more facebook, with class

i knew i wasn't totally down with Facebook.

i thought it was because its version of community seemed cheap and parodic compared to blogging; a shallow, performative dance of "i have some friends, you don't have more friends" that neither allowed for complexity nor for the specificity of context that tends to foster empathic conversation and sharing out here in the blogosphere.

apparently, it's just 'cause i'm a punk rocker, dude.

Danah Boyd, who at five years younger than me - why do those words smart so much, anyway? - is a guru of teh internets, sez that Facebook is the Pottery Barn of social networking sites among young people, while the much-vilified and frequently-banned MySpace carries cultural capital among totally different groups of kids, among them youth who are marginalized by class or ethnicity, or who choose to be part of an anti-establishment subculture.

Boyd's full article is fascinating to me primarily because it deals with class. in North American society, gasp. yes, we have class. or rather, classes. not tidy ones, either...given that, as Boyd points out, her friends (and mine) who eke out 14K a year working in cafes while in grad school are no more members of the traditional working class than a lottery winner is a member of the upper crust. class membership today is about lifestyle, the article posits, with social stratification operating partially through the realms of aesthetics and activities. thus, literacies and tastes mark a person as a member of various (possibly intersecting) communities, some of which may be completely unrelated to the tangible, physical community of geographic location and culture and economics that once delineated class. this makes sense to me...and i think it has resonance for some of the "who are we?" class identification conversations that have gone around the blogosphere in the past number of months.

but Boyd's more interested in the class affiliations of Facebook and Myspace users than she is in bloggers, at least in the attached article. i do think her otherwise keen analysis of the current social milieu stumbles pretty hard when she tries to demarcate teen social network users into two clean-ish groups, even just for the purpose of establishing ground on which to found the conversation: the thesis of her article posits that the hegemonic "good kid" teens use Facebook, in part because of the hype around its connection to colleges back when it first made inroads in the teen world, while "subaltern" teens chose or stuck with Myspace. fair enough...but then she goes on to explore the subaltern group largely in terms of poverty. certainly, poverty is a significant factor in the lives of many, many marginalized teens, particularly those who belong to marginalized cultural groups - Latinos, African Americans - whose forms of cultural expression are associated with the flash and bling aesthetic that Boyd says is far more characteristic of Myspace. but if we're going to break the class conversation out of its traditional, ill-fitting box of economic delineation, shouldn't the exploration of subaltern identity go a little further too? what about the emo kids she mentions, or the punk kids? the hegemony they're rebelling against with their own identifications isn't just the dominant culture, per se, but in many cases their own cultural heritage - their suburban, Wonderbread parents, or the broader cultural values they're implicitly expected to inherit and uphold. they reject the Pottery Barn or Ikea aesthetic of pleasant Euro-simulacric order just as much as the hiphop kids do...but the two groups find different aesthetics and spheres of belonging through which to express that rejection. poverty matters. but i think for any of us who work with young people or youth culture and are interested in understanding what they're really doing on these sites that they spend just as much time on as most of us do on our blogs, we'd be wise not to see Myspace merely as a poor kid's Facebook. is it the rock-n-roll end of social networking? probably not. it's not open source, not terribly responsive to user input in terms of its development over time. both are commercial sites, and both, as i see it, shape users to a shallow, referential form of identity performance, where much is signified but little is said.

but then, maybe i think that because tastes and literacies are as generational as they are class-based, and i'm always going to be a print native, sucker for the details and individuality of expression i believe to be available in words. blogging is a simulacra of my own ideal world.

maybe Facebook and Myspace really do - in ways completely inscrutable to me, whether with gaudy bling themes or hardcore logo - fulfill the same purpose for the digital natives of the next generation. i dunno.

thoughts?