Utter nonsense. Overlaying a racist agenda onto the shift from Myspace to Facebook is ridiculous. Neither have any barier to entry.
Abandoning Yahoo! for Google might also shadow the population changes the author alludes to, but does that make google users racist? No.
EDIT: the new original link provides more reasoned context - but even then, the data appears very, very weak [~4 anecdotal data points, all 17-year-olds].
If the point were valid it would be troubling, but I'm not convinced on the evidence provided.
First, read the actual article, not this poorly regurgitated bullshit (http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html). Second, recognize the fact that Danah Boyd does actual research and generally knows her shit. Third, understand that she specifically says that we wouldn't expect to see the problem because there's no barrier to entry, yet we do anyways, which makes it that much more disturbing.
"This quote provides the key to understanding the distinction between MySpace and Facebook. Choice isn't about features of functionality. It's about the social categories in which we live. It's about choosing sites online that reflect "people like me." And it's about seeing the "other" site as the place where the "other" people go.
" Anastasia (17, New York): My school is divided into the 'honors kids,' (I think that is self-explanatory), the 'good not-so-honors kids,' 'wangstas,' (they pretend to be tough and black but when you live in a suburb in Westchester you can't claim much hood), the 'latinos/hispanics,' (they tend to band together even though they could fit into any other groups) and the 'emo kids' (whose lives are allllllways filled with woe). We were all in MySpace with our own little social networks but when Facebook opened its doors to high schoolers, guess who moved and guess who stayed behind… The first two groups were the first to go and then the 'wangstas' split with half of them on Facebook and the rest on MySpace... I shifted with the rest of my school to Facebook and it became the place where the 'honors kids' got together and discussed how they were procrastinating over their next AP English essay."
I joined Facebook because everyone I knew in college had a Facebook account. There was no culturally charged avoidance factor for my MySpace account. MySpace was ugly and felt like a spam website (and when I started receiving fake requests for friendship from random good looking women, it was a spam website) whereas Facebook was clean, usable, another good reason why I switched. The primary motivating factor was simple: "What are my friends using?" I now have a pretty substantial network of friends on Facebook and don't have the /luxury/ of switching. THIS is the issue. You cannot migrate all of your data and still interact with your network of friends on MySpace when you switch to Facebook, so you don't switch. The digital ghetto exists not because of choices made by users, but because of the lack of choices users have once they're effectively locked into a service. I'm sure you could craft a clever analogy to show how this is just like white flight as well, but it just doesn't make sense IMO.
By the same logic we could say that all the hotmail users live in a "digital ghetto", and all of the white upper class folks got the hell out of dodge and went over to that sweet homogenous GMail service where everyone has a PhD. It's ridiculous.
There's no barrier to entry, but there is a barrier to /exit/.
Although most of you call these sites "social networking sites," there's almost no networking going on. People use these sites to connect to the people they know. In other words, even if they could talk across the divide, they might not anyhow.
I'm curious, what about Twitter (which I still don't really understand, but wonder about)? By keeping an eye on trends, it seems that users read comments from everyone, regardless of class, ethnic, or cultural background, or follower status. Or is Twitter's user base too limited to tech early adopters (as all the "most Twitter users post one message and leave" articles suggest), so it makes up a kind of "ghetto" by itself? Alternatively --- even if people use the same system, they just follow their interests and so inherently talk about different things, and therefore do not intersect?
EDIT: Looks like the author discusses this closer to the end, noting that people who followed the Iranian election on Twitter probably do not follow celebrity gossip trends, and vice versa.
By keeping an eye on trends, it seems that users read comments from everyone, regardless of class, ethnic, or cultural background, or follower status.
You assume that people use Twitter to keep an eye on trends. I'm not sure that more casual Twitter users do that. I know a lot of people who use Twitter purely as a status-update mechanism, so they can communicate with their friends, figure out where other people in the office are going for lunch, etc.
I have a strong suspicion that the most-common use case for Twitter is not using it to follow trends or meet new people, and instead is very much like other social "networking" sites -- as an easy way to stay in touch with people the user already knows in real life.
ok, voted down, maybe for not explaining. alli can bring myself to do is say: the point is not barrier to entry but self-segregation.
starting a comment with "Utter nonsense. <article thesis> is rediculous" is entertaining but poor form (in my books). i think there are real issues here that are being belittled simply because sociology and media studies do not fall into the IT/web realm you are comfortable with.
i regret having risen to the bait to begin with. this article, ironcially, cannot be seriously considered in this community.
