Social Networks, danah boyd, and Class, Redux

Apophenia, danah boyd's blog is one of the first blogs I ever read and have been reading more-or-less continuously over the past 3-4 years (since she took a class on framing with George Lakoff and blogged about it).

She is probably the most thoughtful analyst of online behavior. There are thousands who can write about technology and "killer apps", but she understand better than anyone the users' point of view: what works and what not and why.

Her ethnographic/sociological/anthropological/psychological approach to the study of the Web is, to me, much more insightful than any technology reviews written from the point of view of techno-geeks who actually write those "killer apps" for each other. You should check out some of her best work here.

The other day, danah wrote an essay on Class distinctions between high-school users of MySpace and Facebook (Note: high-school users, not everyone). Although it was just am impressionistic rough draft of a blog post hoping to become a rough draft of a paper, I found it insightful enough to already link to it twice - first to put it together with another relevant class-related post elsewhere, and second, to think about what kind of social networking platform would appeal to scientists.

Apparently, the article got a life of its own. It was linked and grossly misinterpreted by everyone from BBC to Metafilter and back. While she was traveling and offline, her associated blog post received more than 170 comments, some useful and enlightening, actually helping her with her project and her thinking, but many downright nasty, left by Metafilter folks who, of course, never read anything longer than two sentences and go with the "feel" for what the article is about gained from the misleading title of the Metafilter link without ever reading the actual article. They wanted to be offended in order to be able to lash out at someone yesterday, so they targeted danah as an appropriate target.

Of course, danah was stunned by the turn of events. BBC stated that this was a scientific study. Can you imagine one of your blog posts getting cited in the media as a "scientific study" although you were just thinking out loud late at night?

The chatter on smarter blogs is also quite interesting. Some bloggers (e.g., Scalzi, Eric Rice and Travis Hime) commented on the topic of the article itself. Yes, if you are offended by the aesthetics of MySpace, that actually tells something about you, who you are, where you are coming from and where you are going to in your life, and who your parents are. Your aesthetic sensibility arises from your, gulp, class. So does mine (yes, I also hate the MySpace bling, which tells you something about my upbringing).

Chad comments three times (one, two, three) and Ezra notes that class is not so much about money, but about "potential for education". In other words, it is not how rich your parents are, or what education you have, or how much money you are making now, but where you can easily go to get more education if you wanted to (and other people cannot). Also, you need to check this interactive graphic about Class in the USA (which is different from class in the UK).

Ethan Zuckerman gives a summary of danah's work to date as well as a talk she recently gave on the class aspects of social networks' use by highschoolers. MySpace is scary to parents, while Facebook is not. Why not? There, I see the shortening of the leash effect. One day, when we are all wearing our online-access devices on our bodies, the leash will get longer again, but it will be electronic (which may be worse).

Scoble and Cornelius Puschmann look at the phenomenon of the article, i.e., the response to the article in the media and online, especially the misunderstandings and the nasty comments.

Cornelius rightly points out that her article was not actually on her blog, but on a site she uses for such works-in-progress, which, in turn, is close to her site where she posts finished articles. Thus, tens of thousands of people (including someone at BBC who should have known better) who have not heard of her until yesterday also made assumptions about the article due to its location, the name ("blog essay") and the anti-theft citation note on the top. Fair. Very interesting to me, of course, is the fact that a blog post was assumed by the media, as well as many supposedly web-savvy people, to be a scientific paper. What are the limits? What are the tell-tale signs that something is a scientific paper and not a blog post? Is a "blog essay" in a fuzzy territory between the two forms of communicating science? Is it going to become more of a norm? Should it?