A new six-month long study has discovered a class divide amongst teen social networkers who use Facebook and Myspace. According to the study, those who use Facebook "come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college", and that Myspace users "tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education". The study was conducted by Danah Boyd from the School of Information Sciences at UC Berkeley (who probably uses Facebook because she's in school to get herself one of those fancy PhD thingies) who interviewed numerous teenage social networkers.
Boyd says that social networks are "strongly connected to geography, race, and religion" and that those fancy kids with big brains and edjamacations on Facebook "are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities". Where in contrast, Myspace kids are too busy freebasing crack and catching STDs to worry about things like prom and college. Who has time for that crap when you're busy trying to take the perfect profile pic!?1!
Boyd lovingly describes the Myspacers as "the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers" and those who are not part of the "dominant high school popularity paradigm". But no worries, she's not saying those on Facebook are better than the kids on Myspace, she's just saying that: "This division is just another way in which technology is mirroring societal values." .
...And that basically, Myspace is for uneducated losers, like me.
Facebook used to be accessible only by students, so there is a direct correlation here. MySpace has been available, since the beginning, to all kinds of users.
I agree with the comment that the main reason Facebook attracts college students is that it started allowing those outside of college networks to join only in the past few months. This makes the outcome of the study sort of obvious. On the other hand, just because they state that it mimics real-life social setups and that people who more people who use MySpace didn't go to college doesn't mean they're saying that people who MySpace are terrible people. There's no connection to that from what they wrote.
I have to stop laughing at this ludicrous article so I can type. I belong to both MySpace and Facebook. Give me MySpace over Facebook! MySpace is not just kids with problems and Facebook is nothing but snobs, the kind I really disliked when in school.
The people on MySpace aren't just kids. There are many college graduates. I'm one of them. I hate snobbery and that's why after I'm finished with this, I'm dropping my Facebook account.
good journalism skillz you got there. boyd doesn't have her phd yet. isnt hard to find that information out.
So kids who are geeks... aren't looking foward to college? There's a logic gap there.
But it is true that Facebook does prominantly emphasize your education and workplace networks, which might turn off potential users who would rather emphasize their sweet noise rock band or hawt pix...