I think that you actually have a point. It's not so much about racial than about social class divide.
The fact that there's a correlation between class and race in the US and in Europe is a leftover of our recent history.
Facebook is cleaner, more orderly. Myspace is more chaotic and flashy. It's not surprising that people will cling online to sites with some familiarity to their real life environment.
Agreed. The question is, what do they actually do at this Berkman Center? This analysis reminded me of a classmate who wanted to cast Shakespeare as an early marxist. Litterature students can make arguments for anything and the people behind this analysis should find something more meaningful to do with their life.
Facebook started out by targeting the Ivy League. Who is more likely to be upper-class and white than those whose social roots are at Harvard University? The restricted registration of Facebook, coupled with the importance of the network effect (making the site valuable only if you are already friends with educated Ivy League students) clearly dictates the direction of the site's demography as it grows.
I graduated HS in '02, and everyone that went to college (.edu email address) was eventually on Facebook, everyone else was on MySpace. That (huge) demographic difference coupled with the poor and unpredictable interface for MySpace signaled their fate a long time ago in my opinion. This paper from a couple of years ago tackles the issue of class division between the two: http://bit.ly/classdivisions
I agree; facebook at first had to have similar differences being a 'college' only community - but since it has opened up I bet it has came back to a similar balance to any other site.
Is the article attributing a racist agenda? Or is it talking about an empirical reality. If the average facebook user is indeed more educated than the average myspace user, it's certainly worth talking about. Even if it is not the case, it certainly seems to be the general perception--as a friend of mine recently said: "myspace if for pedophiles and dropouts, facebook is for everybody else."
Why? The only difference was that white flight had a quantifiable cost barrier preventing minorities from leaving decaying inner cities as well. She's saying that this is disturbing because it's still happening, even without that financial barrier.
What if I reject the premise? I've yet to see a compelling argument as to why this type of self-selection is truly harmful. Why is it a problem if folks of similar culture choose to utilize the same tools? This idea that we should all live in close exposure to diverse opinion is nice, but goes against my basic instinct. I don't want to spend my time defending my cultural choices to folks who disagree. I don't need my life to look like an internet message board.
Well, because class stratification denies opportunities to people who are born to the wrong parents, drastically reducing the pool of innate talent that can actually be applied to solving society's problems, maybe. Or because lack of interchange between social groups brings those groups to misunderstand and fear one another, leading to violence between them (Japanese internment camps being an example inside the US in living memory). Or because groupthink results in intellectual stagnation and collective delusions.
It's true that there are a disproportionate number of upper-class twits on HN, while the twits on Reddit are mostly lower-class. But I don't hang out here because of the upper-class twits. I hang out here because it's a little less vulnerable to, among other things, delusional groupthink than Digg or Reddit.
First, Upper-Class Chad uses MySpace. Later, he switches to Facebook, but he doesn't delete his account. His acquaintance Lower-Class Rodney is his friend on MySpace. Rodney worked as a line manager for a construction firm until getting laid off a few months ago. Rodney still only uses MySpace, because Chad didn't post on MySpace about Facebook. Chad links to all his upper-class friends on Facebook; many had never joined MySpace in the first place. If Rodney were on Facebook, he would occasionally interact with them, but he doesn't. He also doesn't see when Chad updates his Facebook status to say that his dad's company is looking for experienced line managers in their bill-collection firm.
That's the sense in which social stratification denies opportunities, whether it's manifested through YASNSs or other means.
But access to Facebook isn't denied to Rodney, and why would Chad not add him as a friend on Facebook, too?
I am also not friends with everyone on Facebook, so I guess a lot of opportunities are denied to me (because Chad doesn't tell me about the job offers either). It's a cruel world.
Wouldn't the most likely explanation simply be that the connections on social networks tend to mirror connections in real life? I think there was a study posted to HN recently that basically said instead of connecting to everyone and their dog, connections tend to stay local.
When Facebook first started becoming really popular (as in, internationally) I was very pro-Myspace exactly because of its "ghetto"-ness (not in the racial sense, but in terms of atmosphere). Facebook was dull and sterile, whereas MySpace had music, you could look at profiles of people who hadn't friended you, you could put crazy layouts on your profile, and.. well.. MySpace was just 101x more interesting.
