[Air-l] viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

[danah boyd]

A week ago, folks were talking about class divisions around Facebook  
and MySpace use in teen culture.  I was in the middle of writing an  
essay about that exact topic(and some folks have heard me speak to  
this issue over the last few months) so i didn't want to peep up  
until i had written what i could.  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.html





[Barry - i disagree with your view that it's just local clustering  
dependent on a random local seed.  I've seen this in too many schools  
in too many states in the United States to believe that this isn't  
about class.  I can't speak to Canada or Britain or anywhere else.  I  
also can't speak to adult usage.  I'm talking solely about high  
school teen usage in the US.  If you've got ideas for how to measure  
this quantitatively when demarcating class is difficult, i'm all ears.]