About 3 years ago, my lovely cousin was over for Thanksgiving dinner and asked to borrow my computer. What I thought would be a routine e-mail-checking session turned into my first lesson in social networking (whatever the fuck that is). She logged into her Myspace account and began showing be pictures of her hot friends. Are these your actually friends? Where do they live? Is it hard to make one of these sites? Will I EVER get 100 friends?
Of course those questions were easily answered after about the next 4 hours I spent ignoring the turkey and writing an “about me” that portended to make myself feel important-to my 3 actual myspace friends.
Which brings us up to today (well, you don’t need to know my personal myspace history, as all of ours share enough in common to not write about here). I love the space. It’s constantly on in one of my windows. When I get to work in to morning, I open 2 windows-work window, play window. Play is fun-Pitchforkmedia, CNN, Myspace,
But Facebook? Never.
I think I’ve opened that devil-forsaken, ugly, hard to understand, myspace-backstabbing site only a handful of times. Nay shall I ever again. So much to my surprise did I learn today that, according to one Danah Boyd- “Social networking” researcher linked from Boing Boing-that I, as a loyal myspacer, am one of the non-college attending, “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.” Hmmm.
Facebook kids, she contends, are the whitey-white bread athletes who only want to please mommy and daddy by going to a super rad college and making lotsa lotsa money. These “goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids” are relegating themselves to the, in my opinion, lamest, dorkiest, weirdest, and again, hard-to-navigate and search-websites I’ve come across.
But hey, I was an athlete in high school, and I was also an art fag. I went to shows every weekend, painted my eyes black and still got into a good college. I never truly burnt-out, just every other Saturday night. Not sure if there’s any thin other than Swedish/Irish whiteness in my blood, but I still like the punks, and queer kids.
Basically, fuck this girl. While there is something to be said about researching and noticing patterns, especially in this new web 2.0 realm, I don’t think it’s a good idea to use the type of generalities and wording she does in this paper. It’s just once again reinforcing these archetypes that keep the Latino/black/punk/whatever kids thinking that they somehow don’t “belong” in college/executive positions/government/the ruling class.
Read the article here
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