[Air-L] Facebook's class divide - implications

[David Brake]

Dear all,

I am writing a piece for The Conversation about the social implications of the recent sharp decline in the use of Facebook in the US by wealthier teens https://qz.com/1355827/do-teens-use-facebook-it-depends-on-their-familys-income/, speculating on the social implications of this shift. I made some conjectures about this but the editors wanted some empirical backup for these if possible, so here are some of the issues I raise - I would be interested if anyone could suggest good references that relate to any of them!

* Do we have any idea why wealthy American teens are leaving Facebook? It surprised me since it was wealthier MySpace users who migrated to Facebook in the first place.
* Do we have evidence that widespread Facebook use may have helped facilitate inter-cultural or inter-class communication/understanding? I speculate it might because even if FB tends to show you strong tie information, you might still get glimpses of the lives and concerns of people you knew whose lives have taken different paths. If the wealthy leave FB they might lose some of that information and empathy?

My second half is about the shift from a textual to a visual ‘culture’ which a move away from FB towards Instagram and Snapchat might represent.

* Do we have any quantitative evidence for this shift (eg shortening length of text used in online communication?)
* Do we know anything about whether richer/more well-educated people are more effective at getting their message across using social media video and images than poorer? I would argue yes because they have the time and resources to learn and employ editing techniques and use better hardware and software to do so while poorer people might tend just to put out ‘raw’ video. Visible minorities also may find their message sidelined because of their visible lower ’status’. Whereas text is meant to be more of a status leveller than f2f (though of course we know this is not entirely true).

Pardon the rant. If there is no good scholarship on some of these points, I will be making the point that more scholarship is needed which may help some of you to get grants ;-)

Regards,

David

--
Dr David Brake, Researcher and Educator http://davidbrake.org/, @drbrake
Author of "Sharing Our Lives Online: Risks and Exposure in Social Media” https://www.facebook.com/sharingourlivesonline <https://www.facebook.com/sharingourlivesonline>