Facebook - MySpace and a Class Divide

Today a ran across an interesting paper about Facebook and MySpace, and signs of a possible class divide between the two. Here is a couple paragraphs from the paper:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for 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. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

I'm not even going to pretend that I understand all of the paper, or many of the factors that it is talking about, but I do know what I see. I also know that for some odd reason it seems to be human nature to want to fit into groups. People will often times go with the group that makes them feel the most comfortable - and regrettably, many times, not always, that involves going with people of the same social class as your family (kids with rich parents feel comfortable with other kids who have rich parents, people of the same faith, etc.). One thing that I have yet to understand is why social classes seem to have different preferences, is it due to the class, or is it more of a personality thing (that's a topic for another time).

I have used, and viewed MySpace often, but Facebook I have only started to explore. There are differences between the two, Facebook is cleaner, easier to follow, but much more limited on what changes you can make to it, overall the same display for everyone. MySpace on the paw is endlessly changeable, you just have to know how, but things get difficult to follow, it's difficult to wade through all the "bling" on the site, and often times will make it ugly. So which one do you use, I guess it depends on who you know on either site, and what your tastes are - which I guess can depend on what social class you happen to fall into.

http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
http://www.facebook.com
http://www.myspace.com