technoculture203-09

In discussing SNS by demographic we looked at the idea that Facebook is used by more sophisticated users such as university students whereas MySpace is used more by lower social economic groups and more expressive users. There has been some interesting research released which tends to support the claim that MySpace does hold an appeal to a certain sector of the population, at least in the U.S. The reason given is that the users largely populate smaller cities and communities and thus they are ‘not anywhere near the media hubs (except Atlanta) and far away from those elite opinion-makers in coastal urban areas’. The author of this piece has some further MySpace research findings here. So rather than suffering a crisis as suggested in some reports, MySpace is still holding steady in popularity according to this research, yet there does seem to be some level of disregard for the 11th most visited site in the world. Looking further into this here (transcript here) is a video of a talk by ethnographer Danah Boyd who suggests that the differing demographics of the SNS are in fact representations of online access and media literacy within our offline world. If what we are creating online is simply a reflection of the class differences we have offline, then we need to be more discerning about what we are being told about a very competitive market. It is certainly possible that the demise of MySpace is being talked up precisely because of a lack of engagement with the media elite, or that because its users are of a lower social economic grouping that the media overlooks the importance of MySpace to the online community.