« Writing About Microsoft Internals | Main | A Recipe: Michael Barr's Bread »

November 17, 2007

I'm In the 'Book

I joined Facebook this week. The level of chatter about Facebook has been increasing at Microsoft; I heard several people say that they joined after we invested in the company. And somebody else at Microsoft mentioned they were on, and a guy on my hockey team said he was on. So I signed up to check it out. I'm not planning on being a particularly active member; I'll maybe flesh out my profile and add a few people I know as friends, but I don't think I'll be posting my daily plans.

There was an interesting article I read a few months ago about the demographics of teenage MySpace vs. Facebook users. One of the points was that the more college/career-oriented kids tended to be on Facebook, and the kids at the margins were on MySpace. Closer to home I've noticed that the angst-ridden teenagers from Studio East, who started on ModBlog and briefly dipped their toes in LiveJournal, are now on Facebook (I presume the initial impetus to join was alumni who were now in college). Perhaps it's the rarefied air, or the fact that people use their real name, or general maturing of society, but they seem to spend less time cursing the fates that bind them to this strange land, and more time keeping in touch with each other and deploying nonce-y Facebook apps in each other's direction.

If you read danah boyd's article (linked to above) then you might observe that theatre kids would generally fall under the label of "other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm" (which would theoretically steer them towards MySpace) but they also are definitely not "kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school." So maybe musical theatre is a cross between the hegemonic and the subaltern, or maybe it's becoming cooler, or maybe it just happens to interact with social networks in an unusual way.

Posted by AdamBa at November 17, 2007 12:04 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://proudlyserving.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/638

Comments

I started out on facebook the same way, just wanting to disect it a little bit and see what makes it tick, why do people like it... and then I fell deep. I think what sent me over the edge (in a good way) first was finding online scrabble and boggle. And from there I started to see the use in keeping up with acquaintances, or just spying on people with whom i have only the shakiest of connections. I continue to be fascinated by the different modalities of communication - the wall, the built-in-from-the-ground-up organic nature of sharing information, the app platform, email notification, etc.

Posted by: KC Lemson at November 29, 2007 10:29 PM