MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
inquisitr.com
inquisitr.com
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure that doesn't make any sense in this context. Did you mean something else?
[edit]
I see where you were coming from in the OP: "homophily".
I believe that the URL of this news item should be switched to point to the original paper.
" 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."
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.
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.
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.
How networks start out matters.
I called us white blight.
After all, why are we here on HN instead of Digg or Reddit? I'm sure a demographic analysis of that switchover would yield similar results.
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.
Though I suppose as a researcher you could have some fun by creating fake accounts with different profile pictures and start adding friends randomly.
That's the sense in which social stratification denies opportunities, whether it's manifested through YASNSs or other means.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Why couldn't one conclude that the #1 predictor for whether or not someone will meet someone who is gay is how they side in issues of gay rights?
No idea what "the Castro" is, but it sounds as if somebody who doesn't like gay people would be less likely to go there.