Blogger and Berkeley iSchool PhD candidate Danah Boyd presents a seemingly catchy and provocative claim in an online essay, “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” Facebook and MySpace are reflecting and creating a “digital divide” because:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.”

By contrast, Boyd argues:

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

As soon as I read those stereotypes, I wondered if Boyd had managed to channel New York Times columnist David Brooks, whose “bizzare misinterpretations” of American society have become legendary fodder for liberal bloggers (see Tom Tomorrow’s hilarious “Mr. McBobo,” http://thismodernworld.com/2973). As Philadelphia Magazine pointed out about Brooks, “There’s just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false.”

I’ve not studied the subscriber data from either Facebook or MySpace to know whether there in fact more “‘good’ kids” on the former any more than there are more “art fags” on the latter service. The language of her generalizations is inherently reductionist, but I’m surprised by how little she tries even to define the meanings of her own categories, much less give some actual numbers to back up the categories she ascribes to each service.

The larger conceptual problem that I see with the entire essay is the fact that Facebook and MySpace have completely different purposes. Although Facebook has grown in scale and in scope since its inception, its purpose was to replicate some of the pre-existing networks in the physical world — first colleges and universities, then geographies and employers, and only relatively recently in its history could people join without a “network.” To the extent that Facebook network groups are homogeneous, and to the extent that Facebook itself is middle class or upper middle class based this simply is indicative of the socio-economic stratifications already existing in American society. Is anyone really surprised to learn that a website primarily populated by college students is generally middle class or upper middle class in character?

By contrast, the MySpace network was originally used by musicians and artists looking to network themselves and their work to as large an audience as possible, as diverse a crowd as possible. Many people become “friends” with strangers they’ve never met and will never meet because they liked each others’ pictures or the same song. Users have hundreds of “friends” from seemingly everywhere. The point is that this is a completely different sort of community, organized differently, and, big surprise, the generalizations about its members are different.

Boyd does not seem to understand that the reason there was a “pedophile scare” in the media surrounding MySpace and not Facebook was because it’s much more difficult for a pedophile to target and befriend children on Facebook than it is on MySpace. A comparison would be the way that the online classified marketplace Craigslist operates as opposed to the newly introduced classified ad section of Facebook. Craigslist, offering users the sense of anonymity, is home to a variety of ads for “escorts,” maintains an “erotic services” section, has a personals section which reads like pornography. I’ve never seen an ad for a prostitute on Facebook. Maybe it will happen, maybe it has happened, but I am guessing that having one’s picture and profile a click away from an ad will keep everything rated PG-13, PG, or G. There’s no “erotic services” section in the Facebook ads. That different people will be using these sites for different purposes seems completely obvious.

There’s another huge conceptual flaw with the entire argument and that is the fact that most individuals belong to multiple social networking websites. Facebook users frequently join MySpace and vice versa. Boyd tries to suggest that while MySpace is accessible to Facebook members and is generally known, the reverse is not true. Preppy kids can go slumming on MySpace, but not the other way around. That’s just ridiculous, especially when she gives only anecdotal evidence to suggest how many users of each service are aware of the other. Boyd would do well to consider the quantitative evidence published recently by Parks Associates, which concludes:

MySpace users are chronically unfaithful…. Nearly 40% percent of MySpace users keep profiles on other social networking sites such as Friendster and Facebook. Loyalty among the smaller social networking sites is even lower, with more than 50% of all users actively maintaining multiple profiles.

These trends highlight a peculiar aspect of the market for social networking services. Nearly half of all social networkers regularly use more than one site; one in six use three or more. The result is an increasingly interlinked environment tied together by links, widgets, and the users themselves. “MySpace is a growing ecosystem and one that ironically now extends beyond MySpace itself,” said John Barrett, the lead author of the report, Web 2.0 & the New Net.

The survey, “Web 2.0 & the New Net”, is based on exactly the sort of data that boyd’s report is lacking. Its findings completely refute any idea of a “digital divide” between social networking websites. If anything, such websites promote mobility and connections between individuals who might not interact as easily in the real world.

It is discouraging to me that boyd’s essay is being so widely circulated on the internet. Even The Chronicle of Higher Education “Wired Campus” blog has picked it up and runs with it, “Social Networking and a New Digital Divide?”

By the time they get to college, many students already have pledged allegiance to one of the two social-networking giants — Facebook and MySpace. (Plenty of young men and women have profiles on both sites, but even most of those students check one site more than the other.)

Despite that parenthetical, the article makes no mention of the Parks Associates study or gives any quantifiable evidence. They cherry picked Boyd’s conclusion, concluding by asking college administrators if they’ve “noticed a social-networking class divide?” At least that piece ends with a question, rather than Boyd’s fairly trite, “MySpace and Facebook are new representations of the class divide in American youth. Le sigh.”

The real “le sigh” in my view should come from reading Boyd’s second paragraph about her methodology:

The practice of ‘ethnography’ is hard to describe in a bounded form, but ethnography is basically about living and breathing a particular culture, its practices, and its individuals. There are some countables. For example, I have analyzed over 10,000 MySpace profiles, clocked over 2000 hours surfing and observing what happens on MySpace, and formally interviewed 90 teens in 7 states with a variety of different backgrounds and demographics. 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 talk to parents, teachers, marketers, politicians, pastors, and technology creators. I read, I observe, I document.

This strikes me as the sort of research methodology that gives ethnography (potentially even “social science” more generally) a bad name. Which 10,000 MySpace profiles did she pick out of millions? How many Facebook profiles did she look at? How many Facebook profiles could she look at considering many of them are visible only to friends or network members? How was the sample group of 90 teens chosen? At least that’s “only the tip of the iceberg.”

Thankfully, the Valleywag blog picked up on the major methodological problems with Boyd’s work with “The Shaky Sociology of Social Networks.” It’s sort of embarrassing that this blog manages to ask critical questions that escape The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Valleywag even goes so far as to show a graph in a follow up piece, “THE CHART: Measuring the Social Network Divide,” which shows the difference in average income levels of MySpace, Facebook and general web users. This difference is not surprising, of course, because Facebook began as a social networking site for students at elite universities, spread to all colleges and universities, and now to companies and regions.

Again, this doesn’t seem that shocking to me, given the different purposes of the various social networking sites. So, while Valleywag is right to point out the flawed methodology, they still accept the Boyd’s paper’s completely flawed conclusion. “Le sigh” indeed.