If you are of a certain age, you probably switched from a MySpace account to Facebook at some point during your youth. Boyd wants to understand this switch, and why white kids have made it quicker and more frequently than others. The obvious explanation is that all their white friends were doing it: Facebook was started at (predominately white, upperclass) Harvard, was built around (predominantly white, upperclass) college students and only opened to the general riffraff around 2006. So, duh, white kids are going to join Facebook at a higher rate than other races who happen to be poorer and less likely to go to college.

But this does nothing to explain the racially-tinged language Boyd turned up in her interviews with high school students when they tried to explain their social network preferences. One white interviewee, for example, described Myspace users as “like ghetto and hip hop rap lovers.” (Boyd interviewed over 100 for her study from 2004-2009.) Nor does it touch on aesthetic and functional differences between Facebook and Myspace, and how those might influence the racial and class makeup of the sites.

— super interesting read: “Why is Facebook so damn white?”