Just a couple of months ago I entered with some trepidation the world of social networking sites by signing up to MySpace. After getting invites to be the friends of a few strange music acts I had never heard off (since I've also had some very thinly veiled invites to be someone's friend who is clearly trying to get people to click through to their porn site - "see the pictures MySpace won't let me share with you!"), seeing some truly terrible web design and generally not getting it - I blogged here: "What's the point of MySpace?"
I've found the answer now: there isn't any. I'm too posh for MySpace. Oddly, just days after blogging against MySpace, I got my first invite from a friend to join Facebook. Of course on signing up, it started spitting out numerous friends, past and present, mainly from universities I have studied at or old school friends. People I am actually interested in being in contact with.
So it was very interesting to hear on the ever excellent On the Media, an item on the class distinctions between MySpace and Facebook. It's not just high-school vs. university educated; in the military the enlisted men use MySpace and the officers use Facebook. The interesting essay that OTM has based their report on, notes that the US Army has now barred soldiers from accessing MySpace, but - unsuprisingly - not Facebook.
There was an interesting series of articles recently in the NYTimes about the issue... I think the Freakonomics blog gives some good links and short analysis:
ReplyDeletehttp://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/myspace-v-facebook-the-class-divide/