Link: http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
danah boyd
June 24, 2007
Citation: boyd, danah. 2007. "Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace ." Apophenia Blog Essay. June 24 . http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html<
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(If you have comments, please add them to the related entry on my blog. Thank you.)
(I have also written a response to the critiques of this essay. This should answer some of the confusions introduced by this essay.)
Over the last six months, I've noticed an increasing number of press
articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook.
That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but
it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American
teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred.
Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to
Facebook. Who goes where gets kinda sticky... probably because it seems
to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.
I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been
traipsing through the country talking to teens and I've been seeing
this transition for the past 6-9 months but I'm having a hard time
putting into words. Americans aren't so good at talking about class and
I'm definitely feeling that discomfort. It's sticky, it's
uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don't have the language for
marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally
descriptive, but in being so, it's also hugely problematic. I don't
have the language to get at what I want to say, but I decided it needed
to be said anyhow. I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all
and be done with it, but instead, I'm going to face the stickiness and
see if I can get my thoughts across. Hopefully it works.
For the academics reading this, I want to highlight that this is not
an academic article. It is not trying to be. It is based on my
observations in the field, but I'm not trying to situate or theorize
what is going on. I've chosen terms meant to convey impressions, but I
know that they are not precise uses of these terms. Hopefully, one day,
I can get the words together to actually write an academic article
about this topic, but I felt as though this is too important of an
issue to sit on while I find the words. So I wrote it knowing that it
would piss many off. The academic side of me feels extremely guilty
about this; the activist side of me finds it too critical to go
unacknowledged.
Enter the competition
When MySpace launched in 2003, it was primarily used by
20/30-somethings (just like Friendster before it). The bands began
populating the site by early 2004 and throughout 2004, the average age
slowly declined. It wasn't until late 2004 that teens really started
appearing en masse on MySpace and 2005 was the year that MySpace became
the "in thing" for teens.
Facebook launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only site. It slowly expanded
to welcome people with .edu accounts from a variety of different
universities. In mid-2005, Facebook opened its doors to high school
students, but it wasn't that easy to get an account because you needed
to be invited. As a result, those who were in college tended to invite
those high school students that they liked. Facebook was strongly
framed as the "cool" thing that college students did. So, if you want
to go to college (and particularly a top college), you wanted to get on
Facebook badly. Even before high school networks were possible, the
moment seniors were accepted to a college, they started hounding the
college sysadmins for their .edu account. The message was clear:
college was about Facebook.
For all of 2005 and most of 2006, MySpace was the cool thing for
high school teens and Facebook was the cool thing for college students.
This is not to say that MySpace was solely high school or Facebook
solely college, but there was a dominating age division that played out
in the cultural sphere.
When Facebook opened to everyone last September, it became
relatively easy for any high school student to join (and then they
simply had to get permission to join their high school network). This
meant that many more high school teens did join, much to the chagrin
and horror of college students who had already begun writing
about their lack of interest in having HS students on "their" site.
Still, even with the rise of high school students, Facebook was framed
as being about college. This was what was in the press. This was what
college students said. Facebook is what the college kids did. Not
surprisingly, college-bound high schoolers desperately wanted in.
In addition to the college framing, the press coverage of MySpace as
dangerous and sketchy alienated "good" kids. Facebook seemed to provide
an ideal alternative. Parents weren't nearly as terrified of Facebook
because it seemed "safe" thanks to the network-driven structure. (Of
course, I've seen more half-naked, drink-carrying high school students
on Facebook than on MySpace, but we won't go there.)
As this past school year progressed, the division around usage
became clearer. In trying to look at it, I realized that it was
primarily about class.
Socio-economic divisions
In sociology, Nalini Kotamraju
has argued that constructing arguments around "class" is extremely
difficult in the United States. Terms like "working class" and "middle
class" and "upper class" get all muddled quickly. She argues that class
divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and
social stratification than with income. In other words, all of my
anti-capitalist college friends who work in cafes and read Engels are
not working class just because they make $14K a year and have no
benefits. Class divisions in the United States have more to do with
social networks (the real ones, not FB/MS), social capital, cultural
capital, and attitudes than income. Not surprisingly, other
demographics typically discussed in class terms are also a part of this
lifestyle division. Social networks are strongly connected to
geography, race, and religion; these are also huge factors in lifestyle
divisions and thus "class."
I'm not doing justice to her arguments but it makes sense. My
friends who are making $14K in cafes are not of the same class as the
immigrant janitor in Oakland just because the share the same income
bracket. Their lives are quite different. Unfortunately, with this
framing, there aren't really good labels to demarcate the class
divisions that do exist. For this reason, I will attempt to delineate
what we see on social network sites in stereotypical, descriptive terms
meant to evoke an image.
