4: Digital Gates
How Race and Class Distinctions Are Shaping the Digital World
I used to have MySpace but got rid of it because it felt too open. You feel safer with a thing like Facebook. . . . It doesn’t feel as if you’re vulnerable to the outside creepy world. It’s just your friends.
—Doug, twenty-one-year-old college student
In the summer of 2007, blogger danah boyd posted an informal essay titled “Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” Based primarily on her observations of MySpace and Facebook profiles, boyd ponders how class antagonisms influence young people’s use of social-network sites. By her own admission, boyd was uncomfortable with the argument and the sociological vocabulary she was in search of to articulate her main thesis: that the class divisions that shape American cultural life off-line are clearly discernible in the communities that form online in MySpace and Facebook. “Americans aren’t so good at talking about class,” she writes, adding, “it’s uncomfortable, and to top it off, we don’t have the language for marking class in a meaningful way.” She is right, partially.
Sustaining a serious public conversation about the class cleavages in American life is a constant challenge, but not for the reason usually cited—that Americans rarely if ever think in terms of class. The truth is nearly every facet of our daily lives—the clothes we wear, the foods we eat, the schools we attend, the neighborhoods we live in, and the company we keep—bears the visible marks of social class and the ever-deepening cleavages between the economically mobile and the economically vulnerable.
“Facebook kids,” the blogger writes, “come from families who emphasize education and going to college.” Users of Facebook, boyd asserts, tend to be white and come, more often than not, from a world of middle-class comfort. Drawing from some of the more familiar social cliques among young people, boyd equates the “preps” and the “jocks” with Facebook. MySpace kids, in contrast, come from the other side of the cultural divide. According to boyd, they are the “kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school.” Latino, black, and youth from working-class and immigrant households, she maintains, are more likely to be users of MySpace.
In the end, boyd’s essay is consistent with a concept—the digital divide—that gained momentum as far back as the late 1990s as academic and policy-oriented researchers began to ponder how social inequalities impact engagement with the Internet. Some of the most vigorous champions of all things digital—the social Web, blogs, wikis, virtual worlds, user-generated content, and social-network sites—can be intolerant of disapproving analysis. Truth be told, technology enthusiasts pay only scant attention to matters of social inequality. After access to computers and the Internet were widened significantly, the continued gap between the technology rich and the technology poor quickly receded to the background.
Race is a kind of “inconvenient truth” for evangelists of the social Web. Early in the Web’s history, the anonymity of computer-mediated communication suggested to many commentators that longstanding spheres of social division, discord, and discrimination—most notably race and gender—would be rendered meaningless in the digital world. It was that logic that made the New Yorker cartoon about the dog and the Internet so famous. The cartoon implies that if being a dog on the Internet does not matter, certainly being black, Latino, or female would not matter either. Despite the utopian view that the Web provides a place and a way to escape the social burdens and divisions of the off-line world, this has never been true. All of the optimism notwithstanding, the digital world has never existed in a bubble, insulated from the social tensions and economic inequalities that are integral to the making and remaking of the social world. Life online has always been intricately though never predictably connected to life off-line. Social inequalities still matter in the physical world. And as we are learning, they also matter in the virtual world. Nowhere is this clearer than in the rise and use of social-network sites.
Right around the time that boyd wrote her essay, my research assistant and I were assessing the data from the surveys and interviews we were collecting. Earlier in this book I explain that the use of social-network sites is the premiere online activity among young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. Along with noticing how pervasive the use of social sites is among college students, we detected something else: a decisive preference for Facebook over MySpace among college students. When we asked college students, “Which social-network site do you visit MOST OFTEN?”—among white students, more than eight out of ten, or 84 percent, preferred Facebook. By contrast, 66 percent of those who identified as Latino preferred Facebook. In our survey Latino students were more likely to name MySpace as their preferred site.
What started out in 2005 and 2006 as a steady move to Facebook among American college students has become, by the time of this writing in 2009, a massive migration and cultural rite of passage. As twenty-two-year-old Sara told us, “In college you are almost expected to use Facebook.” Though many of the young college students we spoke with around this time, in 2007 and 2008, began using MySpace before Facebook, they had either deleted their MySpace profile or seldom bothered to use what at the time was the world’s most populated social-network site. Within months of its debut, MySpace leaped ahead of Friendster, one of the first online social-network sites, to attract a large concentration of American youth. Soon after its launch in 2004, Facebook replaced MySpace as the new digital destination for the college set. By 2007 high school students bound for college were also showing a stronger preference for Facebook.
While identifying emergent themes and trends from our survey, we noticed that the findings from a separate study conducted around the same time, in early 2007, parallel some of the results from our study. After surveying 1,060 students, ages eighteen and nineteen, Eszter Hargittai, a professor of communication studies, found that a majority of the students, four out of five, used Facebook. About one-third of the sample used MySpace frequently. But when Hargittai broke her data down by gender, race, and class, a number of interesting results surfaced. Similar to many studies, and as I note above, Hargittai found that women use social-network sites more frequently than men. But Hargittai’s most interesting findings revolve around the racial and class differences her data tracked.
A majority of white students, 83 percent, preferred Facebook, whereas a little more than half, 57 percent, reported using MySpace. Eighty percent of the African American students used Facebook, and about 58 percent used MySpace. Hargittai reports some significant differences among students of Latino and Asian origins. “Hispanic students,” she writes, “are significantly less likely to use Facebook (60% compared to 75% or more for other groups), whereas they are much more likely than others to use MySpace (73% among Hispanic students compared to 58% or less among all others).” Students of Asian origins showed clear differences too. Whereas 84 percent of the Asian students in Hargittai’s sample used Facebook, 39 percent reported using MySpace.
