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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.
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
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.
They've got plenty of purpose when you're young and virtually all of your friends use the sites along with you, which I'd imagine is what matters most to most users.
Goo goo g'joob.
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
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.
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.
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
Five paragraphs into this 'article' and it became clear the author needs to rethink college and stay in MySpace.
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...
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 also feel like the author's persistent struggles with how to "define class" in the US would evaporate if a proper study were performed. Because, in a scientific study you don't have to "define class"--rather you simply report what variables correlate with website choice, and what variables don't. You can then divide the population into groups (if the data supports such a division) and see whether the group divisions correlate to income, education, ethnicity, etc. (without ever having to artificially apply class labels).
Food for thought, but unfortunately nothing meaningfully conclusive.
Facebook really does have a purpose and that's probably what TFA was driving at without realizing. Facebook is really for college friends (and high school friends) to "hang out" online. It's the social networking of friends and peers and your friends' and peers' friends and peers - people of similar mindedness. Myspace is the bar-scene of the web; you go there to meet anyone and everyone, people sincerely looking for friends and pick-up artists alike.
TFA seems to think there's a socio-economic divide between Facebook and Myspace and there probably is. But not because poorer, less educated people all decided, hey, let's all hang out on Myspace. Think about your high school experiences. If you don't have friends you liked from high school, you're less likely to use Facebook. If you have high school or college buds that you hang out with exclusively, Facebook is all you need, with the added bonus of seeing the ideas of your friends' friends. Compounding this is the initial seeding of Facebook. If you never went to university or college, the likelihood of you using Facebook plummeted because they originally required you to have an e-mail address at that organization!
The original article was interesting but probably read a little too much into the organization of socio-economic and educational differences and probably didn't look sufficiently at the "why" or purpose of the SNSes, which is probably more benign than some plot by the Man to hold us down as was hinted.
As for Care2, it does look interesting and I may sign up. If I'm feeling particularly sociable, I may troll the "bar" that is Myspace; if I just want to hang out with friends, you'll find me on the "pub" that is Facebook; Care2 sounds kinda neat, like when my friends and I want to do activities together, Care2 may be the online "soupkitchen".
Jocks and Princesses go to Facebook. Criminals and Basketcases go to MySpace. Brains go meh.
On a serious note, though, as one of the more flagrantly uncool kids in high school, I've still noticed that the majority of my uncool friends have gone on to college and are now on Facebook. I joined up mostly because everyone else was, and I didn't want to get bugged about it later on down the road. I don't use Facebook all that much, and I've never used MySpace.
Gamertag: WyleType
The only thing I've found myspace good for is running into old high school friends. When I moved out of town, I lost touch with tons of people, but I was able to find them again through other friends down the line. Aside from that, it's a breeding ground for pedofiles.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
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
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!
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."
Doesn't have any purpose!?
Facebook has one major use for me: It's not instant communication. Ever get tired of people asking for your MSN address? Or having people message you constantly when you're in the middle of something? There are alternatives, you can ignore these people, or politely refuse to give them your address, OR you can tell them that you don't really use MSN anymore and that you would rather add them to facebook? This way, you don't have to instantly respond to someone's message, you can keep track of friends more easily if you want, and you don't have to feel guilty about ignoring people on MSN! I have many good friends on MSN that I just don't talk to, not because I don't want to talk to them, but because I don't want to use MSN to talk to them. MSN takes up way too much time to say what you want to say. I have better things to do. I'd rather see these people in person.
Maybe some people don't care as much, and the site wouldn't be useful for them. But I know I feel particularly guilty when I haven't talked to people in months. So I just drop them a message on facebook and I don't expect an instant reply. Simple!
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...
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.
Thats crap. Myspace and Facebook are for kids setting up parties, putting up pictures of themselves with very little clothing on and pictures of drunken mayhem. They are like personal ads and a be my friend because I have nothing else to do but sit here on msn and put up a profile with pics of my and my friends so that anyone in the world can look at me, get my msn, and then piss my off when they start preying on me. Some people have legit spaces where they put up pictures of holidays and school trips but by and large it is a big excuse to try and be 'cool' online. Who the fuck has 200 friends? Who has 20 friends? Who has more than 5-10 close friends? Exactly. But on myspace and facebook some people have hundreds of friends, most of whom they don't talk to, lots of which are probly just a cute guy or girl whose profile they liked. This, mainly because of the young demographic. Not limited to the young ones though. My coworker had a bad runin with facebook last month. Basically used his space and frieds to spread stories and lies. Went totally psycho. But I have a bias and don't really use these sites but get invited all the time. Pretty much hate them but can see their use. (Lets start a group on facebook/myspace 'One legged, bearded, 5.5 feet tall, brown hair, pink eyes, and totally drunk group' and see who the hell joins it trying to belong.)
