Kind of funny, but kind of not…an interesting question is broached here. Are there class division emerging online? Read about this microcosm and lets discuss whether it is translatable to the entire internet and is this unpreventable.
http://www.alternet.org/media/142356/facebook_and_myspace_users_are_clearly_divided_along_class_lines/?page=1
“For decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide."
Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions. This is most salient in the States, which is intentionally the focus of my talk here today.”
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It is interesting that facebook is not really used at all as a social-networking tool. It's just a place to post pictures of yourself farting on your friend's lunch or if you're a girl, giving a handjob.
ReplyDeleteBoyd also brought up 'homophily', which is nice because it gives form to one of the things we talk about a lot. We should adopt this word into our vocabularies.
Finally, the ads on the right side of the page were for facebook, not myspace.
Brent, I think your assessment of what Facebook is actually for is accurate. So would you say, according to evidence from this article, that myspace represents the lower class, facebook the middle class, and perhaps LinkedIN the upper class. The distinction being facebook is for putting up pictures of drunken escapades while LinkedIN, thus far, has been marketed as a site for business networking.
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