"This is not an academic article," and boy, she ain't kidding. C'mon, Crazymonk, this is hardly an interesting essay. It's someone speculative ramblings. "These are the kids whose parents didn't go to college," - what data does she provide on this at all? She actually uses the term "art fag," albeit in quotes.

Was this written by a high school student? It reads like it.

more: "I have analyzed over 10,000 MySpace profiles, clocked over 2000 hours surfing and observing what happens on MySpace...But that's only the tip of the iceberg. I ride buses to observe teens; I hang out at fast food joints and malls...I read, I observe, I document."

in other words: "I don't have a job."

This is bullshit.

I agree with you, jbg. It's a speculative essay that provides only anecdotal evidence. Still, I thought it was worth posting because it could start an interesting discussion.

How many people here have a myspace account? I don't. Being 31 (!) and not being in a band, I feel like I am a bit aged out of that whole world. In fact, I find it a bit creepy, what with so many teens on it.

I share jbg's initial reaction (for once, god help me). To me, a more plausible explanation is that there is a dependency argument to be made: FB has more college students because it started in 2004 as a Harvard-only site, grew from there to include .edu accounts, and only last September to incorporate the broader audience. Ten months seems to be a short period of time to take market share from a rival.

That said, I think there might be something interesting and worth discussing were the author to present evidence that the new-users to FB are disproportionately white upperclass "good kids," and new users to MS are limp-wristed, Derrida-reading, vegan queer Marxist Puerto Ricans. Just the same, I would be hesitant to give such evidence more weight than evidence that college students use more references to wikipedia than non-collegians. In the absence of evidence, however, I find it beyond the pale that Ms. Boyd (the author) is willing to accept this speculation as proof of a fragmentary trend worth of comment (and the concomitant buzz it has created--I first saw this on the BBC).

"Who goes where gets kinda sticky... probably because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class." To the extent that Socio-economic class is coterminous with college, I agree. But, in addition to the awful English (I hate split infinitives), I'm incensed by the quick conclusion hastily drawn in the absense of consideration of plausible alternatives.

By the way, does anyone have a more lucid argument about class being more about "social networks" than income? Kotamraju's reasoning seems worthy of review, but Boyd once again plays fast and loose with specifics. Anyone care to venture a definition/operationalization of "class?" I'm kinda wondering where I fit in the spectrum.

I have both MS and FB accounts. I guess that means I'm a college educated, limp-wristed, Derrida-reading, vegan queer Marxist Puerto Rican.

Snarf, I agree with everything you've written, except for one thing: I like split infinitives, and believe that they can be used well:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002054.html

See, I disagree. In the case cited, the original sentence reads:

"New SAT writing section aims to better reflect needed skills,"

and the crappy (and misleading) alternatives presented are:

"New SAT writing section aims to reflect better needed skills,"

and

"New SAT writing section aims better to reflect needed skills;"

but the best sentence reads:

""New SAT writing section aims to reflect needed skills more efficiently than its predecessor."

There is a distinct problem in 1) the use of a newspaper headline as a grammatical laboratory; and 2) the delimitation of alternatives to exactly the words used in the original sentence.

But why do you think the original sentence is ungrammatical? Your rewrite is also potentially semantically different, using efficiency as the sole standard.

Efficiency might impart a different meaning; but at least it provides some clarification to what "better" means. We might rewrite the sentence as:

“New SAT writing section aims to reflect needed skills previously untested by its predecessor.”

The original sentence is ungrammatical because of the split-infinitive and unclear because of the ambiguous term.

"The original sentence is ungrammatical because of the split-infinitive..."

You are begging the question. Why are split infinitives ungrammatical, in your opinion? You should at least recognize that there is no expert consensus that it is so. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_infinitive)

Here's an argument stating that they can be grammatical, and are often obligatory: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000901.html

Sounds to me like are a parroting some authority, either a former teacher of yours or a prescriptivist text. Can you back up your claim?

