Mo-om! Scott Eric Kaufmann is procrastinating again!
http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2007/06/blogwar-an-inte.html
I've been hearing an amazing number of people use their preferred social networking site as proof of their refinement. Our interns, in particular, can go on and on about how declasse MySpace is relative to their beloved Facebook. I've heard the same tedious discussion at multiple parties, too. I've been through (and to some extent participated in) the same thing with Friendster. And LiveJournal and tribe.net certainly conjures up a distinct set of associations. But it's amazing to me how vehemently and uniformly people express this preference when it comes to MySpace/Facebook. It really has become a widely-used signifier of yuppie personal taste, like expressing disapproval of Coldplay or complaining that Starbucks coffee tastes "burnt".
Actually, I've just been quoting him in another thread. "East African Plains Ape" is DeLong, right?
Great, now when we say MySpace is an aesthetic crime, we're being classist.
5: what would be a situation where calling something an aesthetic crime wouldn't be classist?
5: It's not the aesthetics, it's the illiteracy. But then, I don't use any social networking sites except Unfogged.
From the linked article:
"I clearly don't have the language to comfortably talk about what's going on, but I think that this issue is important and needs to be considered. I feel as though the implications are huge."
I'm not seeing this. How on earth is stratification in terms of MySpace vs. Facebook significantly different from any other form of social division? Do you get your coffee at Dunkin' Donuts or Starbucks? Do you spend time on usenet or blogs? Do you grocery shop at the local whatever, or at Whole Foods?
So, huh? I must be missing something.
5: I'm with you on this one. You don't have to make a class statement to feel that MySpace is hideous. It's not even properly describable as "blinged", as it can in no way resemble a Hype Williams video. Instead, it's just a terrible page editor limited to my-first-page-ever!-style chunkiness and clunkiness.
It would be nice if MySpace would build a tool to keep you abreast of band website announcements without having a profile.
Are you missing something or do you get it?
Speaking of web site aesthetics, Political Theory Daily looks much better at book forum:
Starbucks coffee doesn't taste "burnt"; it just tastes like ass. MySpace is ugly, and Facebook is a cult.
Dude, if they're freaked out about the divide between MySpace and Facebook and the ways aesthetics are used to drive divisions between the classes I can't wait until the author is old enough to start shopping for a car.
How on earth is stratification in terms of MySpace vs. Facebook significantly different from any other form of social division?
That's not the claim. Just that there's a division that might be surprising, given that it would have been reasonable to think that "young people" generally used those sites, and also given our tendency to think that class divisions are less pronounced online.
it just tastes like ass
Analingus is like a mocha frappucino.
Do people who post on this site really think that class divisions are less pronounced online? Maybe all those YouTube commenters have graduate degrees, too?
Maybe all those YouTube commenters have graduate degrees, too?
The AutoAdmit guys did.
17: santorum, crushed ice, and whipped cream.
20: I'd say they were doing an okay job of reinforcing class distinctions.
and also given our tendency to think that class divisions are less pronounced online
Doesn't every blog survey tend to confirm that there is a fair bit of socioeconomic segregation online?
Anal play, I know.
Smasher isn't just bragging here. He knows his anal play. Get your ass over to the Flophouse.
Interesting stuff. Though let me put in a vote against danah's bell-hooksish insistence on a lower-case-only name. I hate that stuff. There's an irritating justification, too. "Why must it follow some New York Times standard guide for naming? The words that i choose to describe myself should be framed in writing and in speech in a way that feels as though i own them, as though i can relate to them." Meh.
Doesn't every blog survey tend to confirm that there is a fair bit of socioeconomic segregation online?
Is that within the online community (which is what I meant) or between the online community and the population at large?
Doesn't the Internet itself confirm socioeconomic segregation? These corner dudes aren't getting broadband.
By which I mean to say, if you want evidence of someone waving their cultural capital in your face in a particularly precious fashion, you could do a lot worse than someone who insists on rendering their name in all lower-case letters.
26: I thought both. I mean, c'mon, you don't think your readers skew in certain class-related directions?
3: Same thing went on about Compuserve vs AOL users in the early 90's and I have absolutely no doubt it's going on in the deepest reaches of hell over the choice of torment a particular devil is employing.
(I took a look at Facebook. The population of people my age is close enough to zero to be zero. 'Twas interesting to see Great Neck's greatly changed ethnic mix tho'.)
27: Dude, don't hate on dial-up. We were all there once.
I was working in a café the summer frappucinos came onto the market and spent about a month trying to come up with a recipe that would please customers asking for frappucino-equivalents. Generally, I came up with a nasty, nasty blended mixture of espresso, milk, chocolate and ice. The Starbucks people have a special syrup that combines cold-brewed coffee extract and highly sweetened chocolate, I think.
