News for the Week of July 8, 2007
A top story in youth Net news of late has been a prominent social-media researcher's view of a developing class divide online as much as offline — or how young people choose where they socialize based on how they identify themselves and who their friends are in "real life"...
Social Web's class divide
Facebook is more like the suburbs and MySpace the inner city, according to a Salon.com blogger's interpretation of social media researcher danah boyd's latest, fairly controversial paper on social networking. I think it's controversial because, as an essay, it's broad-brushed. It also uses teens' own terms for their social groups because it's based on danah's qualitative research (hundreds of in-person and online interviews with social networkers), not the quantitative kind of a sociologist. [danah's legal name is lower-cased.] Note her liberal use of quotation marks: "The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other 'good' kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities. MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, burnouts,' 'alternative kids,' 'art fags,' punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school..." Don't miss what danah says about "good kids" vs. "bad kids" under "Thoughts and meta thoughts" at the end of her essay — insights for parents.
Sites' origins are key
I actually think that the two social sites' populations largely reflect their origins: Facebook was exclusive right out of the gate, having gotten its start at Harvard and then taking other college and university campuses by storm, only later broadening out. MySpace, which was about individuality, diversity, and personal expression (including nearly unrestricted profile customization) from its start with 20-somethings, then teens, also reflected the inclusiveness of the music scene that it was so tied to. Facebook was about networking and limited in the customization it allowed; MySpace was whatever anyone wanted it to be (the two have moved closer together since and away from those very divergent starts). Here's the BBC on danah's essay.
In other news...
- Social stuff taking over Web. Wherever you are in the world, parents, your teens' social networking seems to be here to stay. Online video and social networking are outpacing all other uses of digital media worldwide, according to international market researchers Ipsos, and social networking "is quickly becoming the dominant online behavior globally". In terms of frequency of visits to social sites, South Korea leads the way, followed by Brazil, China, Mexico, US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, France, Japan, and Russia. "While 20% of regular Internet users worldwide had visited a social networking site in the previous 30 days, the figure was 55% in Korea and 24% in the U.S.," according to MediaPost.com's report on the Ipsos study, "The Face of the Web."
- Porn social-networking sites. Social sites that specialize in pornography are reportedly proliferating. One of the more disturbing things about them is the content that's uploaded without the video subjects' permission. This takes social-networking reputation concerns to an extreme. "There are over 250 ex-girlfriends currently featured among the tens of thousands of sex videos on [one such site]," Alternet reports. And how does this happen? "About 15% of women have knowingly made sex videos, according to a recent poll in Cosmopolitan magazine. If true, that's how many are at risk of having an ex post X-rated files of them on a porn-sharing site." The piece leads with the news that the video of one "ex-girlfriend" has been viewed by 138,629 people on one Germany-based porn video-sharing site (or "aggregator of amateur-generated porn"). The article goes in-depth on the tagging, rating, discussion groups, and other social elements of Web 2.0's red-light district.
- Stickam's reported ties with porn biz A former vice president at Stickam.com, a Webcam social site, told the New York Times that Stickam is managed and owned by a businessman who also owns DTI Services, "a vast network of Web sites offering live sex shows over Web cameras. "[Alex] Becker alleges that Stickam shares office space, employees and computer systems with the pornographic Web sites." Becker also said he saw Stickam staff delete "thousands of email messages" that had been sent to the site's customer-service and abuse-reporting addresses without reading them. For its part, the company told the Times it takes user security seriously and Becker was being "retaliatory" because of disagreement over his contract. The thing is, "several thousand of its mostly teenage members log onto the site each night to broadcast their own lives, often from their bedrooms. They put on makeshift talk shows, flirt with other members in video chat rooms, and often, if they are female, field repeated requests to take off their clothes."
- Lost sibling found in MySpace Hours after finding their 17-year-old sister on MySpace, from whom they'd been separated for 12 years, Josh (22), Jake (20), and their sister were reunited, ABC News reports. After all three had grown up in foster homes in Texas, the two brothers also found that their sister — who had been adopted by a different family - was now in Florida, as they were, and just 45 minutes away. The way they found her was, last August, "Jake had a revelation," according to ABC. "Every 16-year-old girl he knew had a page on MySpace. But, he wasn't sure he knew his lost sister's name." It was knowing their mother's maiden name that helped him find her in MySpace.
- 5 tips for parents... in a financial news site of all places - MarketWatch.com. It's a good sign that intelligent tech parenting is going mainstream. I like these online-safety tips because they're simple and smart, and they promote parent-child communication. Points worth highlighting: author and dad Adam Thierer's "layered approach" to online parenting, layering tech tools (like Google's SafeSearch and maybe filtering or monitoring software) with open communication; reaching out to other parents (tech parenting does "take a village"); and keeping up on kid-tech news (I'm showing my bias).
