[Air-l] viewing American class divisions through Facebook andMySpace

[Lois Ann Scheidt]

Your construct of teens as congregating with "people like us" bothers 
me because it seems overly broad.  Based on my experience talking to 
teens online, they  move to online venues first through word-of-mouth 
from f2f friends and acquaintances.  Once they are online, many younger 
teens only converse with people they know f2f...the media has done a 
good job in scary parents about the "dangers" online, who then scare 
their kids.

Older teens may expand their circles into the circles of their friends, 
hence the popularity of second level friending.  While a few, more 
experimental, teens may converse with random partners...many try this 
once or twice but don't continue the practice.  A few will continue it 
often for less acceptable purposes - bullying, flaming, or "hooking up."

Movement between online spaces may take place because of 
recommendations from f2f friends, or online only friends.  Some 
adventurous types, or most 15-year old boys, will check out new spaces 
based on news coverage or random searches.  But like most forays into 
the dark side, these are usually fishing expeditions rather then 
gateways to extensive use of new spaces.  In other words, they may 
check out new spaces, they may even take up a temporary residence in 
such spaces, but total movement of their online "home" is tied to the 
location - or relocation - of primary f2f friends.

So at it's simplest and most basic form, when teens enter an online 
space initially it is for "people known to me" who of course may be 
"people like me" but implies a different level of specificity.

I must admit that I have found Bourdieu to be only partially applicable 
to adolescent spaces.  In applying his theories I have to use a "small 
world" approach first.  With teens their primary concerns are with the 
social hierarchy of their f2f world.  Unlike adults, they are not as 
concerned that everyone they meet - or cross paths with - recognize 
their social standing.  They are, however, very concerned that their 
social standing, stands out among their peers...their classmates and 
friends at their high school, in their neighborhood, and in their 
acquaintance pools.  I believe this is because many of their social 
worlds are still very small towns where they see the same peers at 
school, socially, on teams, etc.  Their social circles tend to have 
much more overlap then do the social circles of many adults.

In all my work I use adolescent development theory as my true 
underpinning because I have found even without consciously using it we 
still end up proving that it works, i.e. the average 15-year-old boy is 
more adventurous than and less tied to social conventions then the 
average 15-year-old girl.  However this may change during various 
developmental periods with the adventurousness see-sawing between the 
sexes.  Without an understanding of adolescent development theory, I 
have seen researchers attribute characteristics to online interactions 
that rather then being unusual or motivated by their use of online 
spaces are normal teen developmental stages that if we were to follow 
that young person 24/7 we would see enacted with their f2f friends, 
their teachers, and their parents.

To tie adolescent development into the MySpace/Facebook discussion.  I 
have found that at an experimental stage teens move to what is "new".  
So for most of my adolescent research population (10-19) Facebook was 
not a factor since prior to the launch of their high school section in 
Sept. 2005, the only college and university email address holders had 
access to Facebook.  So from it's inception, in 2003, MySpace has 
allowed access to non-academic teens.  That gave MySpace a critical 
two-year jump on Facebook with those not yet in college or university, 
in truth the "two-year" jump is misleading since not all U.S. 
institutions of higher education were allowed access to Facebook from 
the beginning.

So is it surprising that their is an economic and ethnic divide between 
the sites...it shouldn't be if you have even a passing acquaintance 
with statistic on college/university attendance based on family of 
origin economic status and ethnicity.

Will the divide hold true now that Facebook allows access to anyone 
with an email address?  Give it another year of so and we shall see.

Lois Ann Scheidt

Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana
University, Bloomington IN USA

Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and
IUPUC, Columbus IN USA

Webpage:  http://www.loisscheidt.com
Blog:  http://www.professional-lurker.com


Quoting Jason Wilson <jason_a_wilson at yahoo.com.au>:

> Hi Andy and all,
>
> Thanks for the question.
>
> First I'd reiterate what I'm trying to account for: a specific,
> well-heeled, well-educated demographic is making the switch to
> Facebook, while other people stay where they are, and others still
> continue to join MySpace. In addition, other specific groups are
> heading to other services entirely, e.g. American teens to Xanga. I
> would argue that "tipping points" and "usability" arguments can't
> entirely account for this, and class and the desire to congregate
> with "people like us" plays a part.
>
> I guess that I'd defer to Bourdieu for the most basic theoretical
> underpinnings of what I'm  arguing here. In Distinction he remarks
> that "Objectively and subjectively aesthetic stances adopted in
> matters like cosmetics, clothing, or home decoration are
> opportunities to experience or asset one?s position in social space,
> as a rank to be upheld or a distance to be kept." One of the central
> arguments in the work is that "taste" and cultural preferences
> mediate class distinctions, that taste is one of the primary ways in
> which class distance and membership are asserted. This informs my
> belief that design, "usability" and the contexts of social networking
> are never neutral, and are always inflected by issues around class
> (among others). I guess that for me, the problematic assumption would
> be that social networking, and the selection of an SNS, could take
> place in a way that somehow evaded, or was innocent of all of this.
>
> Why would I think of this specifically in relation to MySpace vs.
> Facebook? Well, to amplify on an earlier example, I think that the
> ways in which the two services can be personalised appeal to
> different taste formations. The often-"gaudy" nature of MySpace
> personalisation, arising from users' ability to insert large amounts
> of HTML into their profiles to create background images etc. presents
> a contrast with the essentially "modular" personalisation available
> with Facebook profiles, where users select from a range of options
> which do not disturb the given, "clean" colour schemes and layouts of
> Facebook profiles. The Facebook interface strikes me as very
> "designerly" - it is reminiscent to me in its look and feel of an OSX
> application, with all that connotes in terms of "funky"/creative
> professions, the blurring of work and/in play, and discernment (think
> of the Mac vs. PC ad campaigns). The use of whitespace, drop-down
> menus and a very "Web 2.0" set of icons allow it to be
> read as uncluttered, fresh and efficient.  Personalisation for many
> Facebook users takes place by way of deferring to the expert
> knowledges of application designers. By contrast, MySpace
> personalisations often seem inexpert, distracting, ungainly - in
> short amateur, even where the "pimping" is outsourced.
> Coincidentally, both Danah Boyd and I (me in my blog post on the
> 22nd) are drawn to the metaphor of/comparison with Swedish furniture
> stores and their emphasis on modularity and design in thinking about
> Facebook. There are visual rhetorics in Facebook's presentation that
> connote a restrained minimalism which is not avant-garde but rational
> and "tasteful". This observation chimes with the excitement of those
> marketing high-end consumer goods about getting access Facebook's
> "elite" user base. Facebook's aesthetic of personalisation appeals to
> a certain kind of networked, linked-in, design-aware, educated,
> "mature" (non-emo :-) ) subject, in part because of the "distancing"
> it offers from messy old MySpace, which begins, by contrast, to
> resemble the chaos of a teenager's bedroom wall. In this sense, I
> think we can talk about class in relation to the design interface.
>
> That's an example - as I said in yesterday's post, I think the modes
> of networking Facebook offers as well as the narratives associated
> with it's success are appealing to a certain kind of contemporary,
> class-inflected sensibility. If you wanted specific examples of
> MySpace profiles that bear out the contrast, I'd hesitate to give
> them on a list, but could send you some off-list if you like.
>
> Cheers
> Jason
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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