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Here`s a scholarly article by danah boyd (e.e. cumming-like lack of capitalization intentional) called White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook. It`s based on a lot of interviews with teens. For example, one white boy pointed out that MySpace`s tools for customization to bling up their sites drove off more cultured teens:
“These tools gave MySpacers the freedom to annoy as much as they pleased. Facebook was nice because it stymied such annoyance, by limiting individuality. … The MySpace crowd felt caged and held back because they weren`t able to make their page unique.”
Unfortunately, it`s one of those academic articles which could be about 50% shorter if danah didn`t have to constantly puff up the possibility that the universally perceived differences on average between the races might just be one giant mass delusion. We`re not talking about reality, you see, just perceptions of reality and perceptions of perceptions of reality.
Like the lack of bling on Facebook, that kind of Occam`s Butterknife talk is a marker of respectable academic discourse about race: No, we don`t find race interesting, we find our perceptions of other people`s perceptions about race interesting. We try to make our interest in it as uninteresting as possible by padding our writing out with endless meta-ness. (We wouldn`t want any MySpacers reading our articles, now would we?)
