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.