Hargittai’s study also shows pronounced differences across class, which she measures by parents’ level of education. High levels of education attainment are often associated with higher levels of employment and income. In fact, you can tell a lot about a family’s habits, activities, and lifestyle based on parental education. Past studies of children and teens use of television and video games, for instance, show a strong correlation with parental education. Children growing up in low-education households tend to watch more television and play more video games than children in households with highly educated parents. Hargittai’s study finds similar results. “The most pronounced finding,” Hargittai writes, “is that students whose parents have less than a high school degree are significantly less likely to be on Facebook and are significantly more likely to be MySpace users.” A close look at her results reveals that the more schooling parents attain, the less likely their children are to use MySpace.
Both the survey I led and the one conducted by Hargittai confirm that something truly interesting is happening with race, class, and education as it relates to young people’s engagement with social-network sites. But neither study answers the all-important question: why does racial identification appear to influence which sites students prefer?
Fortunately, we were complementing our surveys with in-depth conversations, going out into the digital trenches to talk directly with young people about their use of social-network sites.
What we learned is quite revealing.
Right away, the interviews illuminated the constantly evolving ways teens and young twenty-somethings use the social Web. Talk to them and you quickly learn that they harbor intense views, both favorable and unfavorable, toward social-network sites. Some young people are incredibly passionate about MySpace. “I use it all of the time,” twenty-six-year-old Avani told us. “It’s fun, exciting, and easy to meet people. I think people interact more on MySpace [than Facebook].” Loyalty to Facebook is just as strong. Frances, a twenty-two-year-old communication major, said, “It’s a much simpler site to use.” With assurance, Jonathan declared, “Facebook is for people who already have friends, whereas MySpace is for people who are looking for friends.”
In all of our in-depth conversations we asked each person to use adjectives that, in their view, best describe MySpace and Facebook. Over the course of more than two hundred conversations with white college students, we heard all kinds of words. The preference for Facebook is undeniable. In Table 1 I list the adjectives that they use most often to describe MySpace and Facebook. Notice anything? The language they used to characterize MySpace is strikingly hostile. Words like creepy, crowded, uneducated, and fake reveal a considerable degree of bad feeling toward the MySpace site and community. By comparison, they maintain a largely favorable view of Facebook, consistently describing the platform as trustworthy, selective, educated, and authentic. “Addictive” was another common word used to describe Facebook. Along with the adjectives, young people offered a variety of stories that explain in colorful detail how they make sense of the digital media landscape and, more specifically, the two most popular social-network sites in the United States.
After analyzing the in-depth conversations, we drilled the preference among young white collegians for Facebook over MySpace down to two main factors—aesthetics and demographics. Aesthetics refers to the look, style, and manner in which personal profiles are designed and presented. The second factor, demographics, refers to the individuals and communities that tend to use both sites. Aesthetics point to the system features of social sites, while demographics alludes to system users. Together, both factors illuminate the sharp and powerful differences race and class make in the online communities young people participate in.
TABLE 1. Adjectives college students use to describe MySpace and Facebook
MYSPACE
Crowded
Trashy
Creepy
Busy
General Public
Uneducated
Fake
Open
Immature
Predators
Crazy
Selective
Clean
Trustworthy
Simple
College
Educated
Authentic
Private
Mature
Stalker-friendly
Addictive
Visit MySpace and Facebook and the first thing you will likely notice is that the design, look, and feel of the personal profiles on each site are worlds apart. MySpace’s system features encourage customization and personalization, a kind of digital wild style. The color, design, and mood of MySpace pages vary significantly. Twenty-six-year-old Avani said, “With MySpace there’s a lot you can do with HTML.” Facebook profiles, on the other hand, maintain a relatively standard look. Compared to MySpace, the tone and style of Facebook seems antistyle. From the very beginning of its launch, MySpace carefully cultivated a demeanor that is personal, whimsical, and, at times, oppositional. Facebook, on the other hand, has maintained a relatively stable and uniform presentation even as it expands the scope of its services. Though the content—pictures, wall posts, and use of applications—may vary on Facebook, the presentation of it all does not. These two contrasting styles engender strong views from users of social-network sites, especially those in college who believe Facebook is the superior platform.
Gerry, a nineteen-year-old sophomore, told us that “Facebook just looks cleaner. Not now, with all the new applications and stuff, but it still looks cleaner than MySpace and a lot more organized, as opposed to MySpace . . . with all the background and fonts, and things.” In his words, MySpace “feels very cluttered and kind of schizophrenic to look at a page . . . it really makes your head spin.” Sarah, a twenty-one-year-old communication studies major, agreed. “Oh, MySpace is horrible. It takes forever to download a MySpace page and you never know if you are looking at a real person or not.”
Throughout our conversations with them, college students repeatedly expressed their dislike with the often overzealous design of MySpace profiles and the time it takes to download them. MySpace, said twenty-one-year-old Matthew, reminds him of the “dark, dark days of the Internet.” When asked to elaborate he said, “I don’t like the fact that the designs of MySpace pages are for the most part dreadful. They remind me of back when I was seven and eight and people had just learned how to create Web pages. And they had flashing texts and bubbles.”
Likewise, twenty-two-year-old Brandon expressed irritation with the customizable features of MySpace.
“The big difference I suppose is HTML. There’s no HTML writing in Facebook as opposed to MySpace,” Brandon observed. Like many other college students, he believes the ability to write in MySpace undermines the quality of the user experience. “I think it makes Facebook so much better in the sense that you’re never being plagued by someone else’s bad code.”
