The class system

WIRED:Rupert Murdoch was interviewed recently by several prominent Wall Street Journal staff. It was an awkward discussion: the interviewers were seeking not only to understand Murdoch for the enlightenment of their readers but also to quiz him on what would happen if the Journal was bought by him, as current rumour suggests.

My eye was caught, though, by his throwaway comment at the end of the transcript. Discussing a newspaper buyout, he said "the decline in [ another paper's] readership will probably go on".

The interviewers quip that: "They're all going to MySpace." Murdoch replies: "I wish they were. They're all going to Facebook at the moment."

For those not following the vagaries of Web 2.0, MySpace is the social networking company that Murdoch bought for $580 million (€422 million). Facebook is its current competitor, down on numbers, but accelerating out of the shadows.

As a blog entry by Danah Boyd, internet social researcher, noted, there's more than just Murdoch ownership dividing the two sites.

Facebook originated as a closed system for university graduates: you needed an academic e-mail address to join. MySpace started as a trash, Los Angeles-based site for bands to throw up details and demo tracks quickly.

Both have outgrown those origins and now anyone and everyone can become members of either, but their roots still show through. Facebook is for kids whose families "emphasise education and going to college". MySpace is for "immigrant teens, alternative kids . . . punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids and other(s)". Boyd noted that a few months ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. Facebook is used by officers; MySpace is used by on-the-ground-in-Iraq grunts.

It doesn't really take much to move from one of these social sites to another. As Murdoch is learning to his cost, internet users are fickle. Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace (and Bebo and Friendster) have some additional stickiness, as it's only worth your while to move if all your friends are moving too. But it's surprising how quickly that can happen.

I've noted more and more of my professional European friends appearing on Facebook. Once again, anyone can join, but we are all trapped by our social circles. What makes a smart but poor Hispanic youth here in northern California unlikely to enjoy the riches of Silicon Valley is not that he or she is not near the place, it's the huge leap in social circles they would have to make to start being noticed.

There's no reason those divisions have to be maintained on the internet. As they say, out there "nobody knows you're a dog". But on social networking sites, once again, the everyday world you see is curtailed by who you know. And when one class lives on one server and another lives elsewhere, there is no way for them to connect.

Murdoch and others would be happy to keep it that way. They see this as "a battle for eyeballs": the longer they can trap users on their own site and stop them wandering off to others, the better. And the more high-class the visitors, the more money they make from their advertising.

Facebook has already invested a great deal in its "Facebook applications" infrastructure, which allows third parties limited access to its membership and the details it knows about them.

MySpace, by contrast, is languishing as News Corporation struggles to learn what to do with the rabble it has been left with. Neither will be happy if those two groups ever talk to one another.

As Danah Boyd notes, that's a worrying sign for social fabric. In countries where class strife is reimposing itself in sneering commentaries about alien "chavs" and dirty immigrants, should we be reinforcing the same barriers online? Does it even make business sense, long-term to do so?

I don't think so. People hanker to be able to invite and share photos and stories and experiences with anyone they want, rather than just who has turned up on this particular website. It's fun to hang out with your friends online, but the real entertainment - and the real money - is, as ever, in making new friends, learning new tricks and buying new ideas.

For that, the far wider internet is beckoning us all.