Status anxiety
Facebook versus MySpace is just how the Web 2.0 world expresses U and non-U
Wednesday, 26th September 2007
Toby Young on the social angst of online networking
Not long ago, an obscure journal published what must rank as the most controversial essay of the 21st century. No, I’m not talking about ‘The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy’, an attack on the influence of the Jewish lobby that appeared in the London Review of Books. I’m referring to ‘Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace’ by Danah Boyd.
Ms Boyd is a 29-year-old PhD student in the Sociology Department of the University of California, Berkeley and the reason her essay was so inflammatory is that she dared to raise the spectre of social class in a discussion of social networking sites on the internet. Her conclusions were accompanied by all sorts of riders and qualifications, and she bent over backwards to sound as non-judgmental as possible, referring to MySpace users as ‘subaltern’ and Facebook users as ‘hegemonic’, but these subtleties were lost on the media. ‘MySpace is for poor kids, Facebook is for WASPS’ is how one newspaper reported her findings.
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DD
September 28th, 2007 11:57pm Report this commentSpot on.
Toby Young
October 9th, 2007 8:30pm Report this commentYou nearly had me there!
tony kirkwood
December 21st, 2007 12:25pm Report this commentToby Hi, do you have Alex de Silva's facebook address love and happy crimbo tony
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