Over the years I’ve read a lot of brilliant blog posts, essays, and academic papers by miss danah boyd (lower-case branded, just like our very own cad). But none had me nodding along so enthusiastically as her latest. Its title and its focus: ‘Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.’
And a good portion of it taps into some of my recent thoughts about taste and class. Here are some choice cuts and pastes from danah’s essay:
In sociology, Nalini Kotamraju has argued that constructing arguments around “class” is extremely difficult in the United States. Terms like “working class” and “middle class” and “upper class” get all muddled quickly. She argues that class divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than with income. In other words, all of my anti-capitalist college friends who work in cafes and read Engels are not working class just because they make $14K a year and have no benefits. Class divisions in the United States have more to do with social networks (the real ones, not FB/MS), social capital, cultural capital, and attitudes than income. Not surprisingly, other demographics typically discussed in class terms are also a part of this lifestyle division. Social networks are strongly connected to geography, race, and religion; these are also huge factors in lifestyle divisions and thus “class.”
I’m not doing justice to her arguments but it makes sense. My friends who are making $14K in cafes are not of the same class as the immigrant janitor in Oakland just because they share the same income bracket. Their lives are quite different. Unfortunately, with this framing, there aren’t really good labels to demarcate the class divisions that do exist. For this reason, I will attempt to delineate what we see on social network sites in stereotypical, descriptive terms meant to evoke an image.
Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens. Terms like “bling” come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” – they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.
A couple weeks ago I was down in Salinas helping translate for a piece Cyrus is doing about taco trucks. Before meeting up, Melanie (a friend of Cyrus’) and I went to an internet café to get some work done. The teens sitting down at the computers were the same MySpace users that danah talks about in her essay. They had flashy earrings, baggy denim jeans, tattoos poking out of their shirt sleeves.
That’s not to say that there aren’t middle class and upper-middle class users still on MySpace. But it does say – like Danah rightly does – that we define class by metrics other than income, cars, and houses. Last year I was one of those people making much less (and working much more) than your average janitor. But I wouldn’t kid myself: I wasn’t for a day ‘lower-class.’
If you prefer Martinis over Rum and Cokes, dark beers over light beers, and the New York Times over the Fresno Bee, then you’re middle class. It doesn’t matter what your income is.
So I ask for your help. Why do I like Miles Davis more than Justin Timberlake? Why do I like Atmosphere more than Doctor Dre? Why do I like the taste of gin and tonic more than rum and coke? And why can I (just barely) put up with Facebook when MySpace made me nauseous?
HP will always make more money than me. But when people look at us, they’ll always view me as the middle class one just because of taste.
Could it be true? Could I enjoy the taste of Pacifico over Bud Light just because of the societal notion that it’s somehow more ‘classy.’ What about my love for Miles? Or my taste in architecture and design? Are those preferences not my own?
Does class mobility in the US have as much to do with being able to change taste as as being able to change income?
i’m really glad that you wrote this piece. i’ve been thinking about class a lot lately, both in relation to my research and my personal life. you do a nice job of teasing out a particular aspect of class. you call it “taste,” one of my friends from stanford says “consumer patterns.” i think you bring up some good questions. i hope to explore some of the answers to those questions in my own writing soon… 😉
You professors, such teases. Does this mean you’re going to write about it on your blog?
I’ve dealt with this issue of class quite a bit in the political circles of anarchists, many of them being currently “broke” but just a phone call away from getting back into the network from which they came, the one that will always take care of them. HP drinking Bud Light (from a can no less) just shows he’s a menso that refuses to learn about better options, Pacifico is a great beer for its style. (Take it from me, a homebrewer that learned the art because I couldn’t afford the good stuff.) Next he’ll insist Kraft Cheez is better than Queso Fresco! 😉
Ha, and here I thought I drink budlights because they taste better. Damn cultural mores, they always get me (actually, I prefer budlight in a bottle, had Gustavo had both, I would have reached for the bottle too). Remember when Gustavo looked at my drink then looked at me in the eyes and said something like, ‘how can you drink an american beer at a mexican wedding’? Man, I almost succumbed to the peer pressure.
I can relate in a lot of ways to what you say. The first twenty plus years of my life I grew up in an environment filled with poor minorities, immigrants, gangs, crime and the street life. So naturally I absorbed a lot of that culture. My music taste, my language, my attitudes, and my general outlook on life very much mirrored that around me. However, the remaining near ten years of my life I have been around the opposite – a white, upper middle class, highly educated and generally crime free environment and have also absorbed a lot of the culture. The result of which leaves me feeling in the middle of two worlds. I don’t completely fit in with my new environment and, as my cousin continuously reminds me, I wouldn’t completely fit into my old environment anymore either. I am now a hodgepodge of the two – without a complete home in either camp.
