The Young and the Digital on Ypulse

A number of organizations have made studying and understanding young people’s engagement with digital media a full time endeavor. One of the most innovative and interesting outfits studying young people’s use of digital media is Ypulse, a youth insights group operating in San Francisco and New York. In an interview with Ypulse I spoke with them about, among other things, how youth culture and lifestyles have changed since I began doing research for The Young and the Digital; the evolving role of games in our lives; a wired classroom for third graders; and kids, social media, and privacy.

You can read the interview here.

Interview with The Progressive Radio Show

In this radio interview with Matt Rothschild from The Progressive Radio Show we talk about the rise of the digital world. Among other things, we discuss social media’s role in the decline of the pop music and television industries; the cultural impact of anytime, anywhere media; technology in schools; teens and technology; social media and social divisions; and, social media and public health.

You can hear the entire interview here.

The Fall of MySpace: Race, Class and Social Media

National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” did an interesting piece on the role that social divisions have played in the decline of MySpace, “Facebook, MySpace Divide Along Social Lines.” In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation purchased what was then largely regarded as the world’s biggest and most popular social network site, MySpace. The rise of MySpace, especially young people’s attraction to the site, was the wider public’s introduction to the world of social media. Soon, the parents of young teens were able to put a name on what they in all likelihood were witnessing in their own homes—their children’s increasing engagement with social media. Teens had been migrating to the digital world long before the press began reporting on the topic. Within a few months after its launch in 2004 MySpace emerged as the preferred destination among American teenagers. Almost over night MySpace began to grow into one of the world’s most talked about social media brands. How quickly did MySpace blow-up?

Here is one statistic that I came across while doing research for The Young and the Digital. In July 2004 MySpace represented about .01% of all traffic on the Web, according to comScore, a digital media measurement company. Two years later, July 2006, MySpace represented about 4.5% of all Internet traffic. That was an increase of about 4300%! As the metrics for assessing social media began to evolve research began to demonstrate that it was not only the number of hits that was impressive but the amount of time young people were spending on social network sites. A 2007 report by Nielsen//NetRatings found that teenagers, ages 12-17, were spending about 331 minutes a month on MySpace and about 74 minutes a month on Facebook. (Those numbers continue to grow across all age categories). The report states, “teens who enjoy social media are intensive users and highly engaged.”

But MySpace is no longer the “hot” brand. There are a number of reasons for that. Certainly, teens attention to brands and pop culture trends is always in flux. From the perspective of teens once adults discovered MySpace it was no longer a cool space. By 2006 adults were just as likely to create a MySpace profile as teens were. From the moment it began to grow, MySpace’s size and anarchic inclinations posed challenges for management, especially the maneuvers to monetize the site. As strange as it sounds, MySpace was too successful. The platform’s supersize led to a lack of quality control that began to steadily erode the user-experience and alienate key segments of young people, especially those bound for college.

Part of MySpace’s dilemma was the fact that, rightly or wrongly, it was marked as a hangout for teens. When we began surveying and interviewing young twenty-somethings it was clear that they wanted nothing to do with a site they associated with immature teenagers, a group they believe uses MySpace to openly display their bodies and emotions. But our research also points to another factor in the troubles MySpace has encountered since soaring to the top of the social media marketplace: the racial and class distinctions young people make in the online world.

In 2007, danah boyd, now a researcher at MicroSoft, distributed a blog piece titled, “Viewing Class Divisions through Facebook and MySpace.” In that piece boyd writes that, “Facebook kids come from families who emphasize education and going to college.” Users of Facebook, boyd asserts, tend to be white and come, more often than not, from a world of middle-class comfort. The MySpace kids, according to boyd, are “kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school.” Compared to Facebook, teen users of MySpace were more likely to be Latino, black, and children of immigrant and working class households.

Right around the time that boyd distributed her essay my research assistant and I were assessing the data from the surveys and interviews we were collecting. We noticed among the white college students in our study an overwhelming preference for Facebook. When we asked college students, for example, “Which social-network site do you visit MOST OFTEN?”—among white students, more than eight out of ten, or 84 percent, preferred Facebook. By contrast, 66 percent of those who identified as Latino preferred Facebook. In our survey Latino students were more likely to name MySpace as their preferred site. We collected this data almost three years ago. If you replicate that study today a higher percentage of Latino college students are likely to choose Facebook.

