Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
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Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#2could it just be that MySpace gave its users too much freedom in page design and it turned into an ugly, blinking, unreadable, music auto-playing pile of s#it?
And then people left?
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#3Don't conflate class divisions with racism. Whites did not flee the 'digital ghetto' of Myspace. College-educated young adults fled the 'digital ghetto' of Myspace.
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#4Is't MySpace closely tied to music preferences? Maybe a few influential bands heavily invested into MySpace presence and their audience happened to be black?
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#5Ughhh I hope something comes around and people leave Facebook behind. Companies like Quora scare the hell out of me: I don't have either twitter or facebook account, so apparently I'm "out of the loop". If this goes on people like me are risking complete isolation (or faking it, which isn't appealing)
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#6Is't MySpace closely tied to music preferences? Maybe a few influential bands heavily invested into MySpace presence and their audience happened to be black?
I'm not sure that MySpace was ever associated that closely with a small number of bands, but it certainly was/is associated with bands and self-promotion in general.
At least in the beginning (this has changed as Facebook has become more mainstream), you didn't hear people in "up and coming" bands flogging their Facebook URL, it was all MySpace. The flipside of that was, if you were just a regular person looking to interact with your friends, and not someone trying to 'build a brand' or tell people what club you were playing at this weekend, Facebook seemed like the place to go.
The article talks about spammers, and spam was/is certainly a problem, but MySpace turned itself into a vehicle for self-promotion much earlier and more crassly than Facebook did. I think that shaped the direction of the site and drove users who weren't looking for that away.
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#7>during the period beginning in 2006 when teens began to flock to Facebook, teens' preference for either MySpace or Facebook appeared to fall along lines of race and class.
The obvious answer to this is that Facebook was closed to the general public until September 2006. In 2004 to early 2005, you had to be a college student at a top-30 or so school to be able to use Facebook. Throughout 2005, that loosened to all colleges. In Sept. 2005, they opened to "invited" highschoolers.
So let's flash-forward to September 25, 2006. MySpace's population is drawn from the general public, and Facebook's population is "college students, recent college grads from top schools, and high schoolers who are friends with college students". The next day, Facebook opens to everyone. If you don't have many friends who are "college students, recent college grads from top schools, and high schoolers who are friends with college students", you have little incentive to join Facebook.
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#8Don't conflate class divisions with racism. Whites did not flee the 'digital ghetto' of Myspace. College-educated young adults fled the 'digital ghetto' of Myspace.
As whites and asians disproportionally make up the college body in the US it's quite possible these two are the same.
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#9Did white college kids actively flee MySpace, or were they never on MySpace? Targeting college campuses could very likely have had the effect of attracting a lot of users who had never used social networks before. Flight implies presence in the old location.
Re: Did Whites Flee the 'Digital Ghetto' of MySpace?
#10MySpace is planning a major rebranding / relaunch soon.