I would go as far as to say that most contemporary reference guides on grammer would argue that split infinitives *can* be grammatical. (They, of course, can also be misused.) Brian Garner spends no less than two full pages on this issue, quoting from five respected grammar books that some split infinitives are perfectly proper. He then goes on to demonstrate justified and unjustified uses of the split infinitive.

I do have a myspace profile, although I barely use it. I found the site to be too media heavy and every now and then a page would freeze up my browser. I do use it to check out band's all the time and think it is a great tool for that.

I thought facebook was just for college kids until I saw a slate or salon article last week.

NYA, I don't find people our age who have myspace accounts creepy. I find it creepy that my 33 or so year old friend exchanged public mash notes with his 28ish girlfriend on the site.

You win, Monk.

I'm amazed that nobody's pointed out that the real class divisions are between people who have frequent internet access and people who don't. Or maybe that was just too obvious to bother saying. But really, I don't have the patience for an article that tries to turn the difference between hipsters and frat boys into a "class division."

I canceled my myspace account when I realized that I never used it and my co-workers thought I was snubbing them. Also because it makes my head hurt. It's like the National Laboratory for Bad Web Design.

I'm amazed it took four posts to point out marco spelled GRAMMER like that.

ps. i am all for violent class warfare. we need to start killing rich people and taking their money. who's with me?! we strike newton at daybreak!

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/

As it turns out, Ms. Boyd is a doctoral candidate at Berkeley and a fellow at the Annenberg Center at USC. Evidently she has been speaking with Harvard Law's Berkman Center.

see, i told you she didn't have a job!

She's pretty clear about a) this being somewhat speculative, b) this being an emerging trend she's noting in her relatively extensive research, and not a hard and fast rule, and c) the specific age demographic she's looking at. With all that in mind, and acknowledging that her essay is more problematic than adequate as an explanation, it's pretty interesting to consider what she has to say. At first I was very skeptical, but she's talking about an age group that I have no direct contact with at this point- if she's researched it, which she has, she has a better idea of what's happening than I do, that's for sure.

CM, the problem with 'cultural differences' as opposed to 'class differences' is that it does nothing (or very little) to acknowledge power differences, something which the historically loaded notion of class does very well. There's no doubt that simply talking about class in this country is not very useful, but I think she doesn't use a different term because as Boyd herself points out, she really doesn't have anything else at her disposal that covers it, and 'class difference' retains a sense of tension that 'cultural difference' does not convey. We've got race difference, class difference, cultural difference, some degree of mobility, all in a huge variety of combinations, and a lot of really blurry boundaries besides. How do we account for all of this in an even remotely rigorous way? I think her use of hegemonic/subaltern is also terribly inadequate to describe the spectra we see in reality (re: snarf), but it works to outline what she's trying to describe at the very informal level that she's working at right now, and I feel like I see what she's saying, so that's something.

Do people generally feel like qualitative social science is a totaly waste of time? I personally do not.

No, I don't either. I guess what it comes down to is that I'd like to read more about this theory of the evolution of class as defined by lifestyle rather than income. She mentions that her anti-capitalist friends making $14K and hanging out in cafes shouldn't be considered working class, and she's probably right. Their lifestyle probably affords them different kinds of "income" -- like, for example, the availability of friends' couches and a willingness to go in debt w/o even the possibility of earning equity. But on the other hand, if they had children or other kinds of dependents and continued to make $14K, I'm pretty sure that at that point they could be defined as working class. And while having children is indeed a matter of lifestyle, it is also a matter of income -- the effect of your income is obviously dependent on how many people you support.

