MySpace

Readings

• danah boyd, "White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook " (PDF on danah.org)

[Note that these readings are about the "old" MySpace; today myspace.com has new owners and a very different purpose.]

Contexts

In 2005, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought MySpace for $580 million dollars. Six years later, after an epic collapse, it sold the site for $35 million.

So, what happened?

danah boyd suggests that the answer can be found, at least in part, through attention to the ways that our digital lives are shaped by our material ones, including our fears of "the Other."

Her argument runs counter to a persistent idea about the Internet, that it somehow frees us from the constraints and ugly legacies of the past. This idea is a form of techno-utopianism; it persists because so many people long to escape from a society structured by xenephobia and prejudice.

The idea also persists because corporate advertisers have found that it is an effective way to move product. As a result, advertising is a key vector through which this idea gets re-circulated. A classic example, from an 1997 MCI commercial, appears on the following slide.

Techno-utopianism: on the Internet, “minds, doors, and lives open up”

Design flexibility

MySpace provided extensive design flexibility, allowing users great freedom in formatting their web pages.

Web design for everyone!

As boyd writes, a vibrant community of designers made MySpace layouts available for free.

Users could download the layout templates and then tweak them to make them their own.

White flight

This freedom also made the site seem—to many—to be messy, chaotic, and ungoverned.

boyd traces the ways that this aesthetic fed into perceptions of the site as a kind of "online ghetto."

Facebook, on the other hand, felt more like a college campus: a safe, governed, public space where the elite could meet.

Network Effects

At first this only affected those who felt more at home on campuses than in ghettos. At some point, however, network effects took over. Soon everyone was on Facebook because everyone was on Facebook. And no one was on MySpace for the same reason.

This is a description of network effects. The next module digs into this vital concept more thoroughly.

Source: allstarcharts.com