The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now
going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize
education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call
hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They
are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world
dictated by after school activities.
MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens,
"burnouts," "alternative kids," "art @#!$," punks, emos, goths,
gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant
high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go
to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school.
These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after
schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on
MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at
school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.
In order to demarcate these two groups, let's call the first group
of teens "hegemonic teens" and the second group "subaltern teens."
(Yes, I know that these words have academic and political valence. I
couldn't find a good set of terms so feel free to suggest alternate
labels.) These terms are sloppy at best because the division isn't
clear, but it should at least give us terms with which to talk about
the two groups.
The division is cleanest in communities where the predator panic hit
before MySpace became popular. In much of the midwest, teens heard
about Facebook and MySpace at the same time. They were told that
MySpace was bad while Facebook was key for college students seeking to
make friends at college. I go into schools where the school is split
between the Facebook users and the MySpace users. On the coasts and in
big cities, things are more murky than elsewhere. MySpace became
popular through the bands and fans dynamic before the predator panic
kicked in. Its popularity on the coasts and in the cities predated
Facebook's launch in high schools. Many hegemonic teens are still using
MySpace because of their connections to participants who joined in the
early days, yet they too are switching and tend to maintain accounts on
both. For the hegemonic teens in the midwest, there wasn't a MySpace to
switch from so the "switch" is happening much faster. None of the teens
are really switching from Facebook to MySpace, although there are some
hegemonic teens who choose to check out MySpace to see what happens
there even though their friends are mostly on Facebook.
Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have
an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and
they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy,
immature, and "so middle school." They prefer the "clean" look of
Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is "so lame."
What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as "glitzy" or
"bling" or "fly" (or what my generation would call "phat") by subaltern
teens. Terms like "bling" come out of hip-hop culture where showy,
sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and
feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it
does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in
the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while
commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I'm sure that a visual analyst
would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are
more than simply the "eye of the beholder" - they are culturally
narrated and replicated. That "clean" or "modern" look of Facebook is
akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house
(that I admit I'm drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace
resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I
suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being
reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.
I should note here that aesthetics do divide MySpace users. The look
and feel that is acceptable amongst average Latino users is quite
different from what you see the subculturally-identified outcasts
using. Amongst the emo teens, there's a push for simple
black/white/grey backgrounds and simplistic layouts. While I'm using
the term "subaltern teens" to lump together non-hegemonic teens, the
lifestyle divisions amongst the subalterns are quite visible on MySpace
through the aesthetic choices of the backgrounds. The aesthetics issue
is also one of the forces that drives some longer-term users away from
MySpace.
While teens on Facebook all know about MySpace, not all MySpace
users have heard of Facebook. In particular, subaltern teens who go to
school exclusively with other subaltern teens are not likely to have
heard of it. Subaltern teens who go to more mixed-class schools see
Facebook as "what the good kids do" or "what the preps do." They have
various labels for these hegemonic teens but they know the division,
even if they don't have words for it. Likewise, in these types of
schools, the hegemonic teens see MySpace as "where the bad kids go."
"Good" and "bad" seem to be the dominant language used to divide
hegemonic and subaltern teens in mixed-class environments. At the same
time, most schools aren't actually that mixed.
To a certain degree, the lack of familiarity amongst certain
subaltern kids is not surprising. Teens from poorer backgrounds who are
on MySpace are less likely to know people who go to universities. They
are more likely to know people who are older than them, but most of
their older friends, cousins, and co-workers are on MySpace. It's the
cool working class thing and it's the dominant SNS at community
colleges. These teens are more likely to be interested in activities
like shows and clubs and they find out about them through MySpace. The
subaltern teens who are better identified as "outsiders" in a hegemonic
community tend to be very aware of Facebook. Their choice to use
MySpace instead of Facebook is a rejection of the hegemonic values (and
a lack of desire to hang out with the preps and jocks even online).
Class divisions in military use
A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was
a very interesting move because the division in the military reflects
the division in high schools. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on
Facebook. Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it's not
the SNS of choice for 18-year old soldiers, a group that is primarily
from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace. The
officers, many of whom have already received college training, are
using Facebook. The military ban appears to replicate the class
divisions that exist throughout the military. I can't help but wonder
if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in
the military are leaking information or spending too much time online
or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage.
MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with
their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers' MySpace profiles,
I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war,
pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell.
Over the last year, I've watched more and more profiles emerge from
soldiers who aren't quite sure what they are doing in Iraq. I don't
have the data to confirm whether or not a significant shift has
occurred but it was one of those observations that just made me think.
