Viewing American Class Divisions Through MySpace and Facebook

Viewing American Class Divisions Through MySpace and Facebook

A highly suggested read by Danah Boyd. Here’s the kernel of the argument:

The division around MySpace and Facebook is just another way in which technology is mirroring societal values. Embedded in that is a challenge to a lot of our assumptions about who does what. The “good” kids are doing more “bad” things than we are willing to acknowledge (because they’re the pride and joy of upwardly mobile parents). And, guess what? They’re doing those same bad things online and offline. At the same time, the language and style of the “bad” kids offends most upwardly mobile adults. We see this offline as well.

Of course, this shouldn’t come as a real surprise given the fact that Facebook started as a college-student-only website (originating at Harvard). The far more disturbing conclusion, which this article does not get into, is the class stratification in regards to what Facebook supplements (in the Rosseauist sense of the word): education itself, which can be observed apropos the aforementioned closed-community (Facebook) and the inherent class divisions it has subsequently produced. But rather than attempting to mediate or agitate class divisions vis-a-vis social networking websites, the digital-symbolic divide should serve as a warning to bridge the class-gap in American education. The perfect representation of this socioeconomic (and racial) divide is the Duke rape case, the outcome of which, tragically, was both obvious and expected.

(Thanks to Eric Tobis.)