Legalize Green Today!
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.
Hey, Bitter much?
I would guess you don't actually have any experience with Facebook. I do, and maybe a few people use Facebook the way your saying, but no one I know does. No one that the people I know happen to know does either. It's a lot harder to find random people to add to your "friends" on Facebook (if that's what you want to do) than on MySpace. Not to mention that you can't even see people's profiles unless you're already on their friend list, in which case you obviously aren't going to be adding people because you like their profile. It's not exactly like MySpace, despite your obvious desire to believe so.
As for your friend, people can spread stories and lies just as successfully by sending out emails and telling their friends by phone or in person as by using Facebook. That was a problem with him, not with the site. It's not like these social networking sites have some sort of magical honesty button.
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?
Fair enough...
So in a Marxist utopia, does one produce everything they consume? If not, how do they obtain things to survive that they don't produce? And if they trade what they produce for other goods, are they not selling their labor (or the result of their labor)?
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?
This just in: Antisocial people spurn Social Networking Sites. News at 11!
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.
"Who has more than 5-10 close friends?"
I think that's kind of the point. I have maybe 10-15 close friends that I see and catch up with on a weekly basis, but my extended network I don't get to see as often are exactly the kind of people I keep up with via Facebook.
--- Band: Joey Ultra
what is the name of the logical flaw in which you make an argument which destroys the point which is assumed?
Isn't that just being the Devil's Advocate?
Much of what the author did could have been done by stating:
"As kids don't have their real jobs yet, it is harder to tell what their personal class is. We can either go by their parent's class, or by an estimate of what the kid's job will be eventually, based on whether they are on the college track, the military track, or the lowe end job track. While both methods have their problems, I choose to use the estimate based on track method."
While normally scientists would use the parent's class method, as you seem to think is appropriate, I do believe that his arguments are pretty convincing.
Given that information, I can not consider this to be a no true scotsman fallacy. While he is using a slight new definition, it is in an area where the typical definition is not useable, and I find much of his work to be interesting. Perhaps a better analysis will ocure in 10 years, when we can see whether his 'college/military/other' track concept was in fact a good estiamte of actual social class. More importantly, it might be surprising if we found out that people in the college track that went with Facebook were more likely to end up in the upper class then those that were on the college track but did not have Facebook.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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'm blown away by your very personal and oh so valid opinion.
Well, its not quite a mop, and its not quite a puppet, but man.. So to answer your question I don't know.
Hey, I've got a special purpose!!
--Navin R. Johnson
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yes, I found that most of my old high school friends on MySpace are pedophiles too.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
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.
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?
Class difference is not necessarily class warfare. Class is a reality (at least, as much of one as any other social phenomenon.)
Some people seem to panic when class-based analysis is undertaken of a phenomenon in which they are involved - they assume that there's some judgment or discrimination being made, as if observing that the incoming class of Harvard has a distinctly different background than an incoming class at a community college, or that a NASCAR fan is different from an experimental theater enthusiast in ways that extend beyond mere preferences. It makes people uncomfortable in a way that even talk of race and gender does not.
Class is not money, nor is it education, though money and education can predict class. There's a crude formula that helps: the working class thinks class is about money; the bourgeois (nowadays, probably better to say "middle- to upper middle classes") think it is about education, and that the aristocracy (or, where not applicable, old money: at least 3 generations of not having to work, of being able to "live off of capital" in multiple senses of the phrase) think it is about taste and habits. And the thing is, all of them are right: money will vouchsafe the education, and the education is a prerequisite - though by no means adequate - for cementing the social habits and practices by which the "gentry" recognize each other.
But that's a very crude and general approach - more interesting to me are class fractions, the differences between, say, technical professional classes (practically white-collar working class, like IT) and, say, the class of people who attend B-schools (middle to upper-middle class, and aspiring to be in a situation where their kids might not have to work, except as a "character building" exercise.)
While the empirical data is dated, I highly recommend Pierre Bourdieu's "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste" for an illustration of how tastes and preferences map rather nicely onto co-factors such as educational status of parents, distance from metropoles, income, etc.
Please do not assume your personal view of friendship as the "correct" method.