Close Stay up-to-date with
Observer.com Newsletters
Sign up for Observer Newsletters!
RSS Feed
The New York Observer

In the Battle Between Facebook and MySpace, A Digital 'White Flight'

View Story On One Page View Story On One Page Print This Story Print This Story Share This Story Share This Story
June 29, 2009 | 3:53 p.m
In the Battle Between Facebook and MySpace, A Digital 'White Flight'

This morning, Danah Boyd was spitting out the social media Kool-Aid at Personal Democracy Forum. "Many of us believe that technologies can be these great equalizers," said Ms. Boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and fellow of the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, during her keynote speech at the Jazz at Lincoln Center auditorium. "They can bring everybody on board, they can make a welcome, lovely place and that anybody can participate in if only they had the access."

But in fact, she said, sites like MySpace and Facebook are mirroring, even magnifying, our social, political and class divides.

"MySpace has become the ghetto of the digital landscape," Ms. Boyd explained to the crowd. And many of us in these social environments, she said, "have gotten into the habit of crossing the street like we always do to avoid the riff-raff."

In her research, conducted over four years for her fall 2008 dissertation at Berkeley, she found that what we're seeing is "a modern incarnation of White Flight." Facebook users who canceled or abandoned their MySpace accounts are more likely to be white, educated and privileged. Compounding the problem is the press, Ms. Boyd said, "an institution that stems from privilege," which narrated MySpace as "the dangerous underbelly of the Internet while Facebook was the utopian savior."

Indeed, media often portrays Facebook as the reigning king in not only statistics, but as both a business model and a "safer" arena for kids than MySpace (which is, according to the headlines and To Catch a Predator, seething with pedophiles). Yes, more teens go to MySpace and customize their pages with flashy, sparkly texts and music playlists, while an older demographic uses Facebook for business and networking. But, Ms. Boyd said, some teens are using MySpace and some teens are using Facebook, and things got "messy" when she examined who goes where.

"The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to all of us," she said. "It should scare the hell out of us."

"When people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another, they do not communicate with one another; this canon does breed intolerance," Ms. Boyd said. 

Ms. Boyd said it's important to examine these digital divides as social media is described as "the great leveler" during President Obama's campaign and even Iran's Internet "revolution." If politicians and their techie friends make social media an increasingly important tool for government participation they have to examine how their constituents are segregated on these platforms.

When she asked audience members—politicians, technologists and media types—if they use Facebook on a regular basis, nearly every hand shot up. MySpace users were nil. "There's a cultural wall between users," Ms. Boyd said. "If there's no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so."

The Facebook/MySpace class divide is not a new story line. Michael Wolff illustrated the polarity in his signature, tart tone during an interview last December with BusinessWeek's Jon Fine. "If you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin," he said. "And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people."

She pointed out that the language used by Facebook users against MySpace users is what concerns her the most.

Facebook is described by high schoolers as "more cultured" and "less cheesy," she said. "Any high school student who has a Facebook page will tell you MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious," she said. "Like Peet's is more cultured than Starbucks and jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop. And Macs are more cultured than PCs," she said, quoting a 17-year-old student she interviewed during her research.

"People are already divided and we can't expect technology to automatically integrate them and create cultural harmony," Ms. Boyd admitted. But "you need to understand that these divisions exist." If politicians are using Facebook and Twitter to communicate with their users, "you're only seeing a fraction of the population speak out and be loud," she said. "If you're on Twitter, it's a very specific minority that you're speaking to and that minority looks a lot like you."

"Whose voices are you choosing to listen to?" she asked the crowd. Are you willing to write off a huge portion of the population because they're not using the same service as you are? Perhaps some of us should be asking ourselves same questions.

Post a Comment The Discussion

maybe educated people use facebook because it's better

Submitted by thinkahol on Mon, 06/29/2009 - 19:50.

