Blog #6 - boyd and Jones

In White Fight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook danah boyd focuses on taking about teens and their engagement with MySpace and Facebook. Throughout her essay, she shares teens’ opinions about why they prefer one social media platform vs. the other one. 

She starts her essay by quoting Kat, a white 14-year-old. Kat shares her opinion about why her friends are moving from MySpace to Facebook and she says that MySpace is just old and boring; but then she adds that MySpace is more like ghetto or whatever. Reading Kat’s opinion about this made me realized that I had never thought about MySpace vs. Facebook in such way. I thought that MySpace simply stopped being as popular around me because a new thing had come out and like anything, when the newer thing comes out, people seem to grow more interest for it simply because it’s new and different. I have never been huge on social media, so perhaps due to that, I had never noticed that teens actually had these kinds of opinions about it. As I reflected on what I’ve heard about MySpace throughout the years, I realized that I have not had many conversations about this. I recall hearing from friends and older family members that MySpace was more for bands and music rather that for you to be friends with your friends and that was their main reason for not having a MySpace account. I also heard from relatives that they no longer used MySpace because it was for younger kids. So, some of the comments I recall, kind of match with some parts that boyd talks about in her essay. Like teens saying that they rather Facebook because their college friends had Facebook and not MySpace.

          

Later in the essay, boyd quotes Tara, a Vietnamese-American 16-years-old saying that Facebook seems safer but that she doesn’t know what exactly makes Facebook safer, that just from what people say Facebook seems safer. Her comment about Facebook vs. MySpace made me think that she prefers Facebook because others around her seems to be saying something positive about it. This makes me wonder if she would prefer MySpace only if people around her think positively about it. Like many teenagers, Tara is not sure as to why Facebook is safer but she thinks it is because that’s what she has heard from others. I feel like nowadays the debate teenagers have is in between Instagram vs, Facebook. Or, are they just having a profile on each social media platform and not really making a choice? I noticed that majority of the teens in boyd’s essay said that they moved from MySpace to Facebook because their friends were on Facebook so they were on Facebook, too. This, in a way, makes sense. In a teenager’s mind, wherever your friends are at is where you’ll be. I don’t know if I’m right about this, but I think that many teenagers now have multiple social media platforms because that’s where their friends are at and they want to be where their friends are at.

Teens in boyd’s essay were also talking about the physical appearance options between MySpace and Facebook. A lot of the teens talked about MySpace having more options for you to personalize your page and really show more of your individuality while Facebook presented a more general look where everyone’s page pretty much looked the same. Some teens liked how MySpace had those features and other teens liked Facebook’s general look.

While the teens’ didn’t say that their preference between MySpace vs. Facebook had anything to do with race, ethnicity or class, boyd’s essay says that their reasons cannot be untangled from them.

         

The second reading for this week was Self-Segregation: Why It’s So Hard for Whites to Understand Ferguson by Robert P. Jones. This article talks about this incident and through the article we were reminded about the fact that since the incident, it was pretty clear that whites saw what happened very differently than blacks in our community. The article presented several statistics showing whites and blacks views about this incident. Some showed that most believed that this issue was part of a boarder pattern while others thought that issue was getting more attention than it deserved. I think that since the article presented several statistics and polls, it made it clearer for the reader to see what the author was showing rather than thinking that the article was written only from the author’s perspective.

As I read through the article, I was overwhelmed by the differences the polls were showing. One of the sections of the article that caught my attention the most was when a black man shared what he was taught by his mother as a young black man. He was told not to run in public, definitely not to run while holding something in his hands. He was told not to talk back to the police and to never, ever leave home without identification. This is just crazy for me to read because I know is true but I just can’t take this as a reality. I see these black males as victims of society because they shouldn’t be concern about this just based on the color of their skin. You would think that we are way over that since I thought America had come a long way regarding racism but this article showed that it is still very present in our society.