Normally I could careless but as of late I have been rethinking my commitment to the bachelor life. Long discussions with my dad and the general push life gives you have made me think that maybe kids and marriage should be in my future. So I’ve been more open to such in my relationships – the problem is, I have a hard time finding someone I feel I connect with. The girls I meet either love rap but are more eager to get in fist fights with others than I am, or can control their temper but don’t know The Game from Eazy E. Finding a girl that shares the same mix of both cultures as I do is a challenge. Who knows, maybe I should just follow my dads advice and get one from Mexico. 😉
Anyway, no matter what class you belong to, you will always be my favorite limousine liberal – and that’s no joke. 😀
Chavo,
No way dawg, I am not that Republican. 😉
This isn’t a MECHA meeting bro. JK.
Seeing that the only two musicians you ever listen to are The Game and Eazy E, I’m pretty sure there’s a girl out there who likes at least one of them and who doesn’t scare off your delicate White friends.
That’s not true!!!!….I also listen to Dre, Quick and even LBC rappers.
Re-reading what I wrote above I realized that I forgot another critical component – she likes to cook. Now were definitely into endangered species percentages…LOL.
But it’s like the old saying goes, ‘mejor solo que mal acompañado’.
Oh yeah, and can’t leave out Catholic…definitely Catholic!
Okay, I’ll stop now.
But what if you’re interchangeable? What if you can hang out with the bohos and live it up with the best drinks, threads, and tastes(music, food, de todo) , and still head elsewhere and listen to polka, or cumbias y corridos and have a budlight or lone star with the “common” people–what if you’re respected by both for the qualities and respect you have for both? I honestly think you can straddle the lines of both…if you don’t believe me, ask HP about what went down at my wedding just a little less than a year ago.
I agree about Danah’s post. And I’m really glad you are talking about this — most of the ostensibly cool and progressive folks I know online are OK talking about the environment, politics and human rights but often steer clear of social class – because, I will argue, they are implicated in this issue in ways that make them uncomfortable. If that last line made you uncomfortable, I suggest you do not read on.
I’ve spent most of my life in poverty – first as the child of teenaged hippy parents, then as a student and finally as a writer (another means of extending the student “lifestyle” into one’s adult years). But one form of privilege I always had was social and cultural capital – often, sadly, mistaken by my more privileged friends as originating in socio-economic capital. My mother’s education, politics and social network (despite her financial status) contributed to my having an apparently bourgeois sensibility. Admittedly, these forms of capital have helped me in my life – but not in quite the same way as actual MONEY. Those who have that, have a level of stability and safety in their lives that I don’t. To put a finer point on it, being able to tell the difference between early and late Miles Davis won’t pay my rent.
Class and “taste” have everything to do with each other. In fact, I’d argue that the very idea of taste and the way it is continually fetishized by those who can afford to have it, is part of the problem. Taste is entirely connected with consumerism and materialism. Both of those things define social value in a capitalist culture. Do they say things about “who I am”? I used to think so but now I don’t. I don’t because all you need is to be rich and well connected to know what is cool and smart to like. It doesn’t take originality, humanity or decency to learn how to be cool. I used to make friends with people based on shared cultural references. Then I realised I had a lot of friends who were assholes and wondered why that was. Oh, right … it was because *I* was an asshole believing any of that stuff mattered.
I’ve since grown out of believing that taste says anything genuinely meaningful about a person. Taste, as far as I am concerned, is an index of one thing only: privilege.
added comments feed.
This is an awesome post. And has inspired me to analyze…
I’ve been thinking about this a lot more over the past week. The more I think about it, the more I realize how entrenched I am in my middle class taste and aesthetic.
As I was telling Mari the other day, you can even see the divisions of ‘class’ based on which coffee shop you go to in our neighborhood. I’d be willing to bet $100 that, in our neighborhood, the average annual income of a Peet’s Coffee customer is 10k above that of a Starbucks customer. The two coffee shops are right across the street from each other and a cup of coffee at Peet’s is actually cheaper than at Starbucks, but still, somehow, Peet’s has the wealthier clientele. They would all also tell you that Peet’s has much better coffee whereas the Starbucks coffee drinkers would probably tell you they just don’t really care.
This echoes the same thing that danah discusses about Myspace and Facebook. Most Facebook users have something disparaging to say about Myspace, but not vise-versa.
So … is Peet’s coffee really better tasting? Or have they just successfully marketed to a more upscale clientele? (I’d argue that it’s actually much much better, but then I’m part of that loyal clientele)
Cesar,
I agree with you. I think quite a few of us have lived good amounts of our lives in varying social classes and so we feel comfortable in more than one. I find that when I’m spending a lot of time with middle-upper-class friends, I start to miss the taco trucks, hot dog stands, and cheesy boleros of my days in Acambaro. Or even the cheap bowls of morning oatmeal when it was just me and my single mom and she was spending most of her days taking college classes.
But opposite is also true. If I’m traveling in the cuts of some developing country, after a couple weeks, there’s nothing I want more than a cappuccino and biscotti from Caffe Trieste.
