Sunset resident Kellye Denton says she stopped using her MySpace account in 2008 when the other volunteers she met during a Peace Corps stint in Morocco encouraged her to join Facebook, which they all belonged to



In the year since, she's witnessed most of her other friends - who, she says, come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds - follow suit. She'd never thought about her leap as a social statement at all, and she'd never been all that big on MySpace to begin with.

Sunset resident Kellye Denton says she stopped using her MySpace account in 2008 when the other volunteers she met during a Peace Corps stint in Morocco encouraged her to join Facebook, which they all belonged to

Researcher says white folks are fleeing MySpace for Facebook

By Lauren Gard
Published on July 13, 2009 at 1:35pm

Last week, a study showing that older folks have flocked to Facebook was all over the news. But word of an even more provocative trend waits in the wings: white flight from MySpace to Facebook.

That's according to self-styled social media pundit Danah Boyd, who earned a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley's School of Information in 2008. After four years of quizzing teenagers across the country, she contends that white kids are more likely than their nonwhite counterparts to abandon MySpace for its rival, or to choose Facebook in the first place. MySpace has become the "'ghetto' of the digital landscape," she said in a talk at the recent annual conference of the Personal Democracy Forum, an organization that explores how technology influences politics.

She compared the exodus of whites from MySpace to Facebook to the exodus of white city-dwellers to the suburbs over the past 50 years. As Boyd (who is white, by the way) put it, "Many of us have habitually crossed the street to avoid what is seen as the riff-raff."

[Excerpt]

Sunset resident Kellye Denton says she stopped using her MySpace account in 2008 when the other volunteers she met during a Peace Corps stint in Morocco encouraged her to join Facebook, which they all belonged to. In the year since, she's witnessed most of her other friends - who, she says, come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds - follow suit. She'd never thought about her leap as a social statement at all, and she'd never been all that big on MySpace to begin with.

"MySpace was just a little too much for me, a little too cluttered," she says. "There was too much going on. And Facebook was newer, which was a draw."

Links to Related Topics (Tags):

Headlines: July, 2009; Peace Corps Morocco; Directory of Morocco RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Morocco RPCVs; Internet

When this story was posted in August 2009, this was on the front page of PCOL:




Peace Corps Online The Independent News Forum serving Returned Peace Corps Volunteers

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