I Left Myspace for Facebook… That makes me a Racist!
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under News, Web
Well, looks like I might be a racist. I quit Myspace recently for Facebook, and in a recent keynote speech social researcher Danah Boyd stated that “…digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight” My reasons for leaving were that Myspace is a shoddy site overloaded with adverts, and owned by Murdoch. In fact, despite me using Facebook, Twitter and other such services I’m not a big fan of social networks surprisingly. Without going into my all my reasons for using them, the purpose of Myspace/Facebook specifically, for me, was and is solely as communication tools as it seems that e-mail is “so 20th century”
Abandon your MySpace account for Facebook? You might just be a racist.
At a keynote speech during New York’s Democracy forum at Lincoln Center, Danah Boyd spoke of the racial disparity and possible reasons for mass abandonment of MySpace for the “more cultured” and “less cheesy” social networking site Facebook. Boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and fellow of the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, stated:
“We might as well face an uncomfortable reality … what happened was modern day ‘white flight’.”
Boyd also observed that:
“The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to all of us. It should scare the hell out of us.”
Referring to MySpace as the “ghetto of the digital landscape,” Boyd indicated that MySpace users are more likely to be “brown or black” and espouse a different set of ideals in conflict with those espoused by the teens she surveyed over four years. She said that patterns in migration across social networking sites echoed those of a white exodus from cities in the past. Boyd also said that teens who use Facebook are more likely to condescend their MySpace-favoring peers.
“Any high school student who has a Facebook page will tell youMySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious… like Peet’s is more cultured than Starbucks and jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop. And Macs are more cultured than PCs.”
My first reaction to such a story is to scoff at it, and rightly so I think, that said, I really would like to look at the research behind it.
Tags: Facebook, Myspace, Racism, Racist, Social networks, Study
Redundant Data.
Posted by unluckydip | Filed under Book, University, opinion
Earlier this week I had a Digital Media lecture about Social Networking sites, and there was a breif discussion about the differences between Myspace and Facebook. After the lecture I started thinking about my web habits and have decided to delete all the accounts that I no longer use (That is if i can even remember them at all)
One of the arguments raised in the class was that the proliferation of social networking sites, and in my opinion websites that require any personal data to be used effectively, are simply conditioning us to be more open to a surveillance orwellian-esq society. I can’t help but agree somewhat with this, it’s now just accepted that if we want to view a web-page we are going to have to provide personal data and make an account, (In fact this reminds me of The Gift by the sociologist Marcel Mauss) There was of course a time when this was in fact a rarity.
I was always of the opinion that I’d might as-well keep my online accounts open (such as myspace) just in case I might use them again, but in all honestly I most probably wont. I’d rather remove my data and only have it in places that I regularly use so I can try and keep more effective control of it, this ultimately is futile, but nevertheless knowing where data on me has been obtained in itself is useful.
I’ve so far successfully applied to have my myspace account deleted, it seems there is a 48 hour cooling off period before it is removed, I’m half expecting a torrent of e-mails from them trying to stop me from deleting it, in fact during the process of applying it kept saying things like “why don’t you add more friends?”, which I actually found quite insulting!
I’m going to, over the next few days, start deleting more accounts and updating information on others, hopefully it wont distract me too much from doing some much needed reading. I finish this post on a delightful image i found using a social network I do not intend to delete, stumbleupon.com
Note: I will make the image background transparent later, cannot be bothered to fire up photoshop at the moment.
Tags: Data, Digital, Facebook, Internet, Media, Myspace, Sociology
