cracking open upper-class American society, the right college goes a long way towards establishing your "class" hierarchy. In that regard, Myspace/Facebook clearly follows the divide in America, not causes it... and the divide in America doesn't reflect income, or wealth directly.
That said, since pensions, in this day and age, are more common for government employees, and 401(k)s are popular with the middle class, perhaps the tax code is forcing wealth to follow the class structure, but anyone can own capital in America, and the guy making 50k that lives below his means will acquire far more wealth than the business owner making 250k-500k that is leveraged to the hilt.
I hearby coin the acronym DRTFA (Dont Read the Fucking Article).
I expect royalty checks.
An idea for a Slashdot poll:
I'm a member of:
* Facebook
* Myspace
* both
* The Cowboy Neal Lonely Hearts Club Band
I'd take the Cowboy Neal option.
Hmmm. I think it should be:
Facebook
Myspace
both
Tribe, you insentive clod!
Cowboy Neal Fan Club for geeks what think good
I'd chose both, even if I have a Tribe account too.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Actually, the quality of facebook users has been declining ever since they opened the site to non-Harvard students.
I think you meant to say the Harvard users are envious of we UW students in Seattle and our 133L skilz as shown in our fun groups like Brunettes Are So Hot Now and Seminar Junkies.
That's ok, once you graduate from Harvard, you can come to the UW as a postgrad.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Dear Danah, associates, & some /.s',
... ad nauseam ... for US, EU, India, China, Russia, Japan, Korea ... as I said ad nauseam." Therefor/So, WTF/BFD class division is an observable social phenomenon indicating a single problem of humanity to treat other individuals as groups and prove social silliness/iniquity by using pseudo-science/religion/politics....
... indicates a great nation in decline, our cohesion and homogeneity of national purpose and destiny are crippled. The Real Character of our USA youth is not on any goddamn website, college campus, in a mansion .... Our Best Youth Today are on the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Life all learning reality, lessons, value.... The value of a human life is not in blood/wealth or website, some plutocratic fools would like US to think that birthright and wealth have real value to humanity and history. Most of US are not fools, but some of our leaders are insults to all that is good and right with humanity.
After reading your essay:
"Viewing American class divisions through MySpace and Facebook social websites."
"Viewing American class divisions through Public and Private schools."
"Viewing American class divisions through Poverty and Wealth socio-economics."
"Viewing American class divisions through Occupational and Recreational sex."
"Viewing American class divisions through Compact and Luxury transportation."
"Viewing American class divisions through Emergency Room and Private Room hospitalization."
"Viewing American class divisions through Court Appointed and Personally Retained legal representation."
"Viewing American class divisions through
I am far better educated, with a higher IQ than GWBush (who is President of the USA), but my education is far less recognized in any part of the USA or Europe than that of VP Chaney and many politicians in the DC area. I could never of been President, but I do not doubt that there are orphan kids, kids from poor families, and folks on MySpace a/o FaceBook that could be (IF) in a truly democratic, honorable, and free-society would make far better Presidents than any president that occupied the Whitehouse after FDR and Harry.
Representations of the class divide in American youth, pay, insurance, health, education
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
From what I could get from TFA, the division is painfully obvious but it isn't class, it's cliques. Very simply, preps and jocks are going to Facebook and the rest to MySpace. That wasn't so hard, now was it?
I wonder if they just can't see it because talking about social class sounds scholorly and talking about high school cliques does not.
"It's actually an interesting read and worth your time."
Thanks, but I'll decide what is worth my time, nitwit!
They're using their grammar skills there.
I'm an extremely poor urban white kid now finishing a physics degree on a full scholarship at a rather elite liberal arts college. I use both Facebook and Myspace. Facebook to talk to everyone I've met since leaving my high school, and Myspace to talk to everyone I went to high school with. It's amazing how true it is. There really is NO overlap. Almost everyone I see on Facebook has a crowded list of colleges they have friends at and a pile of high school friends keeping up with them on their wall. I have next to none since, after all, hardly anyone I knew in high school was rich enough to attend a college. Granted, Myspace makes my eyes bleed and my hands cathartically twitch out better code, but Facebook is very, very, very good at making class and social hierarchies explicit.