Initially, the dissatisfaction with the customized profiles on MySpace caught me by surprise. A hallmark feature of the social Web is the ability to not only read Web-based content, but write content too. In the age of do-it-yourself (DIY) media, the fact that we are both consumers and creators of content redefines the rules of media engagement by redefining the rules of media production and consumption. And yet, it turns out that the customization and personalization of MySpace profiles through creative layouts, music, video, and graphics is a major source of annoyance and cultural friction for many college students.
Nineteen-year-old Shelby was not impressed with MySpace, a social site she believes is filled with phony names, phony profiles, and in her words, “glittery, gaudy-as-shit layouts.” The repeated characterization of MySpace as “trashy,” “messy,” “busy,” and “gaudy” unveils a widespread belief among young collegians that the profiles crafted on the platform are unrefined, unsophisticated, and unappealing. All of this is in sharp contrast to the generally glowing praise showered on Facebook profiles, which, according to twenty-four-year-old Kevin, “is much better organized and easy to use.” Another young woman described Facebook as “pretty, simple, and classy.”
Beneath the preference for the more uniform interface of Facebook lies a more complex tale about the influence of race, class, and geography in the digital world. The triumph of Facebook over MySpace across Campus USA is not purely about aesthetic judgments or the desire for a simple and easily navigable platform. Matters of taste, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, do not develop in a vacuum but rather in relation to people’s social class position. Bourdieu, widely recognized as a pioneering thinker and theorist in the “sociology of culture,” used the terrain of culture or, more precisely, what we do in our everyday lives, to examine expressions of social inequality. Bourdieu made a career of studying what he calls the “distinctions”—tastes, lifestyle, manners, and values—members of the middle class diligently practice in order to maintain clear boundaries between themselves and the classes they view as less cultured, sophisticated, and desirable. Sociologists following in the tradition of Bourdieu refer to these practices as boundary-maintenance work.
Bourdieu carefully illustrates how the accumulation of middle-class cultural capital—education, and a taste for the high arts and the other presumed finer things of life—does more than serve the psyche of the bourgeois classes; it also enables them to reinforce their position of privilege. Many of the distinctions college students make in relation to social-network sites are not merely about taste; they are also about the preservation of social status and privilege.
As we probed deeper into the use of social-network sites, it became increasingly clear that young Facebookers’ abandonment of MySpace is not simply about avoiding “bad code”; it is also about avoiding “bad people.”
In addition to developing a strong dislike for the aesthetics that define MySpace, many college students expressed an equal degree of disdain for the demographics of MySpace or, more precisely, the kinds of individuals they believe populate the community. The frequent characterization of MySpace as “trashy” and “uneducated” underscores the widespread belief among young collegians that MySpace is used chiefly by a community of digital undesirables—black, Latino, and angst-ridden teenagers—people they consistently describe as “creepy.”
Twenty-two-year-old Tanner got straight to the point. “When I get on, or think of MySpace, I think of profiles that are trashy and just have garbage all over them,” he said. Tanner also believes that there are class differences among those using social-network sites. “I think MySpace is the poor person’s Facebook.” Vanessa, a twenty-five-year-old Facebook user, also linked class to the use of social sites. She simply did not understand people who refused to use her favorite site. “People who are not on Facebook are kind of weird,” she contended. Vanessa offered a sociological explanation: “It might also have to do with their socioeconomic status. Maybe they don’t have a computer or can’t afford the Internet.”
Both Will, twenty-one, and Elissa, twenty-two, characterized MySpace as “ghetto.” When we asked them to explain, Will said that while most of the people he sees on MySpace are his age, they are not in school. In his view, they are people who “edit their profile all day long and use glitter and graphics that just make everything look tacky.” Will clearly associates MySpace with people who can spend more time updating their profiles because they do not attend college or hold a desirable job. Elisa said that MySpace is “ghetto” because she gets friend requests from guys that look like they are “some sort of wannabe thug with all of their chains, or their profile picture is of them posted up in front of their low-rider or something.” Nineteen-year-old Cheryl shared a similar account to explain her distaste for MySpace.
“Once my friend was approached online by a guy who looked like he just came from prison and had crawled under a fence.” Clearly irritated by this, she exclaimed, “We would never invite someone like that into our network, that’s not what Facebook is about.”
Race is not usually evoked so explicitly in our conversations with young people about social-network sites. Concerns like these ordinarily come out through more oblique statements and points of view.
Our encounter with nineteen-year-old Amy is more typical of the young college students we met. She was thirteen when she received her first e-mail account. Referring to her current Internet usage, Amy said, “I spend about five hours a day online.” That time is filled with various things, including school-related work, watching music videos, and, most of all, viewing her friends’ Facebook profiles. Her initial crossing into the world of social-network sites began with profiles on MySpace and Facebook. She quickly decided that Facebook offers a far superior experience. “I had MySpace for about two months.” When asked how often she visits Facebook, Amy said, “It’s a routine . . . many times a day.” Because she has a prepaid phone account, Facebook saves her money. “I know my friends are going to check it,” she said confidently.
Reflecting back on the brief period when she used both sites, Amy said, “MySpace was creepy, weird, and complicated.” The college sophomore elaborated. “Creepy and weird because you can just make up a MySpace page and stalk people . . . it is just not safe.” Amy thinks that social-network sites, in general, are getting scarier and that Facebook is in danger of becoming more like MySpace after announcing in September 2006 that it would open up registration to anyone with an e-mail address. Up until then, Facebook had restricted its user-base mainly to college students.
Amy has always been cautious in her use of social-network sites, preferring only to communicate with people she knows from school or some other familiar space. “I have a Facebook profile but not a MySpace,” she said.
She explained why.
“Facebook seemed a lot safer, because when it first started out it was only college students.” Referring to MySpace, Amy said, “Weird people were always trying to add me as a friend.”
