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

Thu Sep 27 14:24:33 PDT 2018

Hello David,

Perhaps the move mirrors reasons found by danah boyd as she investigated
teen flight from myspace to facebook. She's written about this here:

boyd, danah. 2012. “White Flight in Networked Publics: How Race and Class
Shaped American Teen Engagement with Myspace and Facebook.” Pp. 203-222 in
Race After the Internet, edited by L. Nakamura and P.A. Chow-White. New
York: Routledge.

In short, she found that the language teens used to describe their
migration mirrored the language of whites during what's traditionally been
called "white flight" from major US cities.

Chris Julien
PhD Student (PSU), MA (UNCG)
State College, PA, USA
www.chrisjulien.com

On Thu, Sep 27, 2018 at 4:49 PM Barett T. Christensen <bchristensen at bwf.com>
wrote:

> This is not formal research nor is it a response to trends, but it may be
> interesting. Using the Ads Manager, here is the current number of teens
> (13-18) on Facebook and Instagram and their distributions by zip code
> values. You will see that 65% of teens on Facebook live in the bottom half
> of zip codes in the United States, while 37% of teens live in the top half
> of zip codes. You will also see that 67% of teens on Instagram live in the
> bottom half of zip code values in the United States, while 33% of teens
> live in the top half of zip codes.
>
> Facebook currently has a wealthier teen audience by count and percentage
> of total teens.
>
> 1. There are approximately 8.8 million teens on Facebook.
>         a. 320K (or 4%) live in the top 5% of wealthy zip codes.
>         b. 660K (or 8%) live in the top 6-10% of wealthy zip codes.
>         c. 920K (or 11%) live in the top 11-25% of wealthy zip codes.
>         d. 1.2M (or 14%) live in the top 26-50% of wealthy zip codes.
>         e. That leaves 5.7 million teens (or 65%) on Facebook living in
> the bottom half of zip codes in the United States.
>
> 2. There are approximately 7 million teens on Instagram.
>         a. 250K (or 4%) live in the top 5% of wealthy zip codes.
>         b. 520K (or 7%) live in the top 6-10% of wealthy zip codes.
>         c. 680K (or 10%) live in the top 11-25% of wealthy zip codes.
>         d. 840K (or 12%) live in the top 26-50% of wealthy zip codes.
>         e. That leaves 2.3 million teens (or 67%) on Instagram living in
> the bottom half of zip codes in the United States.
>
>
> Barett
> Director, Marketing and Digital Services
> Bentz Whaley Flessner
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Air-L <air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org> On Behalf Of David Brake
> Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2018 3:03 PM
> To: AoIR mailing list <Air-L at listserv.aoir.org>
> Subject: [Air-L] Facebook's class divide - implications
>
> 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>
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