[lbo-talk] Hipsterville

[John Adams]

On Jul 4, 2007, at 10:53 AM, Blackmail wrote:

> Maybe it's just an outcome of suburban atomization returning to urban
> centers, but hipsters are still folks who want to belong to something. 
> I
> think the success of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook 
> are
> testament to that.

Here's an interesting piece from one of the most interesting 
academics/activists around today: 
http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

danah boyd
June 24, 2007

Over the last six months, I've noticed an increasing number of press 
articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. 
That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but 
it's not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American 
teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. 
Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to 
Facebook. Who goes where gets kinda sticky... probably because it seems 
to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.

I want to take a moment to make a meta point here. I have been 
traipsing through the country talking to teens and I've been seeing 
this transition for the past 6-9 months but I'm having a hard time 
putting into words. Americans aren't so good at talking about class and 
I'm definitely feeling that discomfort. It's sticky, it's 
uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don't have the language for 
marking class in a meaningful way. So this piece is intentionally 
descriptive, but in being so, it's also hugely problematic. I don't 
have the language to get at what I want to say, but I decided it needed 
to be said anyhow. I wish I could just put numbers in front of it all 
and be done with it, but instead, I'm going to face the stickiness and 
see if I can get my thoughts across. Hopefully it works.

For the academics reading this, I want to highlight that this is not an 
academic article. It is not trying to be. It is based on my 
observations in the field, but I'm not trying to situate or theorize 
what is going on. I've chosen terms meant to convey impressions, but I 
know that they are not precise uses of these terms. Hopefully, one day, 
I can get the words together to actually write an academic article 
about this topic, but I felt as though this is too important of an 
issue to sit on while I find the words. So I wrote it knowing that it 
would piss many off. The academic side of me feels extremely guilty 
about this; the activist side of me finds it too critical to go 
unacknowledged.

...and so on.

	John a