Thing is, it's still true. Facebook is dull and sterile, MySpace is still fertile and full of musicians.. and yet now I'm on Facebook and never use MySpace. Go figure!
Everyone thinks it's cool to live in a neighborhood where your neighbors blast hip-hop all hours of day and night until they have to sleep. Everyone thinks MySpace is cool until your browser crashes or slows down, or you strain your eyes reading yellow on orange, or you hear the first 3 seconds of some crappy hip hop song that clashes with what you already have playing on iTunes.
Sadly, Facebook isn't dull and sterile anymore. I can't spend a minute there without someone asking me to join their mafia or pushing some dumb "which care bear are you" quiz on me when I just want to chill out and exchange messages with my friends and comment on my fruit smoothie this morning.
" Everyone thinks MySpace is cool until your browser crashes or slows down, or you strain your eyes reading yellow on orange, or you hear the first 3 seconds of some crappy hip hop song that clashes with what you already have playing on iTunes."
So you are saying that black MySpace users tend to have a bad taste in colors and music, and therefore the white users leave? Whereas surely white users only create tasteful profiles?
Or maybe MySpace in general sucks, and therefore people are leaving irrespective of race.
One thing though: MySpace seems to be the standard site for music and bands, so perhaps "races" who are more preoccupied with music would tend to hang out there more.
MySpace sucks because it gives users far more control than they ought to have over their pages.
Facebook maintains high quality and a coherent feel by realizing that most people couldn't design their way out of a paper bag, and only giving users very basic, high-level control over their page.
IMO, everything flows from that. MySpace feels like Geocities: total amateur hour. Even if you had the exact same group of people (and I do agree there are demographic differences between MySpace and FB, I just don't think they're that relevant), Facebook would still be easier and more pleasant to use.
I thought it was a given that MySpace is the epitome of ugliness. So my point was, maybe the "migration" has just the superficial reasons of ugliness and suckiness, not the huge society-psychobabble reasons.
Sadly, Facebook isn't dull and sterile anymore. I can't spend a minute there without someone asking me to join their mafia or pushing some dumb "which care bear are you" quiz on me
To be fair, that's mostly dependent on the sort of company you keep, and you can turn off the notifications for all that sort of stuff anyway - it makes FB actually usable :)
I know, I just thought it was a lot better before it became a platform for third party apps, and when it had built in features that were useful to the college student core community (like registering which classes you had and searching for other students in your section).
I hear the argument about browsers blowing up on MySpace all over the interwebs, but it really depends on the company you keep, to some degree. In other words, they give people freedom and some pages are horrendous, but some people's profiles are interesting and really well designed.
From the notes of the talk which others have cited: "If you don't know people who are different than you, you don't trust them. Think about this in the context of the politics around gay rights. The #1 predictor for how someone will side in issues of gay rights is whether or not they know someone who is gay."
Even if causality works in that direction, and you could eventually make bigots into better people by hanging around with them, who would want to spend their time that way?
We spend time with people we like and respect. If you regard that as a problem, what's the solution?
What I find ironic and laughable at the same time is the article doesn't mention usability of the software deployed by the two sites and how that might actually factor in. Assuming it has a racial connotation is absurd. IMO, Facebook has a better interface, making it easier on the eyes, makes use of less ads, etc. etc. -- any part of that racial? I'd like to answer by using more derogatory words in this space because the assumption by this author is simply ignorant, but then I'd be lowering myself to this author's level.
You should read the original, not the craptastic blog summary.
It does indeed mention the usability differences between the two sites, then goes on to discuss how the prime deciding factor between a teenager using one site or the other is rather: "Simply put, they go where their friends are."
Further it's not ascribing racist motivations to anyone's choice of social network, instead making the observation that, by going where their friends are, existing socio-economic divides are being perpetuated into social networks.
That's an argument that's in a way true, but it's also a non-sequitir comparison: in order to live in a middle class suburb (or especially a middle/upper class section of an urban area, e.g. Pacific Heights in San Francisco) there's a very high monetary barrier to entry. There's no monetary barrier to entry for Facebook (especially since it's no longer just for college students-- which may have been the seedling of the current phenomenon).
Facebook once required an .edu email address, starting from #1 ranked Harvard, opening access gradually down university rankings until it was free for all people.
It's true that anyone can open a Facebook account now, but would be impossible to open a Facebook account with several years of accumulated use if you didn't attend these selected universities.
