along these lines. What is interesting is what happened when some teens chose to move from MySpace to Facebook.

Social media is faddish. MySpace came first and many teens chose to embrace it. When Facebook came along, plenty of teens adopted it as the “new thing.” In doing so, some chose to leave MySpace, while others simply maintained two profiles. Yet Facebook did not simply usurp MySpace. In May 2009—two and a half years after teens began splitting—comScore reported that MySpace and Facebook had roughly equal numbers of unique visitors. In other words, while a shift did occur, not all MySpace users left for Facebook, and not all who joined after both were available opted for the newer site.

Those teens who left were not abstractly driven by fads; they were driven by their social networks. Thus, the shift that took

place was also shaped by race, socio-economic status, education, and lifestyle. Here is where the division solidified, marked by social categories and distinctions:

Anastasia ( 17, New York): My school is divided into the “honors kids,” (I think that is self-explanatory), the “good not-so-honors kids,” “wangstas,” (they pretend to be tough and black but when you live in a suburb in Westchester you can’t claim much hood), the “ latinos/his-panics,” (they tend to band together even though they could fit into any other groups), and the “emo kids” (whose lives are allllllways filled with woe). We were all in MySpace with our own little social networks, but when Facebook opened its doors to high schoolers, guess who moved and guess who stayed behind…The first two groups were the first to go and then the “wangstas” split with half of them on Facebook and the rest on MySpace… I shifted with the rest of my school to Facebook and it became

the place where the “honors kids” got together and discussed how they were procrastinating over their next AP English essay.

In choosing between the two sites, teens marked one as for “people like me,” which suggested that the other was for the “other” people. Teens—and adults—use social categories and labels to identify people with values, tastes, and social positions. As teens chose between MySpace and Facebook, these sites began reflecting the cultural frames of those social categories. Nowhere is this more visible than in the language of those who explicitly chose Facebook over MySpace.

Craig ( 17, California): The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook. It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace. Any high school student who has a Facebook will tell you that MySpace users are more likely to be barely

November + December 2009