Every time dem newfangled social networking sites are brought up I can't help thinking that ye ol' geocities and some sort of universal standardized social networking framework will be the ultimate solution. Add or remove modules. Throw some wiki elements in... Personally on general principle I'd feel a lot more secure if I was hosting my own profile rather than some corporate farm.
[social networking] is how adults get jobs .... little is known about how [online networking] will impact the more traditional social networking world, but rest assured that it will
...And for god's sake I hope it stays that way. Your post gave me chills.
I can't wait to be turned down for a job because I don't like Blink 182 or Christina Aguilera, or because I don't number among the interviewer's 983 link-affirmed friends, or because I don't have pictures of supermodels I've never met on my web page, or the right mix of day-glo colors set on a bright yellow background, or annoying noises, or, or, or, {head explodes}.
In all seriousness, the only examples I've heard are of people *not* getting jobs because they were easily Googled and employers found MySpace pictures of them passed out in their own vomit or running around naked with lampshades on their heads.
The piece has been taken out of context. It's an academic brainstorm, put up in a blog for comment. It's not a finished, polished paper.
Now please stop looking silly by acting as if it was otherwise.
Are you adequate?
Hi, i'm from the ASA, or the article summary awareness group, and we have the following problems with the current summary:
"It's actually an interesting read and worth your time."
should actually read
"NO. STOP. CLOSE THAT TAB YOU JUST OPENED. AND RUN AWAY."
cheers.
Yeah, I'm a paranoid nut who strongly values his personal privacy ... yet I go on Facebook and report a slew of information on myself in this spirit of openness and sharing. Lots of people are this way, and there is a lot that can be done with this information. I use Facebook not so much for reasons to not hire somebody but rather for fodder for interviews; it's quite revealing to ask a question about interests that are not reported on the applicant's resume ... often times it puts the person on edge, for they haven't prepared for it. I work the conversation in the direction of this interest and let the applicant supply it, then we can chat about it. It either breaks the ice, or the person reveals a lack of social skills (and that ultimately leads to my preferring other applicants).
I don't worry about kids who have evidence of their partying on Facebook. It's rather normal at such an age, and illegal this's and that's aren't any real worry to me (not my job). The red flags are things like wall posts that say "dude, you got fired, again?" The giant pluses are when applicants do things similar to the job while on their own job (we're in software development, so showing a genuine interest in the field from a non-professional perspective, especially on a network for college kids, is a good sign).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
What evidence of class differences would you accept?
Apart from the band and other artist members, myspace is primarily a social networking site for teenagers and young adults. Depending on the teens and young adults you know, your view of myspace can be anything from "facebook with lots of overdone HTML" to "nothing but survey bulletins of 'would you kiss #4 on the left little toe? What color underwear would you wear while you did it?'"
Myspace and text messaging are how a *lot* of young Americans keep in touch. I stay in touch with at least a hundred young people from middle school through post-college years (so far). Quite a few of them depend on myspace, IM, and text messaging for 90% or more of their communication.
A much smaller group depends on facebook. I'll agree this is primarily a college or college-bound crowd; they also seem less likely to depend on text messaging. Not sure about IM.
Now linkedin is beginning to demand my attention, too, for my day job (which seldom has anything to do with teenagers). I'm apparently odd man out there, because I had to be forced nearly at gunpoint by my job to carry a cell phone, and refuse to even think about a PDA. I'm kinda old school for a high tech guy...
There's a whole different set of class divisions the author didn't really address (and said so right up front). In real life, which carries over into myspace (not sure about facebook) a huge number of teens care *very* much about these classes-- kickers vs rappers vs hiphoppers vs preps vs emos vs goths, etc. But every single class is heavily represented on myspace. The class distinctions (mostly) carry over to friends lists there, somewhat akin to the distinction the author hypothesizes for the myspace/facebook division.
I suspect there are quite a few serious research papers waiting to be written on these topics...
Congratulations for confirming what everyone suspected: hiring isn't based on whether the candidate can DO THE DAMN JOB, but rather on how much crap they can throw on a myspace page.
This is probably why my workplace tends to hire morons who have A+++ skills in cubicle decoration (college pennants and football schedules) but who cannot actually DO the jobs they were hired to do, chase away good clients by ruining perfectly simple projects, and generally sit around doing nothing.
So thank you for clogging offices with useless people, wasting stockholder's money, and allowing our cut-throat competition to get the jump on us, because the people you hire can't move fast enough to keep up. But who cares as long as they have good Myspace or Facebook.