It's an interesting article, and digital "white flight" as the author describes it is an interesting phenomenon, but she tries to elicit more fear than I think is justified. She makes it sound like people are only using facebook to get away from "undesirables." But this isn't real estate. Educated people use facebook because it's better. That class is associated with education level and race with class is par the course in this country and it's quite a stretch to say that digital media magnify political divides. Facebook isn't going to become any less valuable as it becomes more standard, to the contrary, just like a telephone it increases value with each user.
That facebook is getting more users (and remember the article has been talking about correlation and not causation) without direct evidence linking it to race, leads me to think that the parsimonious explanation that facebook is getting more users because it's more useful than myspace is the best explanation for now.
It is significantly more worrying that the establishment media sees it as their duty to insulate the powerful from justice; that Obama has taken the same position on government secrecy and the state secrets privilege as the Bush administration; that the U.S. defense budget is as much as the rest of the world's combined; that the U.S. defense related expenses including funding the wars and other military items not on the official defense budget come to a trillion dollars and the cost of ending global poverty is less than a thirtieth of that at $30 billion, etc. etc. etc.
There are few things I am less worried about than educated people using a more useful digital social networking tool.

Taste culture divide, gentrification or simply passing fashion?

Submitted by on Mon, 06/29/2009 - 22:26.

So what?

Online communities serve the people who use them, the bias comes in how people perceive the identity of those being served. Sounds like every other identifier in the world.

If you are white living in Africa, chances are you're not connected to the majority of the black population who can afford internet because you're not on Hi5. Unless of course you use more than one social media networking site.

If you're in a band you have to have a myspace page, even if the users are 'ghettoized pedophile white trash teens', because it's a tool that serves your marketing needs. But you also have to have Facebook, too.

What's the point of this article? That people derive a sense of identity through accepting or rejecting certain cultural identifiers? That some people feel the need to divide and conquer? That social media follows established social patterns?

Why should we be scared? Facebook's popularity will one day wane, the audience will fracture, new niches will form, then they will fracture, new micro niches will form and so on, until we all get bored and start hanging out face to face again.

Social networking isn't social identity, it's just a tool to connect to your friends so you know where the next cool party's at. We will all move on to the next, more effective, tool as it comes along.

Boyd, Data, and Ghettos

Submitted by on Tue, 06/30/2009 - 22:26.

Boyd had an interesting general point: that we replicate our real-life social networks online, and that divisions - particularly those based on race and class - are very prevalent.

Unfortunately, Boyd did not present a data set that disaggregated the numbers of Myspace and Facebook users by race, class, age, gender.... Instead, she relied on anecdotal evidence. As a sociologist, I fully appreciate the value of qualatative analysis and ethnographic research. But the bottom line is this: 14 year old kids from the suburbs calling MySpace ghetto does not conclusively evidence a race/class divide. One very well may exist, but Boyd did not present that data.

What's more, Boyd suggested that we were witnessing a digital phenomenon similar to ghettoization and white flight. The comparison between the current cyber landscape and what took place in America during the era of white flight in somewhat disingenuous: By its very definition, a ghetto is a physical space that is cut off from the rest of society; people are trapped there. From the Jewish ghettos of Nazi Germany to the modern-day ghettos of southwest Baltimore (where I taught high school), a ghetto has always been a physically defined, closed off space where people were trapped. The idea of ghettos in the cyber world is somewhat misplaced. Some 14 year old suburbanites may call MySpace ghetto, but that does not lend the concept (i.e. ghettoization and white flight) credence. Online, unlike in southwest Baltimore, you can get from MySpace to Facebook without first requiring the removal of large scale structural barriers.

Again, I certainly do not deny that there are (1) A digital divide between those who have access to high speed internet and those who do not and (2)Significant differences in how people spend their time online, with these differences often based on race, class, age, and a number of other factors.

But in presenting the MySpace/Facebook argument without a deeper data set, Boyd undercut her credibility in my book. I was at the Personal Democracy Forum, and fully appreciate that she was pressed for time, so may have skipped some of these details in the interest of time. So I'll wait for whatever research she has forthcoming, and hopefully that research - when published - will address these issues.

A skewed perspective?

Submitted by Wryan on Wed, 07/01/2009 - 01:34.

It's only natural that a fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society would claim that gravely serious social trends are afoot in the seemingly ubiquitous realm of social networking; if she didn't make such claims, she would be out of a job. How's that for a little armchair sociology? But anyway, aren't we overstating things a bit here when we're talking about technologies like social networking which have existed in their current form for what, five years? Does anyone remember when AIM was all the rage? I wonder how many books and dissertations on that and other "revolutions" are mouldering in our libraries. Every time something like Facebook or Twitter comes along, our perspective gets a little shorter (even as we think it's getting wider). Whatever it is that is directly in front of our nose at any given moment is the most important trend in the history of civilization.