She told us that her future participation in social-network sites would likely be determined by how well the providers of the platforms managed access to their virtual doors. “In the years to come, I hope that there is a way to regulate who is allowed to get on . . . I would prefer to keep creepy people off.”
Nineteen-year-old Loren agreed. She mentioned that Facebook once practiced a “weeding-out process,” a reference to the initial decision to restrict the site to users with a “.edu” e-mail. She believes that the Facebook sign-up process discourages random friend requests and thus helps users maintain a degree of privacy.
The desire to keep undesirable people off social-network sites highlights another crucial factor in young collegians’ unmistakable preference for Facebook—a strong desire for platforms that provide privacy. Contrary to popular belief, young people do care about privacy. Specifically, they care about who has access to the content and community they share with friends and acquaintances online. Even among teens who use social-network sites, a majority of them, 66 percent, say their profiles are not visible to all Internet users, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Importantly, the longing for privacy is different from the concern for security. Specifically, the Facebook users we spoke with want exclusivity rather than safety. And, like so many others, Amy and Loren’s desire for privacy is also conditional, not absolute.
Amy and her peers consistently acknowledged that they like Facebook “because,” as she said, “it allows people to see what you are doing.” Many of them openly admitted that watching their friends’ photos and keeping up with them throughout the day by way of the news feeds and status updates is what draws them to Facebook. Being watched, clearly, does not bother them. What does irritate them, however, is being watched or approached online by people they classify as outside their social sphere and below their social position. That’s why many of them, including Amy, no longer use MySpace.
As our analysis of the distinctions young collegians make in their engagement with social-network sites probed deeper, our understanding became clearer. Many college students favor Facebook not only because they believe it is simple, navigable, and pleasurable, but also because it is special. In other words, the migration to Facebook is also driven by a desire to join a more exclusive community. Many of them said as much. Understood in a larger social context, it became apparent that the students we talked to preferred Facebook to MySpace for an intriguing reason: Facebook’s restricted and college-oriented user-base offered an experience that was practically the same as living in a gated community; only virtual walls surrounded this exclusive neighborhood.
For eight years, Setha Low, a cultural anthropologist at the City University of New York, conducted ethnographic research on the gated community phenomenon in America. Along with examining population statistics, Low talked to home developers and families to gain better insight into the gating practices that wall off families and communities from the people and areas around them. Once associated primarily with the Sun Belt regions of the country, gated communities, according to Low, have become ubiquitous and now spread across the vast American landscape. In 1995 an estimated 4 million people lived in gated communities. By 1998 more than 16 million people called gated residences home. And the number of gated residential developments is growing. Analysis of a 1997 national survey of Community Association Institute member associations identified three types of gated communities—lifestyle, elite, and security zones. The preference for Facebook resembles the elite gates that emphasize status and privilege. Elite gates, Low explains, are “primarily about stability and a need for homogeneity.”
Residents are drawn to gated communities for a number of reasons, including, as Low writes, “desire for safety, security, community, and ‘niceness,’ as well as wanting to live near people like themselves because of a fear of ‘others.’” From a purely sociological perspective, young people’s desire for privacy online is fascinating and complex. Even as they casually share some of the more intimate details of their everyday lives in a quasi-public space like Facebook, they still want privacy. In many ways, the language college students use to describe their attachment to Facebook—“safe,” “private,” “selective,” “neat,” “clean”—is amazingly similar to the language Low documents in her ethnography of gated communities. During our conversation with him, twenty-two-year-old Dylan, an avid Facebook user, candidly captured the sentiment for a gated online experience.
“When you think of Facebook,” Dylan explained, “the word safe sort of comes to mind, because even though the criteria for membership has opened itself up to anyone with an e-mail address, you feel like it’s a close-knit community of your friends.” When he thinks about MySpace, Dylan said that the word dangerous comes to mind “because it’s been open to everyone from the get-go.”
When it operated largely as a college-based social site, Facebook, much more than the open-door policy of MySpace, offered its users the chance to join what Low calls a “pure space.” Low explains that “the more purified the environment—the more homogenous and controlled—the greater the resident’s ability to identify any deviant individuals who should not be there.” And that is what Facebook does. It makes it easy to identify who should be there (college peers) and who should not (those outside the collegiate circle).
In the minds of gated residents, a pure space is also a safe place. Along with the wish to feel special, residents also prefer gates because they feel safer. Low explains that gating inevitably is about the fear of others and a world teeming with difference. But here is where gating in the physical and virtual worlds split. Facebook users in their late teens and early twenties are seldom threatened by the appearance of “others”—in this case, people not in their social sphere. Moving from MySpace to Facebook is more of a wish for prestige than protection. Being approached by someone you suspect is not in college or not middle class does not engender fright, though it does seem to intensify feelings of intolerance and indifference for people they classify as beneath their social class position.
Whereas young Facebook enthusiasts do not believe that MySpace is dangerous, there is a general suspicion that it is more promiscuous. In fact, young men and women express dissatisfaction with the frequent spams, sex-oriented solicitations, and friend requests from random people that make MySpace, in their view, a computer-mediated community that is out of control, an unpurified space. Twenty-one-year-old Doug said “I use to have MySpace but got rid of it because it felt too open. You feel safer with a thing like Facebook . . . It doesn’t feel as if you’re vulnerable to the outside world. It’s just your friends.”
This is one of the most common complaints about MySpace—that the social mores of the site encourage random “friending” behaviors that are far less selective compared to Facebook. The nondiscriminating nature of the site is taboo among college users, a brazen violation of their expectation that an online social site restricts who comes and goes in a network. Listen to college students talk about MySpace and Facebook and the attraction to a gated experience is easily apparent.
