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Speeches, like plays, are sometimes more interesting to read rather than see live.
So I have spent some time staring at the words of a speech recently given by Danah Boyd <http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/>, from the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, titled "The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online."
In the speech <http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/PDF2009.html>, given to the Personal Democracy Forum, Boyd picked up utopian views of technology, pinned them against a wall and asked them for a little more than their name and rank.
"For decades," she said, "we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with 'access' and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine."
She then used the example of Facebook and MySpace to suggest that perhaps people's behavior online absolutely mirrors enduring social divides.
Many Americans use Facebook and MySpace, she said. But which Americans?
Using teens as the indicators of where the world is heading, Boyd described some of her research among them and took the words of one 14-year-old, Kat from Massachusetts, to describe her central thesis:
"I'm not really into racism, but I think that MySpace now is more like ghetto or whatever, and Facebook is all...not all the people that have Facebook are mature, but its supposed to be like oh we're more mature...MySpace is just old."
For Boyd, the sites we go to reflect our idea of what "people like us" do. Another teen, 17-year-old Craig from California, put it extremely baldly (especially for a Californian):
"The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook. It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace. Any high school student who has a Facebook will tell you that MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious."
Boyd, who is also a researcher at Microsoft Research New England (Microsoft being a prominent investor in Facebook), described the migration from MySpace to Facebook as being akin to white folks setting up their own communities. Yes, the places that spawned the allegedly desperate housewife. This wasn't that Facebook was newer or cooler. This was "modern day 'white flight.'"
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