Class Divide Between Facebook and MySpace
This essay is a fascinating exploration of the class divide between high school teenagers who use the Facebook social networking site (Microsoft subsidiary) and the MySpace social networking site.
Danah Boyd argues that Facebook is hegemonic, while MySpace is subaltern. She traces this class distinction through history, usage patterns, style, and established policy.
The most powerful observation she makes in the essay is that the military prohibits use of MySpace, but allows use of Facebook:
"A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because the division in the military reflects the division in high schools. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook. Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it's not the SNS of choice for 18-year old soldiers, a group that is primarily from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace. The officers, many of whom have already received college training, are using Facebook. The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. I can't help but wonder if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in the military are leaking information or spending too much time online or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage.
MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers' MySpace profiles, I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war, pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell. Over the last year, I've watched more and more profiles emerge from soldiers who aren't quite sure what they are doing in Iraq. I don't have the data to confirm whether or not a significant shift has occurred but it was one of those observations that just made me think. And then the ban happened. I can't help but wonder if part of the goal is to cut off communication between current soldiers and the group that the military hopes to recruit. Many young soldiers' profiles aren't public so it's not about making a bad public impression. That said, young soldiers tend to have reasonably large networks because they tend to accept friend requests of anyone that they knew back home which means that they're connecting to almost everyone from their high school. Many of these familiar strangers write comments supporting them. But what happens if the soldiers start to question why they're in Iraq? And if this is witnessed by high school students from working class communities who the Army intends to recruit?"
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3 comments:
I ran across that article this morning and I thought her observation about the military was interesting as well. I think she's onto something, although I'm not sure how much of it is really about class divisions as it is about perception.
The government is embracing its gross ignorance about social networking technology so it's easy to see why they blocked YouTube and MySpace. The government doesn't know what to do with wikis or blogs or social networking sites and instead of recruiting experts in this new technology, they run from it. (I'm speaking from experience here, I have family who work for the federal government and have come up against these kinds of issues.)
So if you look at a site like MySpace that has a reputation as a gathering place for "riffraff" and compare it with something like Facebook which has strong ties to education and you combine it with only a rudimentary understanding about how social networks function, it's understandable why they would ban MySpace and not Facebook. I'm not saying that the things Ms. Boyd observes in her post aren't real--I grew up on military bases and have seen the dramatic differences in the lives of officers versus enlisted personnel. I'm just saying that I think she might be giving policy makers within the federal government a little bit too much credit.
I think their decision was based less on the idea that MySpace is a tool that will allow soldiers to connect with others and begin to question their mission, and more of a general, "We don't know what the hell this is, but it can't be good," attitude.
I agree that it is likely that the decision was ill-informed, but I also think it was likely that officers made a gut-level decision along the lines of "MySpace is bad, but Facebook can't be bad; I use Facebook (and so do my friends)." I'm under the impression that despite the stylistic markers, the content of Facebook and MySpace are quite similar (especially the "bad" content). Personally, I have spent very little time on either; I'm an ivory tower technocrat so I just blog about them....
Yeah I totally agree, I'm positive that's what happened. I personally had a miserable time in high school and wouldn't dream of revisiting it virtually in MySpace or Facebook.
/cranky grownup
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