Use of fully upgraded computers, broadband, the social Web, and other new media technologies from home or increasingly on the go are forms of cultural capital—that is, indicators of social status, tech cool, and social mobility. Likewise, the transition from MySpace to Facebook represents it own distinct bid for a social status upgrade, a step up in the digital hierarchy. I get the impression that for many college students switching from MySpace to Facebook is like moving from a modest to a more exclusive zip code. Grace, a friendly nineteen-year-old I interviewed, typifies the shift in the social-networking behaviors of young college students and, especially, their desire to belong to a more improved online community.
When I met Grace she was three-quarters of the way through her first year in college and, by that point, a clear Facebook admirer. Once upon a time, though, it was all about MySpace. “Oh, me and my friends loved MySpace when we first started using it in high school,” Grace recalled. “MySpace,” she said with a bright smile spreading across her round face, “was sooo cool. We used it to share pictures, see how many friends we could add, and talk about all of the crazy stuff that went on at school.” And then, everything changed.
One day during the summer of 2006, after graduating from high school, Grace noticed that many of her college-bound friends, virtually overnight, had practically abandoned MySpace. Many of them had taken advantage of their new college e-mail addresses to set up profiles on Facebook. Unable to communicate routinely with her friends, Grace began to feel isolated from them and the conversations, jokes, pictures, and daily updates they shared with each other online. Even though she still saw them face-to-face, the inability to connect with them through a social-network site left her feeling like an outsider.
What Grace learned is what many students have learned—Facebook is an important source of cultural currency among the college set. In just a few short years, social-network sites have changed the bonding experiences associated with college life. During the days before the Web, the summer prior to going off to college was a period of great excitement, anticipation, and anxiety. Part of the anticipation and anxiety was not knowing things like who your college dorm mate was going to be or who was most likely to share your interests in music, movies, or a major. But all of that has changed with Facebook. Today, many students use Facebook to start making connections even before arriving on campus. Through their profiles they can identify people who share their same academic and, likely more important, lifestyle interests.
Social-network sites are not merely a source of communication among the young and the digital; they are the source of communication. It is the medium they use to exchange information, update each other on the latest happenings in their lives, and plan events together. Even before the first day of class, Grace was already missing out on a key collegiate bonding experience and core means of communication.
Her friends told her she had to get on Facebook because, as Grace put it, “that is the site all college students use.” Once she committed to a school and mailed in her deposit to hold her spot in the incoming class, Grace requested her “.edu” e-mail account from her university’s admissions office. One of the first things she did after receiving her new e-mail account was set up a Facebook profile. Speaking about the switch, Grace admitted, “It was scary for a while, feeling like I was cut off from my friends.” On Facebook she and her friends exchanged thoughts about things like where to live and which fraternities and sororities to associate with. “All of my college friends prefer Facebook,” she told me. “I may have one or two friends who do not use it.”
I asked her if she uses MySpace anymore. “Not really,” is all she said.
She and her friends had moved on. In the span of two months, MySpace was, as the saying goes, “so last year.”
In MySpace, collegians see a social-network site swarming with another unattractive segment: young teenagers. College students consistently describe MySpace as immature. Nineteen-year-old Rylee expressed outrage at the presence of so many young girls on the site. She called it ridiculous. “I see ten- and eleven-year-old girls on MySpace. And they are adding me!” With more than a bit of dismay in her voice, Rylee asked, “Where are their parents?”
One of the most interesting allusions to the presence of teens in MySpace comes from one of the student researchers that I worked with. Summarizing her research, she explained that many of her peers refer to MySpace as “emo.” If you are unfamiliar with the term, she described it this way. “Emo” is short for emotional and refers to the adolescent outsiders who find refuge in social sites by pouring out their heart and soul in a way that Facebook users find appallingly juvenile. Whether it is the exhilaration from a first crush or the desolation from the inevitable break up, some teens use the social Web to express their most inner feelings. Teens’ use of social-network sites and blogs to grapple with the highs and lows of adolescence have often been compared to the longstanding practice of maintaining a personal journal. In the case of social-network sites, though, these personal expressions can be quite public.
Facebook’s initial registration restrictions contributed to the relatively small community of users compared to MySpace. In reality, that made it more quaint, manageable, and most significantly, exclusive for the first wave of users. Indeed, many college students viewed the smaller Facebook as a superior platform and social-network experience next to the bulging growth and cultural anarchy they associated with MySpace. Not surprisingly, the decision by Facebook management to open up registration to anybody with an e-mail account was not very popular among college students. They understand why Facebook opened up registration—to grow as a business—but are generally unhappy about the decision.
Opening up Facebook, in their view, represented the end of an era, albeit a brief one, when the platform was largely an online hot spot for young collegians. There were no boomer parents, no “emo” teens, and definitely no future employers snooping around for incriminating pictures or wall posts. “Yeah, we [college students] still use it,” twenty-one-year old Jason lamented, “but it’s not the same since they opened up.” A few people expressed annoyance at the rising number of applications on the site, claiming that the changes, in general, threaten to make Facebook more like MySpace—too open, too busy, and consequently too crowded.
Ten months after opening its virtual gates, Facebook experienced a rush of users. Between August 2006 and August 2007 the site experienced triple-digit traffic growth, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. The number of teens using Facebook grew even more, by 122 percent. In December 2006 Facebook had about 12 million active users. By October 2007 that number had risen to over 50 million. After registration was opened up, the Facebook user-base underwent some interesting changes. Facebook’s 85 percent market share of four-year U.S. universities still made it dominant in that category. But more than half of Facebook users were outside of college, and the fastest-growing segment was among those twenty-five years and older.
