Facebook Tastes
October 2nd, 2008 |
This uproar and boycott over the new Facebook is pretty interesting in the context of my thesis.
One of the major differences between Facebook and MySpace is its design, layout, and overall aesthetic. As danah boyd colorfully notes, MySpace is ridden with “flashy…Las Vegas imagery,” while Facebook is akin to a “poshy Scandinavian design house.”
The connection between taste preferences and socioeconomic status has been explored by Thorstein Veblen, Herbert Gans, Pierre Bourdieu, and others. SES becomes an identity which must be displayed by distinctive consumption, whether of material products (food, clothes, etc.) or cultural products (music, movies, etc.). This correlation between taste and SES is one of the reasons boyd suggests that MySpace and Facebook are reflecting class divisions.
One of Facebook’s reasons for redesigning its website was to regain the ascetic Facebook aesthetic, after the addition of applications made profiles significantly more cluttered (i.e., more like MySpace):
Among Facebook’s goals with the new design were to reduce the clutter of members’ profile pages and restore the social network’s clean and organized layout.
At first, I thought that the majority of complaints about the new design would come from Facebook users who prefer a MySpace aesthetic. But the article above points out that the redesign does incorporate at least one element that clashes with the Facebook aesthetic:
Fishbein, like many redesign critics, dislikes the new tabbed interface because she feels it forces people to do too much clicking around to see and find things. She preferred the more consolidated look and feel of the old design. She also finds the overall effect of the new design to be “very in-your-face,” whereas the previous layout was, in her view, less strident and more discreet.
Though my proposal has already been approved by the human subjects committee, I’m going to try to get approval for a new question asking Facebook users to rate their opinion of the new Facebook on a Likert scale. It’ll be interesting to see, when I begin collecting data during the next couple of weeks, if there’s a correlation between socioeconomic origin and opinion of the new Facebook’s design.
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