MySpace now a “digital ghetto”
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Abandon your MySpace account for Facebook? You might just be a racist.
At a keynote speech during New York’s Democracy forum at Lincoln Center, Danah Boyd spoke of the racial disparity and possible reasons for mass abandonment of MySpace for the “more cultured” and “less cheesy” social networking site Facebook. Boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and fellow of the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, stated:
“We might as well face an uncomfortable reality … what happened was modern day ‘white flight’.”
Boyd also observed that:
“The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to all of us. It should scare the hell out of us.”
Referring to MySpace as the “ghetto of the digital landscape,” Boyd indicated that MySpace users are more likely to be “brown or black” and espouse a different set of ideals in conflict with those espoused by the teens she surveyed over four years. She said that patterns in migration across social networking sites echoed those of a white exodus from cities in the past. Boyd also said that teens who use Facebook are more likely to condescend their MySpace-favoring peers.
“Any high school student who has a Facebook page will tell you MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious… like Peet’s is more cultured than Starbucks and jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop. And Macs are more cultured than PCs.”
Teens aren’t even the worst culprits when it comes to socio-economic social media judgment passing. The New York Observer cites a quote from BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine in December 2008:
“If you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. 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.”
Boyd’s research indicated that the class divisions were likely to only worsen over time, as the media continues to portay MySpace as a seedy stomping ground for pedophiles and Facebook as a “utopian savior.” She contends:
“There’s a cultural wall between users. If there’s no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.”
[Image: Flickr]
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Comments
I frequent Facebook more than MySpace because the latter has such a horribly ugly and time-wasting user interface. MySpace allows for crazier page layout than Facebook’s blue-and-whites but design without understanding bores me.
Well to be fair, MySpace has always been hella ugly and slow. That’s why a lot of people left for Facebook originally – it was clean, simple, and fast. But now Facebook is hella ugly and slow! But at least it doesn’t have annoying music on everyone’s profile, I guess.
Something can look racist, without being racist.
So, yes, Facebook is mostly white and myspace is heavily populated with brown people. But the divide isn’t color. It’s class. Without starting a flame war, preteens, urban youth, hip hop culture, and the working class are more likely to be on myspace (up until recently you could add artists and musicians into that too). The college educated are more likely to be on Facebook. (Hey, that’s how it got it’s start).
Once those divides started, they became more entrenched. if all of your friends are on myspace, you join myspace, if they are on facebook, you join facebook.
Practically everyone I went to high school is on facebook, but they almost all went to college (some of them are on myspace too, but everyone of them say they use it less and less). My friend Laura (one of the facebook crowd) says that none of her daughter’s friends are on facebook, they are all on myspace, but she won’t let her daughter use it, because she is worried about pedophiles.
Sometimes things look as if they are racially based, because it is easy to see race, but race isn’t what it is about at all.
PS if it matters, I am black.
MYFACEBOOK.COM
Save your life with an
Electronic Cigarette
What a huge load of crap. Go back to AOL. Same bs that I heard about usenet when AOL gave it’s users access. Same BS over and over again. No one is stopping anyone from doing anything. Myspace is a digital ghetto because of the utter ridiculousness of most of the pages people make.
This is a laughable argument. As a white person who abandoned MySpace for Facebook, I can attest that my exodus was caused not by the elasticities of the other real users but by the aggression of the fake users.
MySpace is full of intrusive, loud and annoying ads, bots that spam your inbox and preposterous profile customizations that lead to two or three music videos being played simultaneously which slow down your browser and blast cacophony in your ears. Facebook is practically devoid of these problems and offers a far superior search tool for finding long lost friends.
There is definitely a “flight” from MySpace but it is based on the fact that Facebook offers a preferable product with an easier interface that occupies a similar niche to MySpace in the social arena. Race hasn’t a thing to do with it and any statistics that say otherwise are either coincidental or based on root causes ancillary to race.
Wow… another useless flawed study, where a liberal arts major who was too lazy to pay attention in basic science classes… ends up using inconclusive data to reach a flawed assumption which probably matches his initial agenda.
Sigh…
I was there http://twitpic.com/8rgs7 and the word racist or the topic of race never entered her speech at any time.
