OK...

So, I stumbled across this website Personal Democracy Forum and started listening to Danah Boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft.  Boyd, starts out by saying "They [facebook/myspace] can bring everybody on board, they can make a welcome, lovely place and that anybody can participate in if only they had the access."

facebook vs myspaceBut in fact, she said, sites like MySpace and Facebook are mirroring, even magnifying, our social, political and class divides.
"MySpace has become the ghetto of the digital landscape," Ms. Boyd explained to the crowd. And many of us in these social environments, she said, "have gotten into the habit of crossing the street like we always do to avoid the riff-raff."

In her past four years of research - she found that Facebook users who canceled or abandoned their MySpace accounts are more likely to be white, educated and privileged.

Media often portrays Facebook as the reigning king. Yes, more teens go to MySpace and customize their pages with flashy, sparkly texts and music playlists, while an older demographic uses Facebook for business and networking. BUT, Ms. Boyd said, some teens are using MySpace and some teens are using Facebook, and things got "messy" when she examined who goes where.

"The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to all of us," she said. "It should scare the hell out of us."

"When people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another, they do not communicate with one another; this canon does breed intolerance," Ms. Boyd said.

It's important to examine these digital divides in social media.  Politicians need to partner up with their techie friends and make social media an increasingly important tool when trying to reach a mass crowd, while not leaving certain groups out.

She pointed out that the language used by Facebook users against MySpace users is what concerns her the most.

Facebook is described by high schoolers as "more cultured" and "less cheesy," she said. "Any high school student who has a Facebook page will tell you MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious," she said. "Like Peet's is more cultured than Starbucks and jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop. And Macs are more cultured than PCs," she said, quoting a 17-year-old student she interviewed during her research.

"People are already divided and we can't expect technology to automatically integrate them and create cultural harmony," Ms. Boyd admitted. But "you need to understand that these divisions exist." If politicians are using Facebook and Twitter to communicate with their users, "you're only seeing a fraction of the population speak out and be loud," she said. "If you're on Twitter, it's a very specific minority that you're speaking to and that minority looks a lot like you."

"Whose voices are you choosing to listen to?" she asked the crowd. Are you willing to write off a huge portion of the population because they're not using the same service as you are? Perhaps some of us should be asking ourselves same questions