While our survey data revealed some interesting things about race and use of social network sites, it could not tell us why racial identification appears to influence which sites students prefer. Fortunately, we were complementing our surveys with in-depth conversations, going out into the digital trenches to talk directly with young people about their use of social-network sites.

I discuss the results of those interviews in detail in a chapter from The Young and the Digital titled, “Digital Gates: How Race and Class Distinctions Are Shaping the Digital World.” What did we find? Well, take a look at the table below. It is the results from one of the questions that we asked the hundreds of people that we interviewed. The questions went something like this? “What words or adjectives would you use to describe MySpace?” or “What words or adjectives would you use to describe Facebook?” The chart below is what we typically heard from white college students. These are also the words that “Morning Edition” quotes in their report.

Adjectives college students use to describe MySpace and Facebook

MySpace / Facebook

Crowded / Selective
Trashy / Clean
Creepy / Trustworthy
Busy / Simple
General Public / College
Uneducated / Educated
Fake / Authentic
Open / Private
Immature / Mature
Predator / Stalker-friendly
Crazy / Addictive

We drilled our analysis of racial and class distinctions in the use of social network sites down to two factors—aesthetics and demographics. Aesthetics refers to the look, style, and manner in which personal profiles are designed and presented. It turns out that all of those “blinged out” profiles on MySpace—the splashy graphics, colorful fonts, and hip-hop music—are a real source of cultural friction. Demographics refer to the types of individuals and communities associated with social network sites. The chart above tells you what some college students think of MySpace user.

A number of things strike me as interesting about the language college students use and the choices they make regarding social network sites. For example, the language college students use to describe their preference for Facebook—“safe,” “clean,” “private,” “neat,” “selective”—is amazingly similar to the language used by residents of gated communities. The personal networks on Facebook provide a much greater chance of socially homogeneous communities than the networks formed on MySpace. Facebook, frankly put, has become a way for young collegians to get away from users of social network sites they believe are unsophisticated, undeducated, and undesirable.

When we began our work about three to four years ago it was common to see college students switch from MySpace to Facebook. Among other things, the switch was also a bid for a social status upgrade, a move up the digital ladder. Today, middle class students in middle and high school are moving straight to Facebook. Social class distinctions like everything else in the digital age are trickling down to younger and younger users.

I’m a trained sociologists so I find it quite natural and instructive to look at wider sociological trends to understand what is happening in the online world. I simply can not separate what we do online from what we do offline. Social network sites do not cause racial divisions or the desire for homogenous online communities. Insofar as what we do online is intimately connected to the lives we lead offline the fact that a kind of digital sorting is happening is not that terribly surprising. Still, it is striking that among a generation that played a key role in electing America’s first Black president race plays a crucial role in their use of social network sites and who they bond with online.

Facebook Activism

I had a chance recently to talk with Omar Gallaga, the technology and culture reporter for The Austin-American Statesman. You may be familiar with Omar if you listen to All Things Considered on National Public Radio. He’s usually featured in their segment, “All Tech Considered.”

Omar was writing a piece on what he calls “Facebook activism.” If you are active on Facebook you likely know what he is referring to. There are a growing number of cases in which people are using social media tools like Facebook to express their interests in a variety of social and political causes. Maybe it’s signing up as a fan of an environmental or local community cause. In several other instances Facebook users are creating groups finding that it is an effective and efficient way to coordinate their efforts, share information, and generate momentum for their respective causes.

During our conversation Omar asked me if I saw any evidence of this type of activism in our research. “Absolutely,” I said. Not to surprisingly this is one of the ways in which the thirty and under set are coming into their own politically. In other words, social media will be more than a complement to how they express their political engagement; It will be a dominant aspect of their involvement in political life.