That said, the mostly caucasian and college educated audience was asked if they had a Facebook account. More than 90 percent of us raised our hands. When asked if we had MySpace accounts I guess that fewer than 10 percent did.
She pointed out that there is a cultural division that has formed around the two sites. Military personnel, blue collar workers, and people who go see live bands are on MySpace. It’s not ghetto – it’s just people interested in different things.
She felt that we have developed different classes of people who inhabit different ‘echo chambers’ where we only hear that which is interesting to our group. She implied that a mono-social network was ideal. I disagree with her on this point.
Also, she prefers to have her name spelled without capital letters. It’s danah boyd – not Danah Boyd.
Thanks for posting this, however, There is merit to discussing her well-researched findings.
i abandoned myspace because it was a shitstorm of advertisements, it had an extremely clunky interface, and the search interface never worked correctly.
this theory makes absolutely no sense. if you design a site well, you will fail. if you design a site poorly, you will succeed.
Personally, I think there is too much creative license in Myspace, so I just don’t use it. Someone wants to make a statement about how edgy and dark they are so they put blood red text over a black background and what results is the most eye-straining, disgusting example of design choice on the Internet. Compound that problem across an entire site of bad composition and seizure-inducing flashing images, plus obnoxious, automatic playlists of crappy songs, and you have the most annoying Internet experience on the planet. It’s not white flight for something more cultured. It’s the flight of those with sensitive sensibilities and those who can’t stand all the fucking caricatures that exist on Myspace.
It has nothing to do with racial lines… Facebook is no less diverse than MySpace. MySpace was first, it was open to everyone. Facebook was second, it was originally open to only college students. Facebook interface is cleaner, MySpace let’s anyone with an HTML editor to hijack your browser. MySpace is annoying, Facebook – a little less so. Sometimes total control is not a good thing.
This article doesn’t make clear the distinction between boyd’s own words and the quotes from her informants. Rather than linking to a bunch of second-hand reports, you should send readers to the source:
http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html
Everyone I know myself included switched to Facebook to avoid super annoying colors themes and music. The interface to find friends is or was far superior when I switched.
The people I know that haven’t switched just don’t want to change to another site even if it’s better. Maybe the people left behind on myspace are people who in general resist change and growth, maybe this could be what they’re seeing.
I left myspace for facebook for really simple reasons. Facebook does not batter me with ads constantly and loads much quicker too. I also prefer the simple layout.
Macs are more cultured than PC’s? How many impoverished innercity families do you know that can afford to purchase a Mac?
Get real!
As with, like, every other discussion on race in America, it’s not about race, it’s about class. And, in this particular discussion, it’s not about class. It’s about how ugly Myspace is.
I’m not sure the researchers actually ASKED people why they left Myspace. They’d probably get responses like “Myspace was full of ads and a really irritating interface, and facebook wasn’t.” I mean, there’s also the really stupid profile pages to worry about but I’m not sure how that’s a racial division considering how all my white friends had the most retarded and incomprehensible layouts. Maybe it’s an educational divide? Is educational divide racist? Should we care? I don’t think so. PC researchers, fuck off, please.
“White Flight” Simply does not apply here, the decision to not leave Myspace for Facebook says nothing about race, social status, or income. Both sites cost the same. Neither site has any restrictions. If myspace were to vanish and all of its users migrated to Facebook, there would be no mass exodus. Some people simply don’t change what they feel is a good thing, or don’t care about changing technologies in the social networking landscape.
Oh my god that’s stupid. If you myspace, you might just like independent music, have started a page a long time ago and all your friends are still there, blah blah.
Also, correlation is not causation. If you believe that is, you don’t have more than an 8th grade education (and probably bloviate about the internet for a living).
I don’t have a myspace account, by the way.
I left Myspace because I was tired of getting headaches trying to read people’s profiles. I think if Facebook allowed the sort of profile editing that Myspace did people wouldn’t seem so much classier there.
Maybe MySpace is easier to use than Facebook. Have you ever surfed some of the web pages their? It IS a ghetto. I’ve NEVER had a membership at MySpace because most of the user pages I’ve ever suffered myself to surf look like hell. They’re tacky, and the whole “Top 8 friend” spaces are passe.
