Social scientist Danah Boyd has posted a draft of a paper entitled “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace“. Essentially she is suggesting that MySpace represents the working class kids, whereas Facebook is the social network for the university grads and undergrads.

Danah observes that definitions of “class” in the US are incredibly complex. It is not like the old British system, it is much more tied to education and values rather than necessarily income and where you grew up.

Even in the military the officers are on Facebook, whereas the grunt soldiers are generally on MySpace. The military have now blocked access on their network to MySpace, but they can still access Facebook.

All I can say is that in the last 9-12 months nearly all my friends who are university educated have abandoned MySpace in favour of Facebook. I have also noticed a number of posts out there on the subject.

I originally found this via the eclectically brilliant Boing Boing.

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