The final chapter in The Young and the Digital is about this very issue. Specifically, I focus on the use of social media by Barack Obama’s campaign. Much has been made of how effectively Obama used the universe of social media–Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn–to differentiate his campaign from his rivals. He even hired Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook, to build his own social network site, MyBarackObama. It was no great secret that the Web would play a role in the 2008 presidential election. In truth, much of the attention of the press and Obama’s Democratic and Republican party rivals focused on the Web as a cash machine–a way to raise money.

Obama raised historic sums of money via the Internet. And yet his new media team understood better than anyone else’s that it was not simply the money making capacity of the Web that was important but the social and communal capacities of digital media, too. All of the candidates he faced in 2008 used social media, but Obama used it the way young people do–casually and socially. By enlisting young technology users to lead his new media strategy, Obama came to understand the things we are learning through our research with young technology users. Technology, first and foremost, is social and communal in their world. In regards to social media, Obama did not create a movement, he joined one.

I told Omar that in our research young people are, in fact, using social media as a way to stay informed and connected to the issues that they care about. A 2009 report from The Pew Internet & American Life Project titled, The Internet and Civic Engagement, finds that young Americans–thirty and under–represent a significant portion of what it calls the “online participatory class.” Pew writes, “Some 37% of internet users aged 18-29 use blogs or social networking sites as a venue for political or civic involvement, compared to 17% of online 30-49 year olds, 12% of 50-64 year olds and 10% of internet users over 65.”

The key question, as Omar and I discussed, is whether or not all of the online activity is replacing good-old fashioned political engagement–knocking on doors, signing petitions, attending political events and community meetings, and, of course, exercising the right to vote.

Omar invoked the term, “Click-through activism”, while we were talking. “How much real action do you think is coming out of this type of activism?”, he asked me. In other words, does social media make it easy to sign up for a group or send a friend an interesting news article without any further involvement? There is no denying that social media activism can represent what scholars Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter call “thin citizenship”, a reference to low time and energy investments in civic matters. But, as I told Omar, “we don’t really know the answer to this question.” The truth is, what it means to be an engaged citizen is changing in the digital age.

Since the 1980s political scientists and sociologists studying political participation trends in America have warned that civic life in America is dying. Fewer and fewer people are getting involved in the issues that determine the quality of our schools, health care, environment, and international relations. In particular, the data has suggested that across some of the most important measurements of civic engagement young Americans fare the worst. Young people do not read the newspapers or watch television news. They do not join civic or political organizations or take the time to write government officials. Most troubling, they do not vote. There is a growing body of evidence, however, that suggests some of these decades long trends may be reversing. And social media is, in all likelihood, playing a role. The size of that role is certainly up for debate.

Both the anecdotal and empirical evidence from 2008 suggests that voting, public expressions of engagement, and communal involvement in politics may be on the rebound. I told Omar that, “Young people are using Facebook, using YouTube, using a variety of online media tools - distributing photos, videos, news links and joining groups online.” I continued, “there are different ways people might express their political engagement.” Our challenge is to better understand how online political participation relates to offline political behavior.

One phase of the new research initiative we are about to launch investigates to what degree social media has emerged as a civic tool in the lives of the young and the digital by influencing the issues they talk about, share with each other, and invest in offline.

You can read Omar’s article here.

Interview with OnCampus Magazine

I recently sat down with OnCampus, a bi-weekly magazine published by the University of Texas at Austin to talk about The Young and the Digital. In the interview we cover a variety of issues including surprising findings from our research to what it means to be a social media sociologist.

Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

What intrigues you about this area of research?
I’ve always been particularly interested in the way young people influence different aspects of our culture… It’s really become clear that young peoples’ media usage has changed. For example, television used to be the dominant technology in young people’s lives and I think that is becoming less and less so, and that is a really historic shift. What we’ve seen over the last 10 years or so is that young people are moving away from TV as the preferred media and more toward new technologies or social media, more broadly speaking. What I see happening is quite profound because it represents such a dramatic shift in our behavior, how we consume media, produce media, share media and communicate with each other. As a media sociologist, I am especially struck by how convincingly our adoption of new communication technologies is changing long established media industries like music, print and television.

You can read the full interview here.