Yeah, I'm with you CM. This is a tricky thing to conceptualize at this point and basically I feel like I just need to read more. I think one thing that's interesting about our culture is where symbolic economy (the cache of being one who chooses to make less than one ostensibly *could*, for example) intersects hard economics. And I think another thing is that the old categories still to some extent stand, even if those who fill their ranks are not so easy to pin down. Basically, for better AND for worse, I think these categories, particularly the demographic ones, are more fluid than they were when they were initially defined. They are still just as real, but they are also not the same. The point you raise about how a lifestyle choice can become a class-oriented reality in certain ways is interesting. Like, what starts out as a game at some point becomes 'real.'

I guess I meant "cachet," with a 't.' My bad.

I definitely don't think that qualitative social science is a waste of time (that is saying somthing, coming from a quant jockey). I think poorly conducted qualitative (and quantitative) social science is a waste of time. At this point, lacking any information on standards, methods, state of the literature, and reference points for replicability of her study, Boyd's work is little more than a college-level thought piece and not what I would expect as a product of USC/U.C.-B social science.

Yeah, but it's a blog essay, not a submission for academic publication.

True, but it would be nice to have some rigor, just the same. She's got to think that social scientists will frequent her blog.

She gives the disclaimer that this is super rough about 100 times. And she does say a bit about her approach. And she's been working in this area for several years- that doesn't mean you listen to her uncritically, but it does mean that you give her some credit for knowing a bit about her field. I.e., I think she has the credentials to informally share her thoughts with the world as coming from a (relatively) informed position. Scanning thousands of profiles, logging thousands of hours, roaming the country conducting interviews (presumably grant-funded)- doesn't this suggest some degree of rigor behind her project? It seems to me she basically thought she could get feedback from her peer group on what she repeatedly insists is a tough proposition- that's a pretty good reason to post it, no?

To the extent that Boyd is tossing out ideas, I have no problem with her work. As I said earlier in this thread, "I think there might be something interesting and worth discussing...." But you asked the question whether qualitative social science was a waste of time. Assuming that you consider what she has done to be Q.S.S. (and not just preliminary brain-storming), then I stand by my reply: "At this point, lacking any information on standards, methods, state of the literature, and reference points for replicability of her study, Boyd’s work is little more than a college-level thought piece and not what I would expect as a product of USC/U.C.-B social science." The key phrase being "At this point..."

Furthermore, I most definitely do not believe that the hours of leg work she has put into her research necessarily means that she has put any rigor into her project. I'm not calling her a fraud, but neither am I itching to see her work published based on her time-sheets.

OK, so I'm watching Boyd's presentation at the Berkman Center and I think I should append my comments. Though I still think the blog post is little more than a precis of her ideas, Boyd has a fascinating, albeit descriptive, analysis of social networking sites. I recommend it. It lacks all theoretical rigor, but is a great history of social networking.

"When I post a well-thought out, well-written analysis, I get a few thousands hits and maybe a BoingBoing mention. So far, I've received 90K hits for this latest piece, the most problematic of essays I've ever shared publicly. Figures.
(...) sharing something problematic has sparked more of a conversation and reflection than being precise. In some senses, this bothers me. At the same time, inciting people to think is exactly what I want. So I am feeling very bewildered. Is the way to make change to present something problematic so that people have to engage by disagreeing? Hmm.."
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/06/25/woah_omg_reflec.htm...

Also: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2007/06/26/danah-boyd-on-myfri...

Welcome to the internet! Casual internet browsers don't want well-thought-out academia, they want arguments and porn!

Of note on this topic, Friendster is huge in SE Asia: http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2007/05/14/analysis-friendster-is-doing-jus...

And I have no problem with the use of 'class divisions,' which, if it's politically loaded is probably a good thing. The problem is that the use of it should probably require a little more quantitative research.

for another "defense" of the essay, see also:
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2007/06/25/what-those-crazy-kids-are-...

"class" is a "historically loaded" term for good reason. let's not throw it out too casually, though, yes, it behooves us to be specific about it -- at least those of us who still think analysis of the role class plays in society is a worthwhile endeavor. the term is hardly coterminous with culture, which is much more amorphous and probably should not be used to refer to "groups" (whether discrete or porous) at all.