Education leads in a direct line towards being able to write quickly and well. Education is also an excellent predictor of socioeconomic status. QED.
I'm about two years too old for Facebook and about ten years too old for MySpace, but I do have a pretty funny Facebook story. YoungerCalaSis and YoungestCalaSis are currently in a bit of a tiff because YoungestCalaSis has refused to 'friend' YoungerCalaSis on Facebook, because she's worried that YoungerCalaSis will tattle on her doings to mom. YoungerCalaSis is miffed because 'the only people you don't friend on FaceBook are like, stalkers, and she's friended people she doesn't even like and I'm her own sister."
That's not the funny bit. The funny bit is my mother retelling this story to me, feeling like she would take sides, but also feeling like my sisters are speaking in Klingon. "Is she right? Is that really an insult? What's friending?"
given our tendency to think that class divisions are less pronounced online
The idea was supposed to be that the internet would be a great equalizer, and it turns out it's not? Surprise.
complaining that Starbucks coffee tastes "burnt"
Nonononono. Peet's tastes "burnt", Starbucks just has no flavor at all.
Pretty funny, Cala.
My brother uses Facebook, and I'm able to see his updates and groups he adds and so forth, and I'm come to realize merely by his passive-aggressive associations that he is the very worst sort of religious-right prick. He's blood! but a prick nonetheless.
No no, Starbucks tastes fine but leaves you with a splitting headache after the fact.
Did anyone else find it weird how unaware the author seemed to be of previous literature on class differences? I'm no expert, but this person seems very interested in it, and yet didn't even think to try family education levels as a class proxy. Blargh, this article annoyed me for reasons that I can't articulate very well (perhaps just because my supervisory role at work is being particularly annoying today).
32: I used to make a version of the store-bought frappucinos by brewing a strong drip-filter coffee, then topping it off with about a quarter to a third as much volume again of milk, a bit of cream to enrich the flavor, and a large hit of Hershey's syrup to taste. It was quite delicious, though I may be misremembering precisely how much milk was added.
My ex recto sense of the internet is that class justifications aren't more pronounced online compared to the real world, and while that some of the class lines follow, others don't. Nerdy judgmental people talking about politics all tend to be roughly from the same socioeconomic group, but perhaps not so much with the fantasy football forums. I don't think that makes the Internet less stratified, just stratified in different ways.
42: I think the linked essay was identified as bullshitting rather than academic work, albeit bullshitting possibly leading to academic work in the future. So, rigor, not so much expected.
JAC, that'll make you a version of a frappucino, but let me tell ya, getting to a reasonable simulacrum is nigh impossible.
43 pwned a comment I hadn't even written yet. Miraculous, Cala.
I think there is no way to pwn a comment that somebody else has already written. So the situation described in 47 isn't that extraordinary.
46: I can imagine that. It's got to be really difficult to distill the coffee flavour out of good brewed coffee so that you can create a heavily-flavoured syrup for blending.
Are there any good ways as a barista to make super-concentrated espresso?
So is Facebook slumming with the recent introduction of applications? At the very least, it's losing its conformism.
7: Where someone forces one to listen to Coldplay.
41: It doesn't even taste fine. It all tastes like french roast, i.e. `the beans are irrelevent'. It isn't even that good as french roast goes.
I think you'd have to cold-brew the espresso (practically a one-to-one ratio of grounds and water, left in the fridge overnight and then filtered through paper), but I suspect that the Starbucks people also add a coffee extract to intensify the flavor. That was the problem with my versions of the frappucino: the coffee flavor got lost in the milky ice, but my attempts to add more coffee turned out bad, too.
Isn't a Starbucks frappucino just milk with coffee and chocolate flavoring?
Wait, they add coffee flavoring? Isn't that cheating?
Isn't that cheating?
No libertarian, our Cala.
I'm pretty sure they beef up the creaminess of the Frappucino by adding nondairy creamer in addition to milk.
They have a whole slew of powders they add to each of the drinks, right? They did when I ever-so-briefly worked there.
Freeze strong coffee for the ice cubes, rather than diluting with plain water ice?
35: Hyperbole, I know, but MySpace was only launched in 2003. And the heaviest user of it that I've ever met was about 30.
50: It's an interesting question. I think they didn't have much choice, and I think it was a smart move for a company looking to get acquired, but I also think it'll ultimately doom the network. Eventually technical literacy among users will reach the point at which there's no benefit to having an internet designed like a matryoshka doll. That, or it'll continue to grow until people conclude that sharing a social network with your boss/clients/parents is actually kind of a drag.
