Class Divisions on the Internet

I was reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody yesterday and came across an interesting reference to Danah Boyd, a researcher at Microsoft and also at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society. Boyd has been researching on youth identities and the internet - digital identity even. She has been exploring the idea that there are class differences in which networks people use - are you a Facebook person or a MySpace person, and what’s the difference? Check out the extract below.

here’s just a brief quote - click here for the full essay online.

“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 fags,” 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.”