Subscribe"MySpace is no longer cool. As a matter of fact, its number of users is now one-half the size of rival Facebook. Is this because MySpace is too black for the rest of America? Teenage Internet users may hold the answer. High-schoolers report their use of the social-networking giants along racial lines—MySpace is seen as “black,” while Facebook is “white.”
Social network sites are not like email where it doesn't matter if you're on Hotmail or Yahoo. When you choose MySpace or Facebook, you can't send messages to people on the other site. You can't Friend people on the other site. There's a cultural wall between users. And if there's no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.
At the end of the day, their choice ultimately comes down to: Where are my friends? They’ll marry it across other lines—I like the aesthetics of this more, or the bands that I listen to are on this one, or this is the ‘cool hip’ one, this is the ‘new one’—but if their friends weren’t there, they wouldn’t be there.So it's friends following friends. But why would their friends be on one but not the other? Not because of aesthetics, or bands, or the "coolness," apparently, but because their friends are on one but not the other. Circular reasoning, how I love thee. And how does this correlate with black/whiteness? At all?
I’m trying to more deeply theorize the elements around white flight, but part of it is dealing with that social messiness. And while that term certainly has racial connotations, there is much more to what is happening around “white flight” than that.So… it's not about race? And what the fuck is social messiness?
Social network sites are not like email where it doesn't matter if you're on Hotmail or Yahoo. When you choose MySpace or Facebook, you can't send messages to people on the other site. You can't Friend people on the other site. There's a cultural wall between users. And if there's no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.Actually that's ridiculous because people can have accounts on both sites
The problem with describing Myspace as "ghetto" and Facebook as "preppy" is that Myspace was a crappy mess before Facebook ever existed. Facebook took off primarily because it was the first competitor with a clean, neat aesthetic that didn't buckle under server loads (I remember Friendster gaining some traction, but then having continuous server problems).Actually friendster was around before Myspace. In fact you could say myspace took off because it was a version of friendster that wouldn't crash (probably because they ditched the whole 'circle of friends' thing -- everyone was in everyone elses 'extended network')
Boyd grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Altoona, Pennsylvania,[7] and attended Manheim Township High School from 1992–96. According to her website, she was born danah michele mattas, "spelled all funky because my mother loved typographical balance"[1]. But after her mother's divorce and subsequent remarriage, her family changed their names to Beard. Once she reached college though, she chose to change to her maternal grandfather's name, Boyd, as her own last name and eventually settled on giving her name as danah boyd, "to reflect my mother's original balancing and to satisfy my own political irritation at the importance of capitalization."Also Hipster Alert
I'm not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever, and Facebook is all... not all the people that have Facebook are mature, but its supposed to be like oh we're more mature. … MySpace is just old.Which leads to…
In fact, if we want to get to the crux of what unfolded, we might as well face an uncomfortable reality... What happened was modern day "white flight."…say wha?…
Those who deserted MySpace did so by "choice" but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.Funny, I saw plenty of people talking about features, ease-of-use, and a perceived adultness of Facebook v MySpace.
This dynamic was furthered by the press, an institution that stems from privilege and tends to reflect the lives of a more privileged class of people.Brother, could you spare a fucking break?
They narrated MySpace as the dangerous underbelly of the Internet while Facebook was the utopian savior. And here we get back to Kat's point: MySpace has become the "ghetto" of the digital landscape.Well, I'm no ethnographer, but I'm pretty the word and usage of ghetto by the 14 year-old quoted is not the same as (small d)anah (small b)oyd's.
It should be noted that a lot of what people say about Myspace in this thread--it's noisy, garish trash, etc.--is very similar to the historic reactions to jazz, bebop, and hip hop. I remark on this likeness without passing any judgment or making any accusations; I also think Myspace is garish and not user friendly, but I think it's important to be wary about citing to a second cultural cause as if it removed any tie to the first cultural cause, particularly when that cause is one that people, even on metafilter, are terrified of talking about (race).johnasdf: it was the quantitative types who pointed out that blacks were actually represented in a larger percentage on Facebook than MySpace. To reiterate the points in here the comments you seem to have missed: the use of "white flight" to describe myspace was highly loaded. Many, if not most, of us talking here did have myspace pages until myspace became a mess: and not in a "cultural" sense-- there are certain aesthetic and usability standards when it comes to web applications that transcend race, class, and culture. Not coming to terms with these simple facts is just setting oneself up for disaster or, at least, self-flagelation about why no one wants to use a crappy web site. There is a genuine reluctance from danah and many of her defenders to "pass judgment" on the visual and usability shortcomings of the average myspace page-- I believe that this reluctance is wrong and uselessly forces a lot of hand-wringing about "culture" when when some things can be seen as being objectively good or bad at serving one's goals.
the tone throughout seems to be that of a plucky mom who's genuinely concerned about injustice.I'm not saying that this is true about danah herself, but invoking the stereotype of the "plucky mom" brings to mind someone who means well but isn't that well-informed and is desperate to come across as being "with it" while actually coming across in a fairly embarrassing and meddling manner.
Sometimes the loud, crowded, ugly, noisy, "badly" designed sites win. It's not always clear why -- cultural reasons, the ugly one is what people are used to, what we see as ugly has meaning and utility to devotees of the site that we just don't see. It's hard. This isn't to say you can't make things better, just that it's never as easy as it looks at first. A "clean" FB style design would probably kill MySpace.I suppose part of this gets into what is "successful." Pretty much everyone who discovered HTML right after the blink tag was introduced started using it in their web pages. Lots of people have stories about how their early web pages were huge messes. Geocities was notorious (yet successful by some metrics). MySpace allows people to hang themselves in a way that, honestly, most people hanged themselves given the opportunity when they were first starting out. However, I don't think there's anything bad about saying that one form of design is objectively good and the other is reflective of an immature design sensibility (eg, where you can't read the text because of poor color/graphics choice, etc.)
Finally (and this is getting a little off topic) some of the most successful and frequently used individual pages on these internets are, objectively speaking, hideous. And yet ... there they are. (I'm thinking MySpace profile pages, eBay item pages, Craigslist, Amazon product pages). There's something there.Hm. I'd argue that craigslist has one of the better interfaces. It's the anti-myspace. Makes you wonder how craigslist fits into the "subaltern/hegemonic" framework proposed by danah.
Oh, hmm that was posted by me.
Which shows black people made up 7.4% of the sample, while making up 7.9% of facebook users, meaning they are slightly over represented, at least among this dataset, 18-19 year old college students. Interestingly, it was Hispanics, not African Americans who were more likely to use myspace users then facebook users, The only group with a statistically relevant larger share of the myspace pie then their share of the facebook pie. Asians dropped the most, while Whites and blacks had similar figures for both sites.
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posted by kmz at 12:30 PM on September 29 [65 favorites]