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Saturday 4 July 2009

Status anxiety

Facebook versus MySpace is just how the Web 2.0 world expresses U and non-U

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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