Why Is Facebook So White?

[cthulhu_waves]

Facebook is so 2008. It's starting to attract *minorities*. I'm going to waspbook.com

Who's with me?

Everyone knows that white people love Facebook and hate MySpace. But why? In a sure-to-be-controversial new essay, a famous internet sociologist says it's a lot like white flight.

Facebook users tend to be wealthier and more educated. And, thus, they have been disproportionately white, until very recently. This should not be a controversial observation. (Though, we are sure it will be!) What's trickier is explaining this discrepancy. Everyone's favorite Internet scholar, Danah Boyd, has come up with an intriguing theory in a new book chapter (PDF), as first reported by MIT's Technology Review. White people fled MySpace first because they got scared of it—eventually coming to see it as a sort of "digital ghetto" filled with creepy spammers, weirdo goth kids and people of color.

If you are of a certain age, you probably switched from a MySpace account to Facebook at some point during your youth. Boyd wants to understand this switch, and why white kids have made it quicker and more frequently than others. The obvious explanation is that all their white friends were doing it: Facebook was started at (predominately white, upperclass) Harvard, was built around (predominantly white, upperclass) college students and only opened to the general riffraff around 2006. So, duh, white kids are going to join Facebook at a higher rate than other races who happen to be poorer and less likely to go to college.

Read the entire article here.