As Zuckerberg & Co grew the company, more and more schools were added, you saw access grading from students at elite schools to community colleges and so on. When the general internet was given access, there was a particularly big round of wailing and gnashing of teeth: “My father just friended me. Words fail” (actual status of one of my friends) and “Great, I want creepy old men stalking me online.” At least one person has set up a “Your mom” profile to use for jokes.

Multiple site re-designs, the addition of apps, programming APIs, expansion of advertising, rights over all content uploaded by terms of service—it becomes clear that Zuckerber et al seek more ad revenue and view expansion to everyone as the way to get there. Not a strong argument that they are as a company trying to be classist or racist, since they had to abandon their elitism to do so.

24: the intentions Facebook’s rulers have or originally had as regards attracting or shutting out people of different classes or ethnicities?

Blimey.

ajay – what you mention is similar to what I discuss in the 2007 paper about how people’s online networks reflect their offline networks. (By the way, your example of Asian Americans on MySpace is curious given that they’re the least likely to be on that particular service as per the figures in the tables. From my 2007 data, it looked like they were the most likely users of Friendster, possibly due to communities in Asia embracing that site more than folks in the US at this point. Given that many of the people in the sample are first or second-generation immigrants, this makes sense.) I do think, however, that it’s interesting to note these differential rates of diffusion for various reasons even if to some they may seem obvious or at least completely understandable. For one thing, many people believe that online, all these background differences disappear. For another, many discussions and analyses of social network sites collapse these sites as though they were all interchangeable and depending on what’s of interest, that’s clearly not the case.

I know that FB was initially restricted to college students only (note, of course, that everyone in my sample is in college, but note also that I consider the implications of the history of FB in the 2007 paper). This was prior to 2006. When I published the data in 2007, people said that the differences I found across groups would soon disappear given that the site had only recently opened up to everybody. They haven’t disappeared two years later though.

I can only cover so much in a blog post. Most of what people bring up are taken on in the 2007 paper and I will likely address again in the forthcoming paper. Of course, it’s fine to ask about it and raise points, just don’t assume I haven’t considered them.

As to the question by engels, I mainly focus on the user’s perspective at this point in my work although in the past I have certainly also looked at how site strategies and features influence what users are most likely to do and be exposed to online (I did this mainly in the domain of search engines and portal sites, I haven’t done a careful analysis of Facebook in this regard).

Iirc it was originally restricted to students from a small group of colleges, Harvard, Stanford, etc. Ezster, do you only look at usage data or have you ever tried to find out anything about the intentions Facebook’s rulers have or originally had as regards attracting or shutting out people of different classes or ethnicities?

That said, given the large dip in numbers for MySpace, especially for some groups (like Asian Americans), there are only going to be so many who use both. But yes, it’s definitely something worth looking at!

As I noted earlier in response to lemuel pitkin, I should’ve been more clear about the Internet experiences of people in these two samples. They are in no way representative of Americans as a whole. I have added a table that describes these students’ Internet experiences. These students are very much representative of the so-called “wired generation”. Most of them have been using the Internet regularly for years and have lots of opportunities in their everyday lives to go online and most indeed do so.

Given that we find considerable SES differences in usage even among a group of students whose age and educational level is nearly identical and given that age and education are two of the most salient predictors of Internet usage, were we to look at a more diverse sample, we’d likely find even larger divergences in usage. In that sense, the relative homogeneity of this sample just makes the findings more conservative on those variables.

Addressing Randy’s point about the convenience of this sample, I have to point out that these are not my students. Regular readers of this blog know that I work at Northwestern University. As I’ve tried to point out on the figures, but did not seem to do a good job of in the blog post itself, the students surveyed here are at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC). These are two different institutions physically separated by over 20 miles. I have never been affiliated with UIC. The reason I do my studies there – despite the relative inconvenience – is precisely because the student body is so diverse and lends itself well to looking at questions of interest in my work in the domain of digital inequality. Finally, I never said that the only difference between my sample and danah’s is age. In fact, it is precisely that her sample is likely more diverse on SES measures that may lead to her somewhat different findings (larger SES differences, perhaps larger divergences in usage).

lemuel pitkin asked about digital divide issues. Please note that I did not bring up questions about the digital divide anywhere in this post. As StevenAttewell noted, the digital divide tends to refer to users vs non-users. Everybody in these two samples is a user. Most of my work – my previous blog post and some publications notwithstanding – is about the different Internet skills and usage patterns we observe among users not between users and non-users.

I brought up the issue of digital inequality in the 2007 paper in a different context, one concerning use of these sites by those who live with their parents versus those who live on campus. I didn’t take that up in this post at all, I haven’t looked at those data for the 2009 sample so I won’t get into it at the moment.

Gene and others, as I noted, I’m not ready to look at more elaborate statistical analyses, but it is definitely the necessary next step. (I will be writing a paper on these data later this summer, but I have several others plus a book to work on right now and have already been distracted by this material more than I should have been that’s why I’m not going back to it at the moment.)

Gene, regarding the statistical significance you ask about, what that means is that there is a statistically significant difference in the extent to which men and women use Facebook in 2009 (i.e., women use FB more than men). For MySpace, the gender differences are statistically significant in both 2007 and 2009.

Anthony, I have data on use “sometimes” vs use “often” (in the above figures these are collapsed). In the 2007 data, I also have information about use of Friendster, Xanga, Bebo and Orkut. I am working on a paper right now that looks at amount of usage in addition to any use at all both in terms of number of such sites used and frequency of use. I’m not quite ready to share results yet, but I definitely agree with you that asking questions about amount of use is a helpful next step in all this.