Longform Links - Facebook, Colonial Fruit, Spice Girls
Note: Del.icio.us changed some of their functions, and I haven’t been able to reach the inbox. Carmen and I are working to fix that, but as of right now we are not receiving del.icio.us links. -LDP
Stuff White People Like - Facebook
For a brief period of time, MySpace was the site where everyone kept their profile and managed their friendships. But soon, the service began to attract fake profiles, the wrong kind of white people, and struggling musicians. In real world terms, these three developments would be equivalent to a check cashing store, a TGIFridays, and a housing project. All which strike fear in the hearts of white people.
White people were nervous but had nowhere else to go. Then Facebook came along and offered advanced privacy settings, closed networks, and a clean interface. In respective real world terms, these features are analogous to an apartment or house with a security system/doorman, an alumni dinner, and a homeowners association that protects the aesthetics of the neighborhood. In spite of these advances, some white people still clung to their old MySpace accounts. That was until they learned that Facebook started, like so many things beloved by white people, at Harvard.
Within a matter of months, MySpace had gone from a virtual utopia to Digital Detroit, where only minorities and indie bands remain.
If you plan on befriending white people, it is essential that you join them in the digital suburbs and open a Facebook account immediately.
Vegans of Color - Colonial Fruits
It’s pretty convenient to be a vegan nowadays– I can’t gauge how hard it was years ago, I haven’t been buying my own food long enough, but it is really easy to be vegan right now. Part of that is the fact that in most of this country there is a huge variety of produce, and produce that is available year round.
[…]
And of course part of this variety is due to our ever globalizing world, which also means a world with a history (and present) of colonialism. I don’t know how much neo/colonial trade routes have to do with the production of my vegetables (at least during some parts of the year), but I know there is some major colonial undertones to the production of my fruit. Most of my favorite fruits are of the tropical variety, which of course means they come from the Global South.
See, in my ideal world, where these colonial relationships don’t exist, and capitalism is dead there is no way I could get my favorite fruits. So I’m wondering– how should I interpret my consumption of, what I now think of as colonial fruits.
Pop Feminist - Hi-C-Ya Hold Tight!
Riot Grrls were waging an overt warfare, but warfare is not what these girls need, or are even capable of. They are far too disempowered. Guerilla tactics are the art of the weak, and guerilla feminism is the sort of feminism The Spice Girls offered up– it creeped around in camouflage. The Spice Girls are not only a commodity but a resource for girls—a menu of possible meanings, to be chosen from by their fans whose choices include the group’s message of “girl power”, their wild behavior, their loud, gross, kiss-my-ass attitude, “girlfriends before boyfriends” ideology, and more all piling up in a cultural junk-drawer to piece together a personalized feminist-thought, the most subversive aspects of which are hidden in plain sight. […]
The Wannabe video, after all, positions the Spice Girls as the carnivalesque “other”, infiltrating and desecrating the severe world of the bourgeois who are aghast but helpless before the destructive power of these crude girls. The above behavior is emblematic of the rock ‘n’ roll male disrespect for authority, which is seldom seen enacted by women in the mainstream. They align themselves with the liminal teenager– recognizing the impulse for rebellion in the teenage girl. […]
I am not suggesting that the Spice Girls had revolutionary potential. They did not. But they had progressive potential, where girls like me could scavenge for scraps of validation and camaraderie in the otherwise unfriendly place this “world” was shaping up to be.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
Cynthia wrote:
RE MySpace: I think Murdoch is trying to get some of the Facebook crowd back to MySpace because most Wall Street Journal articles allow linkage to MySpace. Other newspapers and magazines prefer Facebook or maybe Linkedin.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 11:13 am ¶
dave wrote:
stuff white people like is so non-stop cringey. they’re right except for the million ways/people for whom they’re wrong, and i really can’t decide any given day if they really get the joke.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 11:26 am ¶
RJG wrote:
@dave: I think (hope?) that they realize they’re just a cartoonish level of “WHITE PEOPLE DRIVE LIKE THIS”, and really, as a white guy, I’m hardly hurt or offended over the stereotypes presented.