60 is correct. If my parents were on Facebook, my sister would not want to be on Facebook. And I'd probably delete about half of the things on my page. Limiting it to college students and then letting them keep their profiles when they graduate sounds right to me. (although you would have to also let in professors and other people with .edu addresses)
Not hyperbole. It was launched in 2003 for the teenage set. I was in my mid-twenties. Facebook was launched in 2003 or so for the college set. I'd been out of college for two years. Hence, two for facebook, ten for myspace.
Fuck Starbucks. How hard is it to add real cream and brew the coffee properly?
But anyway, this article makes a ton of sense. My only friend who didn't go to college is the only one with a MySpace but not a Facebook page. (of course there are plenty of people with neither) The only person I know with postgraduate education and a MySpace page is a social worker. There you have it.
I mostly remember the coffeeshop version of the Frappucino as being my introduction to a drink with blended ice in it. Which is a good concept, even if the Starbucks version is insanely sweet. I'm sure that iced coffee slush existed before that, but they (and the competitors following them) made it avaliable everywhere.
A frappucino is basically a high-caffeine milkshake in a fancy suit.
Some of them don't even have any caffeine. Or coffee flavor. Behold.
59: And again, LB makes me feel like an idiot for missing the supremely reasonable option.
61 is unfortunately true for most people. I personally love the facebook format, and wish nearly everyone was on it. The truly great things about facebook are two-fold: random trolling is hard (you pretty much have to know someone or be a friend of their friend in order to find them, and you still can't see anything unless that person approves you) so people feel safe disclosing information in the standard format, and it has a standard format that includes such useful information as location, phone number, and current email. These combine to make it the perfect internet-based address book, where everyone keeps their own information up-to-date so that you'll always be able to find them again. It's a killer app for real-life networking purposes: a self-updating rolodex.
when i was working in an office with lots of right-out-of-school people and college interns, that also happened to be publically visible (politically-related), everyone's facebook got vetted for non-embarrasing, are you pretty much had to do the anti-stalker thing where only friends can see your profile. Also lots of reminding not to have pictures of making out and anything htat happened in jacuzzis.
67 is right. I'd still use it for keeping in touch with people, but it wouldn't be fun. Also it's surprising that nobody has brought up how MySpace profiles can be seen by the world at large, but Facebook ones can't.
it doesn't really make sense why some random person in your town can see your profile, but some random person say from college, where i don't ahve an email to join the network, can't.
A setup where only your friends, and the friends of your friends could see your profile woudl make much nore sense,.
A setup where only your friends, and the friends of your friends could see your profile woudl make much nore sense,.
You can change the settings in Facebook to do just that.
68 was true of my last place, only we used it for ammo to mock the new hires.
Cala, the more I read about your mom, the more I'm convinced that all of the trips to my parents' "vacation condo" are an elaborate ruse and that my mom's actually flying to Calaville to visit her secret second family and harangue you about wedding planning.
67: You may want to check out LinkedIn, which is specifically designed for that purpose. It also has plugins that allow it to integrate with apps like Outlook, I believe.
69: You can restrict your MySpace profile in that way, but most people don't. Folks that are really concerned about privacy tend to go with LiveJournal, which has the most granular privacy settings.
Anyway I think the privacy settings are sort of beside the point. Strangers aren't really the problem. The problem is when someone you know wants access to your profile and you don't want to give it to them (I've got several outstanding friend requests from clients on my totally-neglected FB account). At that point you can only give in and get less out of the site, snub them, or jump ship.
You may want to check out LinkedIn, which is specifically designed for that purpose.
Except this won't work due to network effects. Almost all the value of any social networking site resides in it's already-existant userbase, and that's where Facebook rulez and LinkedIn droolz. I think Facebook has the best chance of transitioning into a sort of perfect "rolodex plus fun stuff" application.
I think Facebook has the best chance of transitioning into a sort of perfect "rolodex plus fun stuff" application.
That's what it already is. The number of high school classmates I'm in touch with has gone from 1 to 20 since joining Facebook. And 10 of those are people I actually want to be in touch with.
The problem is when someone you know wants access to your profile and you don't want to give it to them (I've got several outstanding friend requests from clients on my totally-neglected FB account). At that point you can only give in and get less out of the site, snub them, or jump ship.
Facebook handles this in an elegant way too. People don't get a message saying "Tom has rejected your friendness". It acts just as if you had done nothing, giving you plausible deniability as someone who might just not check his profile anymore, instead of someone who has actively rejected somebody else.
76: I think you might be surprised. I don't use LinkedIn, but a lot of folks at work do. Among the tech company and nonprofit org executive set, I think it's already achieved critical mass.
Facebook may end up being the social version of LI's professional rolodex, though -- I get the feeling LI has a more formal attitude surrounding it.
I think you'd have to cold-brew the espresso
This is a new concept to me. What are the merits of cold-brewed espresso other than fake-frappucino-related program activities?
