[Air-l] A verb for using social networking sites

[Kris Markman]

>From: danah boyd <aoir.z3z at danah.org>
><snip>
>Also, regarding the comments on Facebook vs. MySpace, i'm trying to 
>write up an essay about my data on this.  The short answer is that 
>it's classed at the high school level in the US.  Working class kids, 
>subcultural kids, queer kids, kids of color, etc. are using MySpace.  
>College-bound kids, "good" kids, wealthy kids, sporty kids, etc. are 
>all using Facebook.  This has changed in the last year.  It plays out 
>some in college.  If you go to a Latino-dominated community college, 
>you're far more likely to see MySpace be the force.  But if you're 
>teaching a a 4-year institution, MySpace is barely visible except in 
>the artist, queer, and subcultural communities.  More on this on my
>blog shortly.
>

In my (admittedly very anecdotal) experience, class plays a HUGE role 
in determining the use of Facebook vs. MySpace among college 
students. For the last year I have been teaching at a) a 
nationally-ranked, expensive, private university and b) a 4th-tier, 
regional state college. Both are 4-year institutions, and the student 
body of both schools is predominately white (if anything the private 
university is slightly more diverse). But the two schools are worlds 
away in terms of class. My state college students are by-and-large 
working class kids, most of whom work full-time and still live at 
home, while the private university students come from families who 
can afford the ~$40K/year tuition and room costs. MySpace is 
extremely popular with my state college students.  In our various 
class discussions they reveal that some of them also have Facebook 
profiles, but they don't really use it very much; all of their 
friends and their activities are centered on MySpace. The private 
university students are exactly opposite-they use Facebook almost 
exclusively and in some instances have expressed a fairly 
condescending attitude towards MySpace. I would be interested to know 
if others have had similar experiences with class and the choice of 
social networking site.

Speaking of the term "social networking," I agree with the various 
comments suggesting that we won't really see one specific verb emerge 
to describe the activity, and that generally networking is not what 
goes on in these spaces. In my summer class last week, we were 
discussing technologies for supporting groups and teams, and the 
social networking sites came up. One student basically summed up the 
attitude of the class with a statement to the effect of "Facebook is 
really just a good way to keep tabs on people that you don't really 
want to have to interact with on a daily basis." Kind of the opposite 
of networking, no?

Anyway, those are just my random observations, nothing generalizable, 
but possible food for thought.
-Kris M.

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Kris M. Markman, Ph.D.
Email: krism at alumni.utexas.net
http://webhost.bridgew.edu/kmarkman/index.html
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