In fact, I find it pretty hilarious when [white?] people come out of the woodwork after every post there and take huge offense at how they don’t like X just because they’re white, and that they have huge reasons to like X unique only to them, and how terrible it is to assume he/she likes X just based on race because that’s racist and everyone would be sooooo offended if they said all black people like X.
To which I go, “well, yeah, that’s the point.”
I mean, c’mon, the stereotypes they say white people comprise of are either such niche points which clearly aren’t stereotypes (personally I take huge offense at the accusation that white people like being vegans…) or just pointing out the negative things white society as a whole does/enables (gentrification as one example).
It’s a comedic (and thus less aggravating I’m sure) version of someone writing a post about how white society benefited from slavery, or hell, anything involving slavery only to have tons of people up in arms about how it’s so untrue, how they’d never own slaves, how THOSE OTHER PEOPLE OVER THERE also did it so stop blaming white people, and etc etc etc.
At least that’s how I see it.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 12:37 pm ¶
Elise wrote:
Re SWPL: Why the hating on Detroit? What did Detroit ever do to you, sir?
I defend Detroit because, while it has its issues, it is not full of tweenagers who are color-blind and have incredibly poor taste in music OR indie bands of varying quality. Though I find MySpace’s interface very similar to the quality of streets you find in Detroit.
If I were comparing Facebook to something, it would not be suburbia. It would be a business park in some flat part of our country, like the one in Office Space. Clean, tidy, and soul-sucking. Facebook also has flair, just like Chachi’s.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 12:56 pm ¶
Black Canseco wrote:
SWPL is like the old Def Comedy Jam joints only i don’t think they’re in on the joke as much. The crappy comics on DCJ were at least acknowledging a sense of repressed anger stemming from a lack of honest dialog about race and culture, which left stupid jokes as the only outlet for going, “see how it feels to be accused of stuff just because”.
Where Stuff White… fails is in its smarmy self-congratulaltory tone. It’s like Lenny Bruce’s old N-word bit. He proudly touted that he’d yell the n-word till it lost its meaning. but he never did this bit infront of black folks, because he didn’t really care about the word or its origins as much as he cared about looking cool and pissing off other white people.
SWPL were anything more than a hipster pseudo joke, it’d do more than go “i’m cooler than all you other white people.”
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 1:10 pm ¶
Black Canseco wrote:
Oh yeah, the original point of the post:
Facebook’s about as much suburbia as MySpace is inner city.
People on the web manage to segregate by race and culture even within community sites. MySpace is more like Ning now where everyone pretty much keeps to themselves with a little spillover here and there. The amount of racist, elitist, mysogonistic crap on both sites is stunning.
Tho honestly, unless you’re gamer, you ain’t see nothing yet.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 2:06 pm ¶
Elise wrote:
@ Black Canseco: Yes on all counts, especially the comment about gamers.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 2:10 pm ¶
DEAF FEMINIST PUNK!! wrote:
lol@ Facebook vs Myspace. I hate Facebook and I prefer myspace.
@ the Spice Girls: eerrrr, okay. I hate them with passion. I never thought they did much for feminism.
when Spice Girls came along, their crappy music made a joke out of female musicians and female celebrities.
I feel that Spice Girls, along with Britney Spears and other female pop singers of the late 90s, have pretty much set back and destroyed everything for women in music and pop culture.
just look at the declining quality of pop culture in the 2000s.
that’s just my opinion.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 2:37 pm ¶
Ailurophile wrote:
Agreeing with RJG - I’m white, and I find SWPL to be funny. It’s also funny that so many white people take great offense at stuff like “veganism” or “driving a Prius” as part of white culture. LOL. What are they going to do - run out and sell their Priuses, give their dogs to a shelter and start eating meat in order to… what? Be less white? I guess white people can’t take it very well when the joke or the pseud0-anthropological analysis is on THEM.
As far as social networking spaces are concerned - I don’t do either MySpace or Facebook; I do LiveJournal and LinkedIn. I was told by a career counselor that LinkedIn is the only social networking site she recommends to her clients, because it’s business-oriented, not “Ha ha look at me puking my guts up after the wild party at Bob’s!” Does that make me super-duper-whiter-than-white?