76, 79: There's a generational factor as well. I use LinkedIn for professional networking (I'm in tech) and LJ for social. Just about everyone I know (and many people I meet through work) are on LinkedIn. A handful of my RL friends are on LJ, which is why I'm there. But I don't know anyone on MySpace and one guy on Facebook, so they're useless to me.
I, meanwhile, have never heard of LinkedIn before this thread. Presumably all of my generation will be faced with the question of whether and when to switch from FB to LI.
80.---You get richer iced coffee. In a lot of cafés, iced coffee is basically hot coffee poured over ice (watery nastiness) or hot coffee refrigerated (old, a bit sour).
So, I could do this at home to make iced coffee? I may try that.
But isn't it expensive? You're describing using like a pound of coffee to make a pitcher of iced coffee.
It's not anything particular to LinkedIn itself that's compelling, it's the user base. The only reason to bail on a social networking site is when all your friends bail (or when your parents start using it and make it instantly uncool).
There's got to be a recipe online somewhere. I've forgotten the exact proportions, but I remember it was an impressive amount of coffee.
This looks about right. In my old café we didn't make it properly very often: too much of a pain in the ass.
I assume that one could steep the coffee in any sort of sealed container before filtering it into the carafe/pitcher? What is this "toddy coffee maker" nonsense
I've no idea. The dude admitted that it was basically a bucket.
Limiting it to college students and then letting them keep their profiles when they graduate sounds right to me.
Except Facebook no longer has that limitation, as I discovered recently when I was able to sign up.
I can't imagine using LinkedIn for anything but the most boring and professional kind of networking, while Facebook seems liek Friendster only less rage-inducing.
MySpace makes me nauseous. (When I'm down with plaid be cautious.)
Also, it appears I went to school with the author of that article, back when she had a different name, and capitalized it. Weird.
19:"Do people who post on this site really think that class divisions are less pronounced online?"
No. But I am here to help raise your consciousnesses.
Toddy is delicious, and even people who don't like the bitterness of coffee enjoy it, because the level of bitterness is directly related to the heat of the water used to make it. (Starbucks says the "optimum" temperature for brewing coffee is like 210F, which is why their coffee tastes like boiled ass.)
Facebook is really freaking keen for keeping track of people you knew in real life, before you moved away. I never messed with any social-networking stuff (I have a livejournal, but used it as a blog) before I moved away from Beirut - once I'd done that, the stack of Lebanese and ex-Leb-living-expats on my friends list has been slowly growing to unmanageable proportions.
JM, I make iced coffee at home by pouring hot espresso over ice, and it is not watery nor nasty, but tasty. The coffee needs to be pretty strong to start out but it comes out real good.
Have we discussed iced coffee without mentioning Vietnamese iced coffee? It's a different drink, but good. You need one of those little metal drip coffee things (cup sized). Make a full one of those onto a tablespoon of evaporated milk. Stir when done, then pour over 1/2 a glass of ice. Sugary and strong if you do the amounts right...
I guess `need' is too strong in the previous. You could figure out the amounts for a bigger drip thing, I suspect...
94: bitterness comes from a lot of things though, doesn't it? Agree very high temperature does it. I think Starbucks screws up the roast too, though....
bitterness comes from a lot of things
Does it ever.
99: Yeah, their roast is burned, too, which also increases bitterness, but I think temperature is what home coffee drinkers are most likely to screw up.
My college has a site that I can use to look people up. I can e-mail them, and I have a forwarding e-mail address through them. I don't use social networking stuff.
LinkedIn seems to be popular among tech VCs--younger ones. I left a comment on some guys blog with an email address attached, and I got invited. VCs apparently believe that nobody is too small for their massive rolodexes. To be fair, it was a junior person who worked for a firm of bloggers.
I left a comment on some guys blog with an email address attached, and I got invited. VCs apparently believe that nobody is too small for their massive rolodexes. To be fair, it was a junior person who worked for a firm of bloggers.
w-lfs-n, we're not going to invest in your hedge fund or join your VC firm.
LinkedIn seems to be popular among tech VCs
One of the reasons I haven't joined LinkedIn is because an ex of mine is one of those techies and I don't want to have to choose between friending her or not friending her.
89, 90, 94: The key thing to the Toddy is that it has a thick, fibrous filter - better for dealing with all those grounds than mere paper.
And 10 of those are people I actually want to be in touch with.
I'm pretty sure there aren't 10 people from HS I actually want to be in touch with. Out of a class of 360.
106: Whereas I've probably hung out with about 10 high school friends in the last couple weeks alone. Admittedly, we had our 5 year reunion last weekend, so there were some folks about who're usually elsewhere. One of the greatest advantages of nerd boarding school was having a lot of cool people around for long enough that you definitely wanted to keep in touch.
103: Eventually w-lfs-n and dsquared will wear down your resistance. That's when I will strike.