It was interesting to read Boyd's theories on how adoption of social networking sites by American teens was initially divided along social/class lines: the "hegemonic" (or "good") teens gravitated towards the more professional look and feel of Facebook, while the "subaltern" (or "bad") teens were still drawn towards the "outsider" status of MySpace.
It's a nice little theory, but I'm not convinced that the divide (if there even was/is one) can be defined so easily ... For example, she argues that the "showy, sparkly, brash visual displays" found on many MySpace pages were acceptable to those teens who valued the flash and "bling" of hip-hop culture; this contrasted with the more "clean" and "mature" look of Facebook, with its homogeneous style and color scheme. However, I really don't think this can be explained as a mere cultural aesthetic - I remember many a MySpace page which featured clashing graphics for background images and tons of animated GIFs dancing all over the place; that's not "bling", that's just people with no sense of style!
In fact, I would argue that this was one of the reasons why MySpace began losing ground to Facebook (cultural differences notwithstanding): the makers of MySpace allowed users to alter the look of their pages pretty much anyway they liked, to the point of people creating MySpace pages which were nothing more than a jumbled mess of incoherent nonsense (if one's site is so visually disruptive that you can no longer even read the text on the screen, then people will simply move onto other sites that don't give them such a headache). People could even run arbitrary code on their sites, leading to a lot of the security holes/issues which eventually drove even more users away from MySpace.
I believe the reason for MySpace's disintegration is a lot simpler than laying blame on class divisions or such things ... The bottom line is that social-networking sites live and die by how social they are; it seems obvious enough, but people go where their friends are, and if their friends are using Facebook instead of MySpace, then they're going to use Facebook too!
Boyd says at one point that many of the "good" kids ("goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes") are still using MySpace because of "their connections to participants who joined in the early days"; once again, these kids' friends are still on MySpace, so that's where they're going to be too. However, even if these good kids are separated from the "bad" kids in high school, there are eventually going to be some "goths" or "gangstas" that run in the same circles (at college, at work, in the same neighborhoods, at a bar, on another website, anywhere!) and they're going to suddenly want to "keep up" with their new friends where they're socially congregating ... and right now, the most active place online for that type of interaction is Facebook.
The "exodus" from MySpace (whether users were switching to Facebook or just giving up on the site entirely) may have started off in some small way as a "cultural" clash, but soon more and more people began leaving the site, meaning there were less and less people for teens - good or bad - to socialize with ... No matter what group or clique one was associated with, if there's no one else to talk to or share information with, then the site becomes useless, so why bother sticking around?
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