Even after the initial population surge in Facebook, MySpace still hosted the biggest party in the digital universe, as more than 140 million profiles had been created since its 2004 launch. But behind the phenomenal number of profiles, a very different reality was emerging—the steady erosion of the MySpace brand among crucial parts of the young segment that is so highly coveted by digital-media entrepreneurs.
From the moment it began to blow up, MySpace’s size and anarchic inclinations posed challenges for management, especially the maneuvers to monetize the site. Those challenges notwithstanding, the overall consensus was that the millions of eyeballs glued to MySpace made it a logical destination for commercial initiatives. By early 2000 there was widespread accord among speculators in the digital media economy that social-network sites were a hot property—the next new thing in the next generation Web. That is certainly what prompted Rupert Murdoch and his company, News Corporation, to acquire MySpace in 2005—the idea that the explosive growth positioned it as a new business and media model and, eventually, a cash cow in the promising but largely untapped social Web economy. But a much more bedeviling reality has emerged. A steady growing number of people use social-network sites, but as twenty-three-year old Jocelyn told us, “No one goes on MySpace or Facebook to buy things. We go there to communicate with our friends.” In 2009, despite all of the hype, buzz, and cover stories, neither MySpace nor Facebook was generating noteworthy profits.
As strange as it sounds, MySpace was too successful. The platform’s supersize led to a lack of quality control that began to steadily erode the user-experience and alienate key segments of young people, especially those bound for college or looking for what they perceived as a more intimate, authentic, or ad-free online community. Joel, a twenty-four-year-old music studies student, thought about the ad clutter on MySpace and echoed a common sentiment. “Have you seen those ads that pop up?” he asked. “They’re basically like porn advertisements, and so I’ll randomly get these and it’s really annoying.” The constant barrage of spams, phony profiles, ads, random friend requests, and the socially promiscuous environment undermined the value of the site for the young crowd we met, literally driving them away.
It was a rapid and stunning decline for a brand that a few short years ago was the celebrity platform in the burgeoning world of social media. In 2009, Facebook’s global user base surpassed MySpace’s for the first time. The demise of MySpace is a vivid reminder of just how unpredictable the fate of brands catering to the young and the digital can be.
Some of the young people we meet like Diana, a twenty-year-old Latina from the Rio Grand Valley, arrive at college from more humble circumstances and represent the select few from their schools and communities to pursue a post-secondary degree. Diana’s limited exposure to new communication technologies made the transition to college much more challenging compared to that of her technology-rich peers. The soft-spoken twenty-year-old grew up in a low-income household where her family emphasized education. A regular user of social-network sites, Diana spends about four hours a day online between school, work, and play. She spoke openly about her passage from high school to a major four-year university as well as her personal history with computers and the social Web.
In school, Diana regularly scored high marks even though she never had access to her own computer. Recalling her high school days, she explained, “Every time I needed a computer, I had to go to the public library or use one at school.” In both settings—a school or a public library—the ability to fashion a truly custom-fit, social Web experience is severely limited by, among other things, content and time restrictions. Most middle and high schools block access to social-network sites, whereas public libraries usually place time restrictions on users.
The complex interactions of race, class, and education have long been key predictors of household computer and Internet use. Although the technology gap between kids living in high- and low-income households has closed, a gap nevertheless persists. In a 2007 report titled Latinos Online, the Pew Internet & American Life Project states that 29 percent of adult Latinos have access to broadband at home compared to 43 percent of whites. Kids who grow up in broadband households are more likely to belong to a community of peers that share insights, ideas, and experiences that lead to a more robust online experience. Moreover, studies show that individuals in broadband households use the Internet for longer periods of time and for a wider range of activities than those individuals who do not have broadband at home.
During her senior year in high school, in 2006, Diana began using MySpace. Compared to many of her peers around the nation, she was a late adopter. Still, she was thrilled to join a community that by then had grown into a popular online destination for millions of people. Many of Diana’s friends from school, a predominantly Latino student community, were on MySpace. They enjoyed creating their profiles for friends to see and admire. “I must have spent that whole first day creating my page and reaching out to friends who were already users.”
When Diana left home to attend college, her life, as you might expect, began to change. She got her own computer—the first one she ever owned. And then, another first happened. “I discovered Facebook a week into school after I bought my laptop,” she said. She immediately set up a profile and experienced an initial rush of joy that was similar to her first day on MySpace. “I had some similar excitement with Facebook, but the difference was I didn’t know anyone here [at my university],” she said. “Plus, most of my friends from high school didn’t attend college like I did, so I wasn’t that excited in the end.”
Diana realized that college students overwhelmingly populated her school’s Facebook network. The only problem was that she did not come from a school that produced many college students. Most of her friends did not use Facebook. Unlike Grace and her friends, Diana had to contend with what communication scholar Nicole Ellison and her colleagues call “friendsickness,” that inevitable feeling of loneliness that comes with leaving friends to attend college. While some of the earliest adopters were using Facebook to build friendships and acquaintances before arriving on campus, late adopters were missing out on this early chance to accumulate social capital and build community.
Diana’s use of Facebook increased through classes and involvement in student organizations. In order to stay connected with her friends back home who were not enrolled in college, Diana continued using MySpace. Her dual use of Facebook and MySpace to navigate communities that are comprised of a cross-section of people—including the middle and working classes as well as college and non-college-bound acquaintances—is actually quite common among students.
Patty, a twenty-four-year-old college graduate and advertising professional, told us, “I use to be more MySpace-oriented, but now I enjoy Facebook a lot more. I guess because MySpace . . . I used it to keep in touch with people who are from high school and from back home, whom I don’t really see much of nowadays.” She said Facebook, on the other hand, is used to keep in touch with people “who are from here [where she lives and works], who I see almost everyday, or people I work with, so that’s why I use it more often.”
