G4TV

Has MySpace become an electronic ghetto? That's the contention of social analyst Danah Boyd. Boyd, speaking at New York's Democracy Forum, said, "It wasn't just anyone who left MySpace to go to Facebook...We might as well face an uncomfortable reality ... what happened was modern day 'white flight'."

According to Boyd, the people left of MySpace are "more likely to be brown or black and to have a set of values that terrifies white society."

Boyd surveyed young users of social networks and found that people on Facebook look down on people on MySpace, and view MySpace as less refined and less cultured than Facebook. "Any high school student who has a Facebook page will tell you MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious," she said.

Craig (17, California) was quote by Boyd thusly:

The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook. It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace. Any high school student who has a Facebook will tell you that MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious. Like Peet’s is more cultured than Starbucks, and Jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop, and like Macs are more cultured than PC’s, Facebook is of a cooler caliber than MySpace.

Personally, I switched from MySpace to Facebook for a couple reasons, and they weren't class or race based. I switched to Facebook because MySpace started loading slower, and also because MySpace's policy of allowing people to alter their pages dramatically resulted in un-navigable sites that took way too long to load, automatically queued up music I didn't want to hear and generally broke every rule of aesthetics and graphic design imaginable. But, yeah, it is true that Facebook seems more genteel, more sophisticated and less idiotic than MySpace.

I think Boyd's analogy between real "white flight" and the switch from one network to another to be interesting, but doesn't hold up under close scrutiny. One of the main reasons middle-class flight from the inner-city was so problematic was because of the people who were left behind by an unwillingness or inability to take flight themselves. But online, anyone can abandon their social network and start up in another one with little sacrifice. So the online class system is much more fluid than the real life class system.

Also, moving to the suburbs may have been the ultimate dream of past generations of white people, but now everyone is moving back into the cities because, lets face it, suburbs really suck. I really don't think a similar return will happen to MySpace.

What do you think? Do you think people on MySpace and people on Facebook are of different classes? What about users of Beebo, Friendster and other social networking site? 

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