To be fair, Facebook is full of pointless apps. I cancelled my acct there too. I prefer face to face interaction.
PS. Those who “Twitter” are “Twits”
FUCK! Seriously, you want to bring down the wall between the races? STOP TALKING ABOUT RACE. Morgan Freeman said there shouldn’t be a black history month. He said there shouldn’t be a month for any race. He said he need to stop calling each other black people and white people. WE ARE ALL JUST PEOPLE. That is how you bring down the wall. Idiots!
And let’s not forget that Facebook simply has a better interface, and is higher quality. MySpace is very poorly made.
It couldn’t poooosibly having something to do with that, could it? Noo, it’s because we’re all RACISTS.
Fuck you.
Whatever, both sites are just traps for the narcasitic. The real goal of both myspace and facebook is to get you to willingly give up personal info that can then be sold to marketers.
You’re an idiot if you use either one.
This is a joke, right? The fact that people are moving to facebook has nothing to do with the higher aesthetic quality, lack of obnoxious html page editing, and absence of laughable teen drama? It’s racism?
Facebook seems “more cultured” and “less cheesy” because they’re two different websites. Facebook is predominantly used by college students, Myspace by middle school and high school students. Even if they were comparable websites, the racism claim is still laughable
You make it sound like facebook is a high class website that you have to pay to use, that only the WASP kids can afford and get to use. There is no cost to use myspace over facebook. If you can afford to use myspace, you can afford to use facebook. Facebook is used more because it’s better.
Maybe instead of doing something useless like this, maybe address the issue of getting more minority children into college. If more college students are colored, more’ll be on facebook, and then less will be on the joke of a website that is myspace.
Myspace is for people who never finished high school and/or never went to college. Facebook is for people who went to or go to college. This “issue” has been present from day 1.
It’s not my fault if Myspace is disproportionately “black or brown”, as the rates of graduation / higher education are disproportionately low on “black or brown” people. I’ve got a TON of “black or brown” friends on Facebook. If you want to blame users for the issue, blame Myspace users for not finishing their education, or more realistically, blame the state-run education system that dramatically and systematically fails inner-city children, who are disproportionately “black or brown”.
In short, it’s about education, not race.
That is one of the most idiotic things I have ever read in my life. Did she look at every profile on both sites? It could be the fact that Facebook was originally for college students only and if you go to almost any college campus in the states you’ll see that an overwhelming majority of the people there are white. So the reason that most other people don’t come to Facebook is because they probably assume that it is still for college kids only. I can’t believe someone would listen to a whole speech on this and believe it. That is amazing.
Reminds me of something I read a few years ago about social networking and the military. Enlisted men were on Myspace, and the Officers were on Facebook
I hate them both but at least myspace is easier to use. Facebook is a pain in the @$$ and not at all user friendly. It’s more annoying than anything else.
And as far as one being the “digitial ghetto” well, its not myspace where you write on the walls…
No, the scary part is that this gives a clear lens aimed at the “ghetto” with none of the excuses of why they’re there. There’s no reason they couldn’t leave this “digital ghetto” if they wanted to. There’s no “it’s too hard” or “I’m too poor” to fall back on. The truth of the matter is, they associate closely with the environment. They’ve *made* it a ghetto, because for whatever reason, there’s some amount of “social status” within that space for those who stay in that space.
My sister closely associates with real-life ghetto-dwellers. They’re great people – fun, talented, hard-working… but they never leave. Just when you think they’re about to push through, they do something which purposely sets them back, back to their peers, to the familiar. Why? Because leaving would be considered weak, or as abandoning your people. It would take a mass exodus to get them all out at once… and the same is true for MySpace. Unless they all leave, none of them will.
Also I’d like to see the study or statistics behind the reasoning here. Sounds like a load of whiny “omg bigotry” hot air.
To sell this BS, you really need the Trifecta: race, class, gender.
No liberal narrative is complete without all three. Now, rewrite this with more white guilt.
I use my myspace page for personal close friends and expressing myself unhindered. Facebook is for proffesional use, business relationships, acquaintances, and fake friends. Both are are locked up tight in terms of privacy and friends lists don’t over lap.