Chandra,
I too grew up – at least my first five years – in a childhood that was, from the outside, ‘poverty’. As a kid, of course, you don’t realize that. Everything seems normal. I now know that my mother always had her parents to go back to if things got really bad, but the fact remains that during my first few years it was food stamps and public housing and a single mom that I never saw.
The thing is neither my mom nor my stepdad had or have the same taste in music, clothes, literature, or anything else that I’ve since come to love. When they came into money during the biotech boom of the 90’s, they both developed what I would call the kitschy excesses of the nouveau rich that characterizes every gallery and shop in La Jolla, CA where they moved to.
I was reminded of this last weekend in Sausalito, which is a lot like La Jolla: the gaudy aesthetics of the ultra-rich tend to repel me much more than the bling bling of the ghetto.
I’d be lying if I said that taste doesn’t figure into how I choose my friends. All of my close friends and I tend to have similar tastes. We read the same books, listen to the same music, and enjoy the same films. It tends to make it easy when it comes to choosing a place to meet for lunch … but you’re right, there’s a lot more to a person than what they listen to or what they read. I think it’s just a matter of reminding ourselves that.
Much respect to you, Oso – and I think it’s great that you are so honest about taste. I’m probably more guilty of this than I am aware but I do know that over the past ten years I’ve really, really shifted away from believing in those signifiers. Unfortunately, those signifiers do shape my identity now and I know that when I list, for example, my favourite authors, music, etc, it does connect me with others who share those pleasures. This isn’t a bad thing but it shouldn’t be – and I think this is what I was trying to say in my last comment – EVERYTHING. For some people, it clearly *is* everything. I know people like that. People who won’t go out to a bar or a restaurant unless it’s the trendy place. When they talk about books they talk about books that were recently reviewed in the “right” publication. These kinds of friends are people I spend increasingly less time with – but they are younger and put much more of a stake into those signifiers as markers of intelligence, character, or what have you. Again, I read those signifiers as connected to class and affluence and privilege – especially if they are disconnected to the larger world.
But this brings me to the question of Facebook. It only gives you the opportunity to identify yourself according to signifiers. As far as I’m concerned, surviving early childhood – or any form of – poverty, is an achievement. Surviving adversity is achievement. But where do we wear that? List that? in what YASN?
Going along the same lines as what HP said … I feel apart of neither the culture I grew up in, the crowd I was mixed together with in college, nor the people or groups I’m lumped in with now. My family and environment in general growing up was surely as country conservative the southern as you can get. I might have the white as snow part down but the country (other than the accent) conservative is out the door. Then in college I was mostly around preppy fraternity sorts. Parties … upper income. Living off of dad’s credit cards (them — not me). Now I’m in the working world, have since come out into my own and don’t fit the mold of what is expected of me in any sense of the word in the south. Everyone here is mostly conservative (I’m not), are ardent church goers (mostly Baptists — not I), and think all gay men are flaming cross dressers who surely will all end up in hell (I’m not and I hope I don’t). So where do I fit in? No where?? Maybe that’s why I can get along so well with people like HP and you … I don’t think any of us fits any of the atypical molds of what society has laid out for us. And personally, I think that fact makes us much more well rounded individuals …
This has to be one of the best posts I read this year! I also enjoyed reading everyone’s comments. Especially Chandra’s. You have people that are “posers’ and will only by the top of the line to fall in with a certain crowd, but in the end they are plain jane’s just like the majority of us.
Interesting that you should mention the Peet’s/Starbucks debate. I had that EXACT same discussion with a friend of mine last week. Too funny!
BTW…I am coming to your town tomorrow and I am hoping (crossing my fingers) that Peet’s will be open on the 4th. I need to get my stash!
🙂
I spent most of my life crossing the border generated by the two cultures that were thrust upon me. On the one hand being embarrassed by my burrito lunches in elementary school, but despising bologna and cheese sandwiches; loving the dark skin, straight black hair, round hip aesthetic that characterized all the women in my family, but subscribing to the Martha Stewart ban on white shoes from Labor Day to Memorial Day.
My solution to my problem (that went much deeper than taste and class [doesn’t it always]) was radical. Married a “gachupín”, moved to Spain and left my mad, mad, schizoid world behind. Well, you can take the Chicana off the border-line, but you can’t take the Chicana out of the girl. Lately, set on by my upcoming visit to mi gente, I’ve had to deal with it all again. Your post (and your blog in general) has helped me a canalizar toda la energía generada por la recurrente colisión de mis antiguas vidas.
I weep for your country.
Hahaha…hey, atleast we don’t say ‘A’ at the end of everything and only listen to Norah Jones. 😛
You lay off Norah Jones! She’s a musical genius, eh!
I’m still trying to figure out who brought bud light to the wedding…we bought like 50 cases of mexican beer…so hey did you get drunk or andabas borracho?