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

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.

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’.