Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Social Networking and class issues

So, I'm starting to research my commentary essay on social networking, and apparently, a new study released recently shows class distinctions between different types of social networking sites.
According to this article Facebook is for rich kids that are going to college and MySpace is for kids that aren't, all according to this paper.

This is huge.

She basically says there's a class war going on with these sites, and that the aesthetics (another writer compared Facebook to the look and feel of an Ikea store and MySpace to the look and feel of Las Vegas) are going to become part of it. Sure, your typical MySpace page does often look like a giant war of pixels and sound, and your typical Facebook page is cleaner, but these are reflecting class distinctions? Like Ikea and Wal-Mart?

I just started reading the actual paper, but so far, it's very interesting. This woman knows her stuff. I can tell already this article will directly influence my commentary essay!

She also cites this: The Lost Children of Rockdale County, a PBS Frontline special about a 1996 syphillis outbreak in Rockdale County, Ga. I remember seeing this on PBS about a hundred times when I was in high school (in the next county over). It shows how bored, middle-and-upper-middle-class white teenagers can really get into trouble. (Consequently, when this was on PBS for pretty much five years straight, my friends and I would joke that when you turned on PBS, you either got kids with syphillis or Wishbone, a children's television program about a dog that wore hats and was commonly mistaken for historical figures. Our joke was "Is that a kid with syphillis? Nope, just a dog in a hat.")

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