Where We Live Online
Posted by Erin Brown in social media trends on October 26, 2009
In the last couple of years, Facebook has eclipsed MySpace as the world’s most popular social networking site. Facebook now has 95 million active users, compared with only about 65 million on MySpace.
What’s more interesting than these numbers is the way that users of the sites appear to break down along demographic lines. In an NPR story that aired on 10/21, students at an elite private high school in San Francisco explained that Facebook is “safer and more high class” than MySpace, which is “trashy.”
Another group of San Francisco teenagers—the mostly Latino, mostly lower-income students in an art class at a community gallery called Southern Exposure—had a different take on the difference between the two sites. As 19-year-old Diego Luna put it,
“I have friends who are white . . . They are my white people friends and they are mostly on Facebook. That’s why I use Facebook. My brown people are on MySpace.”
Research supports the idea that race and class factor significantly into people’s social networking preferences. As social media researcher danah boyd (who prefers lowercase) told NPR, people tend to re-create online the same kinds of “neighborhoods” they inhabit in real life.
“Young people—and for the most part adults as well—don’t really interact online with strangers,” she says. “They talk to people they already know. You have environments in which people are divided by race, divided by class, divided by lifestyle. When they go online they are going to interact in the same way.”
No matter how vast the Internet may be, it seems that we identify and associate with small communities of people like ourselves. What are implications of this for the book world? Should publishers increasingly refine and tailor their offerings to specialized target audiences, or is it still possible to appeal to a broad and diverse readership?
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