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 2:49 pm ¶
Cameron wrote:
Re: Colonial Fruits
… Anybody have any ideas? Of those 3 items (all fascinating), this is the one we might actually be able to do something about.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 3:00 pm ¶
Chris wrote:
Somewhat offtopic, but I remember reading an article about the socioeconomic class separation between Facebook users and MySpace users. Mainly because the majority of Facebook users are college students or alumni, particularly because at one point you HAD to have a college email account to access it, and a majority of MySpace users are high school students or people who haven’t attended college.
As such, the article pointed out how this leads to such things as to which social networking sites were banned on corporate and military intranets. MySpace was/is banned from access on nearly all major corporate and military computers, whereas Facebook is not.
I can attest to this because up until recently, Facebook was accessible on Air Force computers, and is still accessible at computers at the large military contractor I work for, while MySpace isn’t and hasn’t been since early on.
I can’t remember where I saw the article (most likely linked to from Slashdot), but if I can dig it up I’ll post the link.
I’d like to see someone take an analysis of the socioeconomic class division between MySpace and Facebook users and see how it correlates to the race makeup of the users.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 4:32 pm ¶
Falyne wrote:
As a CS major, I always preferred Facebook to MySpace largely on an aesthetic basis. There’s a limit to the amount of damage stupid people can do to your senses without the ability to change colors or play music automatically. There also was, I’ll admit, a sense that MySpace was a bit of Geocities Redux, a hard-to-take-seriously hangout for the immature and the crackpot.
Of course, any time I wander into any sort of public discussion thread on Facebook, I realize anew that the immature and the crackpot comprise a freakin’ huge swath of humanity.
And, yeah, that’s not mentioning gamers and (some) nerd/dork/geek internet societies. There’s some serious doing it wrong of basic humanity out there….
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 4:47 pm ¶
Phrone wrote:
Weighing in, I’m a Facebook user, but I don’t like MySpace. Maybe it’s like suburbia in that Facebook will only allow you so much variation?
(Although with applications, it is now possible for my friends to once again crash my computer when I try to access their profile -sigh-)
Also, I remember reading that there was a lot of overlap between Facebook and MySpace users…maybe that’s changed? (At that time, the website most visited after checking Facebook was MySpace, and vice-versa)
That being said, the Facebook article is strangely written for STWP like — did I miss something, or was that a guest article?
(Plus, like not a fan of the way they talk about Detroit, as Elise has already pointed out.)
Also, I remember reading something similar by BFP about the whole ‘being a vegan of color’, although there it was more about what constitutes cruelty-free. Very interesting issue, definitely a different perspective than usual on being vegetarian/vegan. (Although I wish BFP had gotten a link or something.)
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 7:00 pm ¶
RJG wrote:
@Falyne:
This doesn’t have much to do with the topic as much as what Falyne said… but as a graphic designer YES YES YES.
I hate MySpace for all it’s auto-playing music, mangled CSS by people who should never been allowed to combine colors in the first place, oversized pictures, broken web standards, etc etc etc I’m anal about this stuff so poor shoddy design like MySpace annoys me so much.
Facebook is so much cleaner and I have the option to avoid all the widgets and ugly things that I would have no choice but to see if I was on MySpace.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 7:02 pm ¶
Torontonian wrote:
I dunno, I don’t think of Facebook as being white, because the vast majority of my Facebook friends are people of colour. I’m wary of MySpace and other social networking sites with less privacy, because I don’t trust random people on the internet, who are often abusive.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 7:45 pm ¶
Torontonian wrote:
There are general demographic differences between different social networking sites, but I think chaos is a factor. Facebook is popular in Canada and the UK, and while MySpace is more popular in the United States. Friendster is popular in Asia, especially in the Philippines. Korea has Cyworld.
