marketing

A few weeks ago, I linked to an article by Danah Boyd about class divisions and community formation in MySpace and FaceBook. There was a bit of a controversy over the article, which caused a stir in the technology blogosphere, academia, and even the mainstream media (who stopped talking about sexual predators for about 5 minutes).

Danah has a new article up responding to the many, many, many criticisms of her initial article. Even if you disagree with her thesis; even if you cringe at the use of elitist (dare I say hegemonic?), grad-school jargon; the essay still has some important information about the ethnographics of MySpace and FaceBook - information that can and should be used for political outreach just like the Repubicans use traditional marketing data.

At the very least, these two essays will be talked about in just about every conversation about politics and social networking for the next year and a half. Read them just to be current.