Comments on: MySpace vs. Facebook: Class barriers online

By: MarcG

MarcG — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 18:07:14 +0000

This isn’t about class barriers? Everyone is ‘free’ to open an account.

Now that was a deep thought.

Just like everyone is free to get a library card and thus get a real education. No excuses. lol

I love when this discussion pops up and all the white FB users follow what appears to be an instinct and immediately begin lampooning with the most sophomoric saracasm. Thanks for the Saturday afternoon humor ya’ll.

At the end of the day, the realities are still what they are. Maybe it would be better to face that reality than make fun of it as if it, and even more frightening, and its implications aren’t real.

As usual. No one actually disputes the class breakdown. Only paper thin arguments that it doesn’t mean anything. Typical.

By: LOEX of the West presentation, 2008 « info-fetishist

LOEX of the West presentation, 2008 « info-fetishist — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:23:28 +0000

[...] Short discussion at TeleRead [...]

By: Septimus Severus

Septimus Severus — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 16:50:43 +0000

After listening to the “On the Media” show during which intrepid Dana Boyd forthrightly spoke “truth to power” I am now convinced that David Rothman should be deeply ashamed of himself for establishing a TeleRead group on Facebook. David is supporting a malevolent structure of hegemonic oppression that wraps the disadvantaged people of the world in unbreakable chains of cruelty and misery. The marginalized and tyrannized who reside on MySpace clearly confront an unbridgeable and awful divide and suffer from the imaginably hurtful throbbing pains of inequity.

One might argue that it is easy to obtain accounts on MySpace and Facebook and that many people have already done this. One might also argue that people can have multiple personas and that social economic mobility and fluidity is remarkably high. But this is false consciousness since we know that the people who have accounts on Facebook and MySpace will be torn apart by the inexorable wheels of the economic engines of death.

Hence, David should immediately disband the Facebook group and reestablish the group on a new equitable community service with the fundamental goal of ridding the world of hegemonic elitism. Of course, all this nonsense about reading “good” e-books must be halted too since it is simply a form of encoded elitism that facilitates the continued domination of social discourse by the artificially hyper-literate that use vocabulary and sentence structures as weapons.
(Yes, this comment is satirical. Unfortunately this bald statement is required to reduce misunderstanding. David’s comment above, “Oh the horrors”, suggests that he also is attuned to the aspects of rhetorical excess.)

By: Jon Noring

Jon Noring — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 16:31:28 +0000

My view is that FaceBook attracts a more educated and sophisticated crowd who are more serious about life, politics, education, career, etc., while MySpace attracts those more interested in just having fun — the “par-tay animals”. I see it less of a “class” thing but rather more of an individual personality thing.

I would think that in terms of those who are avid readers, they are more likely to be attracted to join and socialize in Facebook than they would in MySpace. I have no plans at this time to create an “eBook Community” on MySpace, but haven’t ruled it out for a future time.

By: Joscha

Joscha — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 14:47:10 +0000

Naa, this is not about class barriers - practically everybody is free to open accounts in in both communities. It is about aggregation. Don’t you remember the times at school, when the cool kids who discussed rock bands separated from the nerds, and vice versa? Well, Myspace is the cool kid’s corner (or, as Paul Graham has put it: an online replacement mall for mallrats). And while Facebook appeals less to this crowd, it seems to attract more of those who go to universities.