I can think of lots of situations where people self-segregate along economic or cultural lines, without much in the way of external pressure to do so. I'd imagine it has a lot to do with viewing oneself as part of a group, and wanting to spend time with people whose interests and background are similar, have similar values, etc.
I'd think this is something that academics have studied already; it shouldn't come as a great surprise that when people are released into some new environment they gravitate towards others similar to themselves.
I say this because in a marketing sense when you look the marketing cycle - innovators, early adopters, late adopters, early majority, late majority and early and late laggards you would see with new tech products that those who are economically challenged do not fall (they are not the majority) into the first two or three stages. It's more economic and educational status is the factor over race.
Also has anyone ever did a race poll here at Hacker News? I went to TechCrunch event and 95% of those in attendance were white dudes, while rest of percentage split between women and minorities. I'm not trying to inflame anything here but there is a huge disparity of the minorities this article speaks of in Silicon Valley.
I've always suspected Facebook was run by fascist white supremacists. How come you're not allowed to change your background colour from the prescribed white?!
Seriously though, nobody leaves a social networking site because "it's overcrowded with blacks". You wouldn't even leave such a site if it was overcrowded with trolls and racists. It's not a forum or some shared community resource - you only ever interact with your friends, and there's no such thing as overcrowding (as long as the servers keep up). The fail is strong in this report.
"Seriously though, nobody leaves a social networking site because "it's overcrowded with blacks". You wouldn't even leave such a site if it was overcrowded with trolls and racists. It's not a forum or some shared community resource - you only ever interact with your friends, and there's no such thing as overcrowding (as long as the servers keep up). The fail is strong in this report."
Sigh. How do allegedly well-educated, intelligent, open-minded people end up jumping to conclusions like this?
Read the original talk and the history of the research behind it. There are racial and class-based divides on social-networking sites, but the implication is not that anyone's (necessarily) a racist or a fascist or whatever convenient strawman you'd like to set up instead of actually using your brain.
I'm honestly not sure there is an implication, aside from pointing out the obvious fact that access to the Internet is not a panacea for existing social divisions. People online seek out and interact with people like themselves, just like people offline.
"Sigh. How do allegedly well-educated, intelligent, open-minded people end up jumping to conclusions like this?"
Who's alleging anything about being well-educated, intelligent or open-minded? Keep your prejudices at the door, thank you.
Seriously though, Boyd suggests "a modern incarnation of white flight". An incendiary accusation! What is "white flight" if not racism? "Oh no, don't get me wrong, I'm not a racist. I just want my kids to grow up in a neighbourhood with people of their own colour." Is she deliberately using that term to court controversy?
Could you point me to that history, because I can't see it (as I said in another comment). I think Boyd is mostly talking about her personal impressions.
There may be some basis for the racial argument, but in my opinion a lot of people weren't interested in MySpace because it used to be just a fancy online scrapbook. Before I joined Facebook, I had the wrong impression that it would be the same thing. Fortunately I was happy to find that Facebook wasn't a scrapbook, but instead some tool that lets you know the exact stuff people are doing, feeling, and thinking everyday by the hour. To me this was the main reason for the migration.
Somehow I never get to read real numbers from Dana Boyd. The only number is "... who has spent so and so many years of studying kids on social networks".
I think she hit on one thesis that makes for good "linkbaity" newspaper articles and now she is milking it. In other words, it is marketing, not research.
Since I am not researching the subject, I really don't want to bother her. But since that thesis has been around for quite a while now, surely she has published some papers somewhere?
It is just that I remember the original "article", which was just a blog entry (was it mnths ago, or years already?). But the press loved it and eventually what just was some musings in a blog became "scientific research" in the media - that is what I mean by linkbaity, it is just the kind of think newspapers love to write about. That is not Boyd's fault of course - it's just that after all that time, I would have expected to really see the blog article be turned into something more solid.
If she can make a living that way, also I don't have anything against it. I just felt it lacked substance for Hacker News.
Edit: these are her papers http://www.danah.org/papers/ - I tried one that sounded like it might contain numbers, but I didn't find many. Some words on methodology, though (for Friendster, but still). Anyway, her kind of research just is not my taste (too much talking).
People meet each other before their thoughts on gay rights, or really any thoughts are known. I would say physical location would be more of an indicator of whether or not you'll meet someone gay. If you go to the Castro for example, it's much more likely you'll meet someone gay than if you are ... well, I dunno, somewhere there aren't a lot of gay people.