Well, this article actually misrepresents her pretty well. She’s not as much of a PC simpleton as this article makes her sound at all.
She’s saying this white flight is not because white people are going “OH SHIT BLACK PEOPLE WE GOTTA GTFO!” but because of, more or less, people sticking in their social circle. Her argument does also state that people move to facebook to avoid the lower class, less educated people of myspace. Yes, she does recognize this is also because of the websites’ initial target audiences.
Her work’s more about rejecting the idea of social networking as being a way people can come together and be unified, and is instead an area where people play up their differences.
I mean really, what do you think of someone who uses myspace if you’re on facebook? Just out of curiousity. I definitely think it’s for younger kids at the very least.
Anyhow, don’t take this article’s word for it (because it’s terribly inaccurate and poor journalism and often quotes people she quotes and then attributes the quote to her), read her stuff!
The talk:
http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html
The research:
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/hargittai.html
The dissertation:
http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf
there are obviously flaws with the posters arguments, but i definitely think the present an issue that I had never really thought to consider and one that definitely has threads in reality….
Obviously both flights costs the same but that is not the issue at hand, the issue is what people PREFER and I personally left myspace because I felt overwhelmed by the lack of class, tackiness, and an overall disgust with other users and their pages… I think that it does hold some truth that white people felt that myspace was “trashy” and “dirty” subconsciously because it was filled with minorities and people of lower social classes.
I don’t think this is as much of a race issue as a class issue, but I guess they are always connected.
And afterall at the beginning of facebook only COLLEGE kids “escape” to facebook which really limits the applicant pool — much like only wealthy people could afford to move out of the suburbs..
I can’t tell you how many “myspace” jokes my friends and I make, mocking people who take pictures of themselves, or in general have myspaces, but when you think about it, we are not making fun of myspace, we are making fun of the social class of people that choose to use myspace.
our prejudice is inherent in the comments and in this very blog post by assuming that facebook is “better” than myspace. In reality they are very similar… some people don’t choose to leave myspace becuase they see no reason to… yet everyone here is convinced that facebook is better than myspace? why? becuase it a social networking service of the educated and classy? people here think facebook is better because of the type of people who use it.. no one wnants to be associated with the type of people who use myspace.. is that not a class issue?
Could it be that myspace.com’s demographic reflects its corporate ownership? (That would be Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., purveyor of crap.) Links to myspace.com from other News Corp. properties, like the N.Y. Post, have to affect its makeup.
This is the stupidest thing I’ve read in quite awhile. Facebook and myspace aren’t neighborhoods, they are commercial products, and what you are seeing is a superior product beating an inferior one. This article could just as easily have been written about Google/Yahoo, Nokia/iPhone, Coke/RC, or any other marketplace battle where certain segments abandon an inferior product before others do.
I think it’s much more basic than that. IMHO, that article & cited opinions are intended to do one thing – create the rift where there wasn’t one before. So, white guy says, “eew i don’t wanna be associated that way”, and then bails. Ethnic groups are by nature are just more colorful people than white peeps especially before the 50’s. MySpace let’s people actually customize their page (& slam you with BS ads), where FB, well, doesn’t let people express their colorfulness. The latter is why I came to FB.
In the 60’s there was a movie called “If There Weren’t Any Blacks You’d Have to Invent Them”. Premise (if I remember) is there were no such thing as black people but if you were, it was punishable by death. So someone needed to single out a white guy and painted his face black. Whites said “ooh a black person” and he was ultimately executed.
People create racism – one of my favorite analogies fit here: “Guns Cause Crime Like Flies Cause Garbage”…. Read More
I think you’re a racist for writing this argument. The truth is, white people are just smarter. Nobody is forced to use myspace.
This is complete BS…
I left MySpace because of the constant barrage of friend requests, useless emails from people I didn’t care to know, annoying spam postings on my own page and when visiting other people’s pages getting battered by 5 songs and videos that would all load and play at the same time.
No wonder Microsoft is completely clueless to developing trends. They spend big bucks on tards like this guy to do useless studies that try and claim that white people leaving MySpace is racist!
LOL! The simple fact: Facebook offers a clean, consistent interface, while on MySpace people are free to make their pages as god awfully annoying and retina-burning as they please. And boy, do they ever take advantage of that freedom.
