My wife pointed me to this interesting article this morning:
A new study from Northwestern University finds that college students’ choice of social networking sites is related to race, ethnicity and parents’ education. The review included social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Xanga.
According to the authors, the findings challenge the democratic nature of online interaction and contradict conventional opinion suggesting that all college students communicate via Facebook, the popular social networking site (SNS) launched in 2004 by a Harvard undergraduate.
“That race, ethnicity and the education level of one’s parents can predict which social network sites a student selects suggests there’s less intermingling of users from varying backgrounds on these sites than previously believed.â€
More information can be found here.
The complete article citation is:
Hargittai, E. (2007). Whose space? Differences among users and non-users of social network sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 14. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/hargittai.html