A huge factor in social networking is word of mouth, which means that if a certain social networking site happens to be a little bit popular for ‘random’ reasons, there is a snowball effect. The social networking site then becomes huge within certain communities, or even countries, because of personal connections.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 7:59 pm ¶
Maggie wrote:
@Chris. I think that danah boyd (www.zephoria.org) has done research on the socioeconomic differences of people that tend to congregate on different social networking sights. She may not have written the exact article that you’re talking about, but has a lot of great information on the subject.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 9:00 pm ¶
Brian wrote:
“Stuff White People Like” is so dumb. What’s the point? It’s written by a bunch of white people to simply poke fun at white people they don’t like and make themselves feel better about the type of white person THEY are. It is not true satire. It’s a way for white people to either A) feel prejudiced against or B) rub elbows, chuckle at themselves, and carry on with their ridiculous lives of excess.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 9:07 pm ¶
Chanita wrote:
I have a MySpace account and a Facebook. The one I get the most out of and enjoy, is hi5.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 9:23 pm ¶
Lilah wrote:
Chris, I think you are referencing this paper:
http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 10:20 pm ¶
Abu Sinan wrote:
I am an Electrical Engineer. I had a Myspace for no other reason than to be able to view the content of other friends who were there.
I didnt get into the social networking thing until I saw Facebook. That is because I am a tech junky. Myspace, from a tech point of view, was awful. Facebook was more organised and better displayed.
I also think it is more about education and social-economic issues. I am involved in several of the Islamic/Muslim groups on Facebook and find that the Muslim presence, mostly PoC, is HUGE on Facebook. Not only is it American, but it has taken of in a huge way in the Middle East and North Africa.
Most of the people I know on Facebook are college educated and pretty tech savy. The people I know still on Myspace are those who usually are not as educated and not as family with tech gadgets and the like.
FB is more organised and thus serves advocates better.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 10:28 pm ¶
RJG wrote:
@Brian: I’m not sure what’s so bad about self flagellation, or even making light of aspects of a culture you’re at least more connected to.
I’ve read a few things similar to “Stuff White People Like”, like “Hipster’s Handbook” and
“Food Court Druids, Cherohonkees, & other Creatures Unique to the Republic.”
I kind of prefer what they’re making fun of because it’s at least stuff that I’ve experienced, have personal interactions with, and so on.
It beats making fun of a culture you know nothing about. To me it’s the same level of observational cultural humor as Russell Peters.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 10:55 pm ¶
Torontonian wrote:
The stark racial demographic distributions between Facebook and MySpace is probably specific to the United States. In Canada, most people are on Facebook, and almost nobody is on MySpace. Facebook is also particularly popular in Toronto, where almost half (46.9%) the population are visible minorities.
28.88% of Canadians are on Facebook, the country with the highest Facebook penetration, while the United States is not even in the top 10.
My point is that Facebook is popular with Canadians of colour and Canadians in general, and saying that Facebook is “white” is American-centric. Facebook penetration is higher in Chile, Hong Kong, and Singapore than in the United States, so there is more to it than “people of colour like flashing colours and animation”.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 11:15 pm ¶
Lea wrote:
A huge factor in social networking is word of mouth, which means that if a certain social networking site happens to be a little bit popular for ‘random’ reasons, there is a snowball effect. The social networking site then becomes huge within certain communities, or even countries, because of personal connections.
Yes, to this. I don’t know about the US but in a lot of countries you get a sort of de facto standard where, someone hooks up with a social network and, six months later, suddenly everyone you know is on it. It happened like that with Facebook in Israel. Not noticeable for outsiders, it being a small country with a small population, but there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis on Facebook.
Facebook also has pretty good multilingual support. While most of the international groups/pages etc. are in English (because they’re meant to be aimed at everyone) there are a lot of more specific ones geared at speakers of certain languages.
As to SWPL… I think they have inadvertently stumbled upon the idea that “white” does not just mean “member of the Caucasian race” because it’s obvious in their posts that they mean a specific kind of white person. These are probably the type of people they spend most of their time with, so it’s automatic to them that white means liberal, feminist, literary-artsy hipster type.
They also make “white” synonymous with “straight”. They have a post about how “white people love having gay friends,” and another one about pretending your college experience makes it easy to understand being poor. This says a lot about how the word “white” codifies to “social elite” in their minds — an inadvertent realization, or a deliberate part of their satire?