Also, MySpace is awesome for finding strippers, trannies, and frequently tranny strippers. Facebook basically sucks for fapping.
Danah Boyd has made a career out of telling msm readers what they want to hear to appear “edgy”.
I tried facebook, but I couldn’t tweak the interface to my world famous grey-text-on-charcoal interface, with the blinking pink butterfly that follows your mouse, while playing my “Rock you like a hurricane” MIDI file.
So back to MySpace it is! Since I’m poor (I only make about $160,000 / year – honest!) it’s where I hang with my homies from the ‘hood.
…but it’s true.
myspace sucks.
it was programmed HORRIBLY.
and the people on it are obnoxious and attention whores.
that said, instead of assigning a racial value to it, why not try to extrapolate Z caused X and Y causation pattern?
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that it’s true that Facebook is overwhelmingly preferred by whites and myspace by non-whites. Even if it is true, why is it anything to be concerned about if different ethnic groups prefer different sites? Why is that an “uncomfortable reality”? Everyone is equally free to choose to participate in either, both, or neither site. The fact that the results of their choices are not equal is not something to be concerned about.
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/31/106-facebook/
How about the fact that this was written, perhaps in just, but still the same phenomenon observation almost a year ago.
2 things 1) if Myspace was easier to configure I’d use it more. and 2) if myspace weren’t owned by Mr Murdock, I’d hang out on myspace more.
I have accounts on both sites and I am a college degreed, white male, with friends on both sites.
lol… I am partial to electing democrats to office. This way, the government will place us each in the appropriate social network, in order to avoid any potential for racism.
Even if you prefer to have clean, uniform profiles to look at as opposed to gaudy, impossible-to-load ones, or vice versa, you will have to obey, for fear of being racist(the only alternative).
Eventually, we won’t have to think or make decisions for ourselves, the government can tell use what to do.
Liberalism is the only solution to our social ills.
Mac more cultured than pc? Haha..hell no. Mac is just more wimp than pc. Also, you’ve got everything wrong. Whites are not the only ones leaving myspace once most users discover facebook. The UI itself should give you an idea why a lot of people are favoring facebook over myspace.
The survey should have considered users of all races, and and nationalities, which makes me think that the survey is racist in itself.
That’s the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard, and racist in and of itself to boot.
People are leaving myspace because it’s the new geocities- loud, annoying, filled with twinkly graphics, forced advertising, and unreadable pages. Comparing ‘digital migration’ to real life racism deserves its own version of Godwin’s law.
yes, both sites are completely free to sign up with. it is totally a racial thing. next up; there is certain oxygen that only white people breathe that black ans browns are not allowed to breathe. expect an article from this site detailing how it is a racial thing
All the negative comments on myspace tend to go like this: It has music, background, graphics, colors…
The positive comments on Facebook tend to go like this:
It’s clean, crisp, uniform and uncluttered…
Well, yes, some myspacers go overboard but isn’t customization the whole point? It’s *your* space, do it up the way you want. Facebook is just asthetically boring. It offers ZERO in the way of customization and personalization.
I have an account on both but gun to my head I stay on myspace.
So… all the black people I know on Facebook that don’t have Myspace profiles… they hate themselves?
This story is too stupid for words.
Umm… So I’m a black person who left myspace and is on facebook. But I have a graduate degree, I prefer Peets and I have a mac. So I guess I’m an elitist, self-loathing black person.
Not relevant that: myspace was slow, I hated the increasingly seizure-inducing graphics and I got a million friend requests/comments from crappy bands trying to basically advertise on my page. Oh, and Peets has stronger coffee.
Hmmm I have had a blog on myspace for 2.5 years now and been on facebook for quite some time. What does that say about me, I wonder????
So what is this article saying, that I am the token brown guy in Facebook? This is so ridiculous. I always thought that MySpace was for younger teens and HS aged kids and Facebook for College and older. I thought in the Age of Obama, racism would disappear. I guess people will find racist hiding behinf every door. Sounds to me like Race McCarthyism.
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I agree with what Commenter #2 said
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So has nothing do to with Myspace being poorly designed and displayed….