And then the ban happened. I can't help but wonder if part of the goal
is to cut off communication between current soldiers and the group that
the military hopes to recruit. Many young soldiers' profiles aren't
public so it's not about making a bad public impression. That said,
young soldiers tend to have reasonably large networks because they tend
to accept friend requests of anyone that they knew back home which
means that they're connecting to almost everyone from their high
school. Many of these familiar strangers write comments supporting
them. But what happens if the soldiers start to question why they're in
Iraq? And if this is witnessed by high school students from working
class communities who the Army intends to recruit?
Thoughts and meta thoughts
I have been reticent about writing about this dynamic even though
I've been tracking it for a good six months now. I don't have the
language for what I'm seeing and I'm concerned about how it's going to
be interpreted. I can just see the logic: if society's "good" kids are
going to Facebook and the "bad" kids are going to MySpace, clearly
MySpace is the devil, right? ::shudder:: It's so not that easy. Given a
lack of language for talking about this, my choice of "hegemonic" and
"subaltern" was intended to at least insinuate a different way of
looking at this split.
The division around MySpace and Facebook is just another way in
which technology is mirroring societal values. Embedded in that is a
challenge to a lot of our assumptions about who does what. The "good"
kids are doing more "bad" things than we are willing to acknowledge
(because they're the pride and joy of upwardly mobile parents). And,
guess what? They're doing those same bad things online and offline. At
the same time, the language and style of the "bad" kids offends most
upwardly mobile adults. We see this offline as well. I've always been
fascinated watching adults walk to the other side of the street when a
group of black kids sporting hip-hop style approach. The aesthetics
alone offend and most privileged folks project the worst ideas onto any
who don that style. When I see a divide like this, I worry because it
reproduced the idea that the "good" kids are good and that Facebook
participation is good.
Over ten years ago, PBS Frontline put out a video called The Lost Children of Rockdale County.
The film certainly has its issues but it does a brilliant job of
capturing how, given complete boredom and a desire for validation, many
of the "good" kids will engage in some of the most shocking
behaviors... and their parents are typically unaware. By and large,
I've found that parents try to curtail such activities by restricting
youth even more. This doesn't stop the desire for attention and thus
the behaviors continue, but they get pushed further underground and
parents become less in-touch with their "good" kids.
While I think it's important to acknowledge that some of the "good"
kids aren't that good, I don't want to imply that the inverse is true.
Many of them are. But many of the subaltern teens that I talk with have
their heads on much tighter than the hegemonic teens. The hegemonic
teens do know how to put on a show for most adults (making it more fun
for me to interview them and try to work through the walls that they
initially offer me). As a society, we have strong class divisions and
we project these values onto our kids. MySpace and Facebook seem to be
showcasing this division quite well. My hope in writing this out is to
point out that many of our assumptions are problematic and the internet
often reinforces our views instead of challenging them.
People often ask me if I'm worried about teens today. The answer is
yes, but it's not because of social network sites. With the hegemonic
teens, I'm very worried about the stress that they're under, the lack
of mobility and healthy opportunities for play and socialization, and
the hyper-scheduling and surveillance. I'm worried about their
unrealistic expectations for becoming rich and famous, their lack of
work ethic after being pampered for so long, and the lack of
opportunities that many of them have to even be economically stable let
alone better off than their parents. I'm worried about how locking
teens indoors coupled with a fast food/junk food advertising machine
has resulted in a decrease in health levels across the board which will
just get messy as they are increasingly unable to afford health
insurance. When it comes to ostracized teens, I'm worried about the
reasons why society has ostracized them and how they will react to
ongoing criticism from hegemonic peers. I cringe every time I hear of
another Columbine, another Virgina Tech, another site of horror when an
outcast teen lashes back at the hegemonic values of society.
I worry about the lack of opportunities available to poor teens from
uneducated backgrounds. I'm worried about how Wal-Mart Nation has
destroyed many of the opportunities for meaningful working class labor
as these youth enter the workforce. I'm worried about what a prolonged
war will mean for them. I'm worried about how they've been told that to
succeed, they must be a famous musician or sports player. I'm worried
about how gangs provide the only meaningful sense of community that
many of these teens will ever know.
Given the state of what I see in all sorts of neighborhoods, I'm
amazed at how well teens are coping and I think that technology has a
lot to do with that. Teens are using social network sites to build
community and connect with their peers. They are creating publics for
socialization. And through it, they are showcasing all of the good,
bad, and ugly of today's teen life. Much of it isn't pretty, but it
ain't pretty offline either. Still, it makes my heart warm when I see
something creative or engaged or reflective. There is good out there
too.