In any regard, it seems to me that straight white people are unaware of the fact that there can be (and often is) racial strife in queer communities. People are not actually aware of how implicitly racist and blatantly elitist certain kinds of gay white men can be? Yet everyone jumps on the bandwagon of complaining how blacks and Muslims and Latinos are homophobic.
Posted 06 Aug 2008 at 11:57 pm ¶
Oxford Blues wrote:
I believe MySpace’s fate is shared by Orkut (http://www.orkut.com) which is Google’s social networking site. It has barely any white people left on it and a friend told me that when he asked a white friend whether he was on Orkut, the chap said, “No. Orkut’s just for Indians and Brazilians.” Priceless.
Posted 07 Aug 2008 at 6:55 am ¶
jvansteppes wrote:
@Lea, yes yes yes.
I have to add that there’s a republican energy hidden behind some of the posts, which betrays the fact that this critique doesn’t come from POC based communities but a white hipster who has issues with the idea of public health care etc.
And yeah, most straight white people have no concept of racial issues in queer communities but then again they aren’t exactly in tune with race issues in their own communities either…
Posted 07 Aug 2008 at 12:17 pm ¶
waxghost wrote:
It seems to me that the “elitist” bent of SWPL is the point. It plays off of the stereotype (that is often invisible to white people) that whites are all college-educated, wine-drinking, Prius-driving rich folks. It parallels the kinds of stereotypes that POC face, so instead of acting like, for instance, all black people are poor, it says “all white people are rich”, which then makes non-rich white people vehemently deny that that is reasonable - but it’s not reasonable to assume that someone is poor just because she is black, either.
At the same time, some of the things it talks about ARE very white things to do, and I think it’s great that it points those things out. It shows that white people have a unique culture too, rather than acting as though white=normal and everyone else=different.
I won’t argue that SWPL is perfect - the entry that seemed to be against universal health care bothered me too - but as an imperfect examination of whiteness, I think it functions quite well.
Posted 07 Aug 2008 at 2:13 pm ¶
Vanessa wrote:
Facebook original was for college students only….you had to have a colled email account to log on.
I think it is ridiculous to assume that more whites use Facebook than myspace. I also think it is very ignorent to assume that Facebook is mostly used by white people if you don’t have an empirical evidence to prove it.
From my point of view….I think it is users are very diverse. I know for a fact that there are a lot of Nigerians and Caribbean folks that use its.
I can’t speak for myspace b/c I am not so fond of it….but facebook is more diverse and more user friendly.
Honestly the first article is pretty much worthless and pretty much a race baiting article.
Posted 07 Aug 2008 at 5:33 pm ¶
gatamala wrote:
I hate MySpace for all it’s auto-playing music, mangled CSS by people who should never been allowed to combine colors in the first place, oversized pictures, broken web standards, etc etc etc I’m anal about this stuff so poor shoddy design like MySpace annoys me so much.
Me too RJG. The only reason I got an account is to communicate with certain folks. I spend most of my time looking for the camouflaged mute button and scrolling up and down.
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 9:42 am ¶
k wrote:
This is why I always liked MySpace better. I heard so many comments like “Facebook is for educated people and MySpace is for low-income people” (someone actually said that to me). In MySpace you can do so many things to your profile, and I liked that better especially because I got to learn some codes to change the color and the layout. Anyway, my point is that it’s such a stupid article!! So only white people have Facebooks?? and does that make it better that MySpace? umm… I don’t think so! it depends on what people like, and to divide website like this it’s dumb, they are only websites!
Posted 08 Aug 2008 at 3:36 pm ¶
wendi muse wrote:
lol oxford…your associate was kinda right…though there are plenty white people on orkut, they just happen to be from brazil lol
i opened an orkut account before moving to brazil for that purpose b/c none of the people i knew in brazil had facebook, only orkut…so it was a matter of fitting in
but the program is almost identical to the new facebook in terms of appearance and features…and considering how much people in the u.s. love gmail and google as a whole, you’d think it would have done better in the u.s….but no. and ironically, few people in brazil seem to possess gmail accounts…mainly hotmail.br and yahoo.br emails…
Posted 09 Aug 2008 at 12:02 am ¶