Thanks for throwing away standards. Thanks for being what's really wrong with this world.
Facebook for me covers many uses, many college-centric, but a few that have moved from MySpace with Facebook's opening to the public, and a few that are just general web site services.
College-centric:
MySpace-to-Facebook:
General web sites that happen to be on Facebook:
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Question: Why would you join MySpace / Facebook? Answer: Because people you know use it. Question: What social class are the people you know most likely to be? Answer: The same class as yourself. White trash have white trash friends. Poor, black, inner-city youth have poor, black, inner city friends. Wealthy suburbanites have wealthy suburbanite friends. When facebook launched, it only allowed university students in. About 1/3rd of the U.S. population achieves a college degree. Statistically speaking, college-educated persons have higher income, better educated friends, and have different values than those who do not.
myspace was supposed to be some kind of free dating site, but now it seems like it's mostly filled with porn stars, and people trying to sell you something, advertise their band, whatever.
Facebook on the other hand is a straightforward social networking site that makes some effort to hinder other uses. It's a bit classier than myspace.
However, there's two things missing from facebook that myspace kinda sorta offered before it became so crappy and full of annoying people trying to sell you stuff:
1. Self expression. It offers a little blog and a simple way to introduce yourself to total strangers on the web.
2. A way to meet new people. Facebook offers a mechanism for networking with real life friends and acquaintances, but actually takes some effort to hinder meeting new people outside of your social circle. This of course makes it fairly useless as a "dating" site.
I'd actually like to see a free and much classier site that satisfied #1 or #2.
I'd also like a simpler brand of blog site for people who want to let their friends know what they're up to, but without the self agrandizing "personal diary" feel of most personal blogs. Maybe something like facebooks status messages that get broadcast to all of your friends.
Awww, degree turned out to be a waste of time?
I think being the Devil's Advocate is to argue for a position that you oppose with the hopes that a counter-argument will be made which destroys it. It is, essentially, a means of testing the strength of your own position by imagining how the opposition to it will be countered.
That's not quite what the essay itself was doing since the writer fully believes that a "class" argument can be made despite the fact that Marxist rhetoric doesn't fit so nicely at all in American culture (and she admits as much).
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Dude, a kid without the right skills doesn't get the interview. I was leaving out the technical aspects as they are not applicable to this conversation. Obviously, I do my due diligence in determining whether an applicant has the needed proficiency for the job; there are always tests for professionalism, ability to do the job, and other obvious metrics. The part people don't realize is that exhibiting the ability to learn and to get along well with the rest of the office is extremely important.
Social networking gets you that extra oomph to get in the door, and makes you more personable. If I have a respected peer in the industry who says that this applicant is gold, I will trust that recommendation ... this level of social networking does not currently exist online, but we'll see where that's going (Free Software and other types highly visible online collaborative projects are certainly the right direction).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
American class division doesn't rely on whether or not somebody uses Myspace vs. Facebook, but rather whether or not somebody has an internet connection at all to be able to login and maintain it on a daily basis. Someone who does have an Internet connection is more likely to have the expendable income, or come from a family that has the expendable income, to shell out on a monthly basis in order to have access to the Internet. Those who don't have an in-home connection these days are either on the low end of this "division", or is really old and refuse to embrace new technology.
I noticed most of the blogs and news sites have been focusing on this class divide between Facebook and MySpace. I really think they are making to big a deal about nothing. Facebook until recently was promoted mainly towards college students. It whole focus was concentrated in a small niche area of the social networking market. Now that it has gone mainstream, I have noticed a much wider diversity in it's audience. I expect that to continue, and grow. Which should offset the current "class" divisions that are left over from the previous niche audience. In fact, I really think that if MySpace wants to keep it's current position as the top social networking site, it is going to have to make a lot of changes.
For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three. -- Alice Kahn
I am a live audio engineer in the music industry here in Nashville. All the musicians, production people, fellow engineers, band management, etc are on MySpace. I have gotten several jobs, including a 3 month long tour, by talking to the right people on MySpace, so it's not completely a website for kids.
Oh - and my day rate is $550/day so this also real money we're talking about.
http://myspace.com/sonicspike
BTW - I am also a college graduate and have a FaceBook account too.
Libertas in infinitum