It breaks my heart to watch a class divide play out in the
technology. I shouldn't be surprised - when orkut grew popular in
India, the caste system was formalized within the system by the users.
But there's something so strange about watching a generation slice
themselves in two based on class divisions or lifestyles or whatever
you want to call these socio-structural divisions.
In the 70s, Paul Willis analyzed British working class youth and he wrote a book called Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs.
He argued that working class teens will reject hegemonic values because
it's the only way to continue to be a part of the community that they
live in. In other words, if you don't know that you will succeed if you
make a run at jumping class, don't bother - you'll lose all of your
friends and community in the process. His analysis has such strong
resonance in American society today. I just wish I knew how to fix it.
I clearly don't have the language to comfortably talk about what's
going on, but I think that this issue is important and needs to be
considered. I feel as though the implications are huge. Marketers have
already figured this out - they know who to market to where. Policy
creators have figured this out - they know how to control different
populations based on where they are networking. Have social workers
figured it out? Or educators? What does it mean that our culture of
fear has further divided a generation? What does it mean that, in a
society where we can't talk about class, we can see it play out online?
And what does it mean in a digital world where no one's supposed to
know you're a dog, we can guess your class background based on the
tools you use?
Anyhow, I don't know where to go with this, but I wanted to get it
out there. So here it is. MySpace and Facebook are new representations
of the class divide in American youth. Le sigh.
(I have also written a response to the critiques of this essay. This should answer some of the confusions introduced by this essay.)
Methodolological notes
For those unfamiliar with my work, let me provide a
bit of methodological background. I have been engaged in ethnographic
research on social network sites since February 2003 when I began
studying the practices that emerged on Friendster. I followed the
launch and early adoption of numerous social network sites, including
Tribe.net, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Dodgeball, and
Orkut. In late 2004, I decided to move away from studying social
network sites to studying youth culture just in time for youth to flock
to MySpace.
The practice of 'ethnography' is hard to describe in
a bounded form, but ethnography is basically about living and breathing
a particular culture, its practices, and its individuals. There are
some countables. For example, I have analyzed over 10,000 MySpace
profiles, clocked over 2000 hours surfing and observing what happens on
MySpace, and formally interviewed 90 teens in 7 states with a variety
of different backgrounds and demographics. But that's only the tip of
the iceberg. I ride buses to observe teens; I hang out at fast food
joints and malls. I talk to parents, teachers, marketers, politicians,
pastors, and technology creators. I read, I observe, I document.
One of the biggest problems with studying youth
culture is that it's a moving target, constantly shifting based on a
variety of social and cultural forces. While I had been keeping an eye
on Facebook simply because of my long-term interest in social network
sites, I had to really start taking it seriously in the fall of 2006
when teens started telling me about how they were leaving MySpace to
join Facebook or joining Facebook as their first social network site.
While social network sites are in vogue, not everyone
uses them. When PEW collected data in December 2005, it found that 55%
of American teens 12-17 admitted to having a SNS profile in front of
their parents. 70% of girls 15-17. These numbers are low, but we don't
know how low. In the field, I have found that everyone knows about them
and has an opinion of them. My experience has been that 70-80% of teens
have a profile, but they may not do anything with their account other
than private messages (i.e. glorified email). The percentage who are
truly active is more like 50. Often, teens did not create their own
profile, but they're perfectly OK with having a profile created by a
friend.
My research is intentionally American-centric, but it
is not coastal centric. I have done formal interviews in California,
Washington, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts.
When I do this, I do not capture parents' income but I do get parents'
education level and job. In each of these communities, I have spent
time roaming the streets and talking informally with people of all
ages. I have analyzed profiles from all 50 states (and DC and Puerto
Rico). I use the high school data from these profiles and juxtapose
them with federal information on high school voucher numbers to get a
sense of the SES of the school. I have spent time in cities, suburbs,
small towns, and some rural regions. There are weaknesses to my data
collection. I have spent too little time in rural environments and too
little time in the deep south. How I find teens to formally interview
varies based on region, but it is not completely random. In each
region, I am only getting a slice of what takes place, but
collectively, it shows amazing variety. The MySpace profiles that I
analyze are random. I do not have access to Facebook profiles, although
I have spent an excessive amount of time browsing high schools to see
what kind of numbers show up, even if I can't see the actual profiles.
Again, none of this is perfect, but it helps me paint a qualitative
portrait of what's going on.
(I have also written a response to the critiques of this essay. This should answer some of the confusions introduced by this essay.)
