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

Ms Boyd was writing about America, but her observations are equally true of Britain. I’ve been a member of both MySpace and Facebook for at least two years and while MySpace is populated by a vast array of hip, alternative types (disc jockeys, musicians, skateboarders), Facebook users are almost exclusively upper-middle-class professionals and/or their children. It’s the internet equivalent of U and Non-U.

If anything, this divide is even more pronounced in the UK because, as a nation, we’re so class-conscious. The great thing about Facebook is that it offers people an almost limitless number of ways to advertise their superior social standing — something that U-types are particularly keen on in my experience. I don’t simply mean you can post a picture of yourself standing next to a celebrity — though, God knows, we’ve all done that — or even that you can advertise your membership of U-sounding groups, such as ‘I’d rather be hunting’. (There’s even one called ‘I say loo not toilet’.) No, I’m talking about the ‘update your status’ button that enables you to tell all your friends exactly what you’re doing at any given moment. It is this feature, more than anything else, that allows Facebook users to flaunt just how successful they are.

A cursory check of my own Facebook profile, for instance, reveals that two hours ago a marketing consultant informed her fellow users that she is ‘off to Yorkshire for a weekend of abstinence, yoga and hiking’, while 16 hours ago, a PR lady said she couldn’t get to sleep because she’d just appeared on a live television programme. The ‘update your status’ feature is a notice board on which you can boast about your latest triumphs.

For a Facebook user, the ultimate confirmation that you’ve arrived is if someone else tries to impersonate you on the site. I had no idea how widespread this practice was until I applied to become Facebook friends with ‘Harold Pinter’, ‘Daniel Craig’ and ‘Angelina Jolie’ — and they all said yes. Clearly, they couldn’t possibly be the real deal. I subsequently discovered that there are at least 20 people masquerading as ‘Boris Johnson’, all of them pumping out regular status updates — ‘Just back from Henley’ — in the hope of passing themselves off as the Blond Bombshell.