TMW Ideas

This is a fascinating essay by Danah Boyd on the class divide prevalent in US users of MySpace and Facebook.
I spotted it on Slashdot earlier this week and there are a whole host of similar articles that have been published in the last few days referring to some research by the University of California, Berkeley. Also the Guardian, Big Shiny Thing and the BBC have picked up on the issue.

Most interesting to me is what this divide means for the US military and how the powers that be have blocked access to Myspace for service personnel using military network resources but not Facebook.

The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers' MySpace profiles, I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war, pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell. Over the last year, I've watched more and more profiles emerge from soldiers who aren't quite sure what they are doing in Iraq.