That’s what danah boyd found as she documented a form of “white flight” among teenagers from MySpace to Facebook in 2006-07.
A social media researcher for Microsoft and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for internet and Society, boyd interviewed teens in 17 states and spent more than 2,000 hours observing online practices.
She found that black youth were more likely to be on MySpace, while whites were leaving what some called MySpace’s “ghetto” environment for Facebook. Although few white teens explicitly said they were leaving MySpace to get away from blacks or Latinos, boyd said their comments were often closely tied to race and class.
“The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook,” one 17-year-old told her. “It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace.”
These movements “reflected a reproduction of social categories that exist in schools throughout the United States. Because race, ethnicity and socio-economic status shape social categories, the choice between MySpace and Facebook became racialized,” boyd wrote in an article to be published in “Race After the internet.”
Today, Facebook has eclipsed MySpace in popularity, and Facebook says that blacks are about 11 percent of all U.S. Facebook users. But no ethnic group has increased its Facebook usage more than Hispanics, which went from about 3 percent to 9 percent of U.S. users since 2006, according to the site’s own analysis.
Amador believes this trend, along with more internet access in general, is speeding up the process of assimilation for Latinos by connecting them to their friends and families back home.
“When you’re far away from something, you have a strong feeling for it, and you want it more,” he says. “But now that we can get closer to those things, it makes us much more comfortable here.”
Smith, the Pew researcher, says more research is needed to understand the implications of blacks and Latinos moving so quickly to mobile web access, because this technology is changing the patterns of internet use as profoundly as the shift from dial-up to broadband did over the past decade.
“Mobile is a totally different experience,” he says. “It’s a huge change when the gateway to information in the digital world is always with you.”
- Research: Social media has negative impact on academic performance - April 2, 2020
- Number 1: Social media has negative impact on academic performance - December 31, 2014
- 6 reasons campus networks must change - September 30, 2014