Moving back and forth from MySpace to Facebook, in instances like these, is the digital equivalent of what sociologists refer to as code-switching—a reference to the ability to master varying styles of communication and behavior that nimbly manage different cultural norms, expectations, and environments. More than anything, code-switching in the digital world illuminates the various social networks that we move in and out of. Being digital does not mean being one-dimensional. Increasingly, it means being fluid and in a constant state of evolution.
To a great extent, the social ties and personal relationships that matter most to young people are managed through digital-media technologies. Despite the differences between them, the primary purpose of platforms like MySpace and Facebook is to connect people to people—the quintessential feature in all expressions of community.
Our research suggests that virtual social ties are legitimate. Social ties and communities can even be strengthened and sustained through the use of new communication technologies. As I think more carefully about the young people we meet, two urgent questions emerge. First, what specific kinds of social capital are young people accumulating through their use of social-network sites? And second, who are they building online community and relationships with?
Robert Putnam explains that like any other form of capital, social capital can be used to achieve benevolent or malevolent ends. In his work on the collapse of community in American life, Putnam identifies two specific dimensions of social capital, what he calls “bonding” and “bridging.” Writing about bonding social capital, Putnam says, “some forms of capital are inward looking and tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogeneous groups.” Bonding social capital refers to the social ties and connections to “people like us.” These connections, Putnam claims, do not expand, but rather reinforce our narrower selves. And then there is bridging social capital, which, according to Putnam, is “outward looking and encompasses people across diverse social cleavages.” Bridging social capital’s distinct quality is connecting people who may be different in some distinguishable way—religion, class, nationality, or race and ethnicity. Networks that bridge involve connections to “people not like us” and potentially expand our horizons and our possible selves.
Does the daily use of social-network sites among the college set promote bonding or bridging? Any attempt to analyze what is happening in social-network sites must be open to nuance and change given that young people’s new media behaviors are in a constant state of flux. Up to this point the evidence from our research strongly suggests that everyday engagement with Facebook tends to promote bonding and bridging. But while bridging happens, bonding is dominant.
Laura, a young college student, mentioned that most of the people in her network are middle class and white. Twenty-one-year-old Andrea said that her Facebook network “consists of the people I know closely.” Andrea insisted that the longer she keeps Facebook, the more she feels inclined to keep it restricted to the people she knows very well. Also, twenty-one-year-old Matthew explained that the bulk of the people he communicates with on Facebook “are primarily my college friends, but I also interact with a lot of my friends who I grew up with and don’t go to [my college].”
Among the young, white collegians profiled in this chapter, a main attraction to Facebook is the degree to which it guides online communication toward people who are likely to be young, white, middle class (in orientation), enrolled in college, and nearby. This last element is especially intriguing. Geography, we have consistently been told, no longer matters in a technology-rich environment that delivers access to anybody, anytime, anywhere. But in the initial ascent of social-network sites, the primacy of geography is undeniable. The young and the digital use social sites to communicate with people who are close by—classmates, neighbors, and acquaintances from their off-line social circles. Remarkably, as the World Wide Web grows more routine, it functions more like the local Web—a virtual network made up mainly of people in close physical proximity to its users. These and other factors embody quintessential bonding.
Twenty-year-old Nicole has been online since she was eight, making her a veteran in the world of social and digital media—online chat rooms, IMing, and social-network sites. But even though she has spent more of her twenty years of life online than off-line, it has not led to a desire to bridge—that is, to expand her social networks beyond the people she interacts with off-line. Nicole described her online network as composed of the same people she communicates with face-to-face—in her words, “upper-class Americans.” She used those same types of words while characterizing Facebook as “preppy,” “upper class,” and “American.” MySpace, she said, “is sometimes creepy, sometimes fun. It has more of a creepy element to it for me than Facebook.”
She also believes that there is “probably more diversity on MySpace.” This is a common view expressed by young collegians. They believe that compared to Facebook, the MySpace universe is populated with a wider variety of people. For some the diversity represented on MySpace makes the site interesting. For others, however, the demographic variety makes MySpace seriously uninviting. Results from our survey provide further evidence that bonding social capital is a common part of the Facebook experience. Young women and men alike visit social-network sites three or more times a day. Seventy-three percent of our survey participants chose “spending time with friends” as one of the things they liked most about using social-network sites. More specifically, they said they use social sites to communicate with two specific sets of friends—those that they see frequently and those that they seldom see face-to-face, presumably as a result of going away to school. This particular use of social-network sites points squarely to the preference to engage people online who are close in mind, body, and lifestyle.
Despite all of the hype about how the digital age is changing our lives, it has not changed one essential aspect of human life—who we form our strongest social ties with. Similar to life B.W.—before the Web—our most intimate bonds online tend to be formed with like-minded people. Indeed, the young people we surveyed and spoke with are attracted to online communities that connect them to people who are like them in some notable way—age, education, region, race, or class. In order to understand what is happening online, you have to understand what is happening off-line. One place to start understanding what is driving young people toward homogeneous online communities is a consideration of what author Bill Bishop has tagged the Big Sort, a reference to the geographic transformation of American neighborhoods.
The Big Sort, according to Bishop, began around 1970 as Americans underwent a massive social experiment that changed one of the most basic features of everyday life—where and with whom we live. The change in geography, Bishop maintains, is “really a sorting by lifestyle,” as Americans now more than ever gravitate toward counties and communities that reflect their values, beliefs, and ways of life. Thinking further about the Big Sort and how it is remapping American neighborhoods, Bishop writes, “We have come to expect living arrangements that don’t challenge our cultural expectations.” Many Americans, especially the ones who enjoy a degree of economic mobility, are choosing to live near people who think, live, and look like them.
