The BBC reports on a study from PhD student Danah Boyd from the School of Information Sciences at UC Berkeley that:
Broadly, Ms Boyd found Facebook users tend to be white and come from families
who are keen for children to get the most out of school and go on to college.
Characterising Facebook users she said: “They are in honors classes, looking
forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school
activities.”
“By contrast, the average MySpace teenager tended to come from
families where parents did not go to college, she said. Ms Boyd also found far
more teens from immigrant, Latino and Hispanic families on MySpace as well as
many others who are not part of the “dominant high school popularity paradigm”.
I’m not really surprised to find that teens tend to do what their friends do. Adults do it as well. We’re each doing this now as we read one blog advocating an idea or tool. “Hey if Yada Yada says it’s good then it must be.” Or at least I’ll check it out. The fact that users can be generally characterized to use one network over another; yeah that was a bit of a stumper.