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Class differences between social network sites?

June 26, 2007

A very interesting article from the Globe and Mail:

“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.”

“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. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.”

Read the whole article here and Mail.

I’m not really surprised that the two networks attract different types of people. It’s like saying that people in hot countries like cold drinks, and people in cold countries like hot drinks. Facebook started out with University students, and MySpace started out with hosted music. Of course their users will be different - if they weren’t different, why have 2 identical sites?

I think it’s more a statement that social networking can be examined in more detail in terms of demographics, geographic location, etc. This would be very interesting information to have for advertisers and the like - but it’s always difficult to gather such information without overstepping privacy boundaries.

But in closing, as interesting the trends may be, one should be careful about classifying all users of a site as one type of person - because there are many users out there that are on both Facebook and MySpace… now which class would they be in then?