Social-network sites do not cause social divisions. The young and the digital have grown up in a world in which the geographic sorting by race, lifestyle, and ideological values—a rather extraordinary development—has become ordinary. Bishop is correct when he writes, “Kids have grown up in neighborhoods of like-mindedness, so homogenous groups are considered normal.” The vast majority of the young people we meet go online to have fun by sharing their lives and communicating with their peers. And yet, the choices they make regarding who they interact with online are not immune to the social forces that are shaping their off-line lives. Like the Big Sort, the online sorting among young Facebook users is shaped by a general suspicion of difference, a split along lifestyle, and, finally, the wish to reside in communities with like-minded people.
The digital gating practices of young, white college students are especially interesting when you consider how often we hear that race does not matter to Generation Digital. In his 2008 book, The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream, pollster John Zogby writes that the generation he calls the “First Globals,” Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, are “the most outward-looking . . . generation in American history.” On the question that has challenged America for more than two centuries—race—Zogby says, “The nation’s youth are leading the way into a more accepting future.” From MTV’s embrace of black pop to the selling of hip hop, this generation certainly came of age in a cultural milieu in which racial signifiers were not only visible, but also elaborately marketed entertainment. This generation personally experienced a racial milestone in 2008, the historic presidential election of Barack Obama. Liberal and conservatives alike argued that by embracing Obama’s message of “CHANGE,” young whites provided evidence of a generation no longer burdened by our nation’s racial past. Meanwhile, our conversations with young whites show that some view MySpace and Facebook, in part, through a racially coded lens. Race, it turns out, still matters.
“MySpace,” said nineteen-year-old Thomas, “is on crack. There is too much glitter and music.” Twenty-two-year-old Veronica also drew a connection between MySpace and the notorious drug. “My favorite is Facebook because MySpace is absolutely on crack and overwhelming,” she said. The reference to crack, a drug associated primarily with the black urban poor, is certainly not race neutral. Add to this a sentiment like “MySpace is too ghetto,” and the racial marking of the digital world is apparent. Likewise, the belief that MySpace is sullied with profiles that feature “glittery, gaudy-as-shit layouts” and “too much glitter and music” invoke another racially marked term—bling—a popular slang derived from the larger-than-life fantasies played out in hip-hop songs, videos, and style.
Starting around the early 1990s, hip-hop music, fashion, movies, and marketing campaigns were made as much for young white consumers, especially suburban males, as black and Latino consumers. So, why would a generation that grew up consuming hip hop be turned off by the “bling aesthetics” that pervade MySpace culture? To answer that question, you have to understand the difference between “old media” (think television) and “new media” (think social-network sites).
Television and social-network sites represent two fundamentally different kinds of mediated experiences. Whereas television is about watching and consuming, social-network sites are primarily about doing and sharing. Facebook users share themselves daily through wall posts, news feeds, blogs, photos, gifts, and other activities. This kind of constant connectivity establishes varying degrees of community and intimacy. By the time they arrived in college, the late teens and young twenty-somethings we met were a little less concerned with the quantity of their online social networks and more concerned with what the quality of those networks say about them and the people they are associated with. It is one thing for young whites to listen to music inspired by the hood, and something entirely different to establish a degree of intimacy with people they believe come from the hood. This is the crucial difference between “old media” and “new media.”
Whereas the use of old media platforms like television maintains distance from black and Latino youth, new media platforms like social-network sites offer a greater possibility for closeness. Back when television was dominant, young whites could consume black style and expressive culture from a distance. Social-network sites afford young whites the opportunity to interact with actual black people. However, by avoiding MySpace, the users of Facebook elect to avoid sharing their lives and experiencing a modicum of intimacy with “real” black and Latino youth in the computer-mediated spaces they frequent. Instead of venturing to bridge, some young whites choose instead to bond with each other inside their digital gates.
Social and mobile media may be changing how we connect, but as we move into the digital future, it does not appear to be significantly altering who we connect to.
In one of the first “virtual-field studies” exploring the role of race in computer-mediated social worlds, two social psychologists from Northwestern University, Paul Eastwick and Wendi Gardner, found evidence of racial bias in the online world There.com. The experimenters created two avatars, one with light skin and the other with dark skin. Modeling one of their investigations on a classic “compliance technique” experiment called “Face-in-the-Door” condition, Eastwick and Gardner made a large request of There.com participants that was sure to be refused. It was the response to the second, more moderate request that the researchers were really interested in. Previous studies found that the moderate request usually leads to greater compliance from study participants. It turns out that the participants believe that the requester has made a concession and, thus, are more likely to reciprocate. Researchers believe that the participant’s decision to agree is based on their assessment of the requester.
As expected, Eastwick and Gardner noticed that the more moderate request led to greater compliance. But when they examined the responses to the light- and dark-skinned avatars, a statistically significant difference emerged. Among the light-skinned avatars, 20 percent more people said yes to the second request. Among the dark-skinned avatars, only 8 percent more of There.com participants said yes. The researchers concluded that the social influence of race might have been a factor, though they were unsure of the precise nature of the effect. Did participants respond based on their perception of the avatars’ appearance (skin color) or their perceptions of the person controlling the avatar? Either way, Eastwick and Gardner write, “the virtual world may not prove to be a perfect utopian getaway from the real world.” The racial perceptions and biases we develop in our off-line lives, they conclude, likely creep in to our online lives.
More than a decade after that famous New Yorker cartoon, there is an emerging body of research that suggests that as we travel deeper and deeper into the online world, being a dog in the off-line world matters after all.