A Facebook User and a Gentleman

As I was doing my PT this morning, I listened to last week's podcast of On The Media, NPR's popular show covering how the "sausage" of journalism is manufactured. (Yes, I listen to certain NPR programming, and also eat sushi, drink lattes, and read the New York Times -- while also supporting the Iraq mission, wanting to cut taxes, eliminate most federal agencies, and bring back the Constitution circa 1937... you got a problem wit dat?)

Anyway, one particular segment caught my attention, a piece on how internet social networking sites reinforce preexisting social divisions rather than create a new world utopia where we all hold hands and sing Kum-ba-ya. To wit, a researcher has determined that sites like MySpace and Facebook self-segregate by class.

MySpace originated in the indie music world of LA, and has continued to be a fannish/high school type of place. Facebook, meanwhile, was created by Harvard students, quickly expanded to the rest of the Ivy League, then to all college students, and of late seemingly anyone (though with certain gatekeepers).

Further, the military has restricted access to MySpace (ostensibly for bandwidth reasons), but not Facebook. The researcher surmises that this policy results from a situation whereby, of the military community that uses these sites, most officers (being college-educated) skew toward Facebook, while enlisted men use MySpace.

So, accepting the above distinction between MySpace and Facebook users (and limiting our discussion to those two sites), there are two things going on here: 1. People choosing to join virtual communities where they can find their peers, and 2. Official policies privileging what is perceived as the higher-class online network.

On the first, well, that's human nature. I don't want to tell people who like and are comfortable with MySpace to switch to Facebook because I personally find MySpace too cluttered and juvenile. Similarly, forcing Facebook users to suddenly switch to Facebook would do nothing but create resentments. As a rough analogy, look at the effects of busing schoolkids in an attempt to remedy racial segregation (leaving aside the issue that the Supreme Court recently decreed such a practice to be unconstitutional).

On the second, I can't imagine that the military instituted its internet policy to discriminate in favor of officers (and then concocted some bandwidth ruse to justify it). Everything I've seen suggests that enlisted men are treated fairly, and are valued as soldiers/sailors/airmen/marines and as citizens. There must be something to the bandwidth issue, but also the type of content available (and pushed) on MySpace may not be in line the military's rules and regulations on conduct befitting servicemembers.

Of course, the question remains: Where does Friendster [or insert another networking site] fit into all this? My intuition is that if you surveyed all of these different sites, you'd find a much richer, more parsimonious way to categorize them than simply by class or education level -- much as the "offline" world can be sliced in a practically infinite number of ways.