Last month, we posted a blog Does Anyone Still Use MySpace?, which summarized an article from the Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge about a study of the users of social networks: who they are, and what they are doing on these sites.

One fascinating finding in that piece was that people are in fact using MySpace – 65 million to be exact. It just may not be who you think. According to the research noted in the article, it’s because MySpace users populate smaller cities and communities in the south and central US. “MySpace has a PR problem because its users are in places where they don’t have much contact with people who create news that gets read by others,” said Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, the Harvard Business School associate professor featured in the article.

And recently, a related story aired on NPR about the social divide on social media. The piece examines the use of social media among high school students at The Urban School, an elite high school in San Francisco, and art students at Southern Exposure, a San Francisco community gallery. While all students are living in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the US, there still seems to be a divide on social media. This story suggests that social status and race are the reasons for this online social stratification.

The majority of students at The Urban School are part of the group of 90 million Facebook users and held somewhat elitist attitudes about social media, one student saying, “No one uses MySpace. [Facebook] is safer and more high class.” Another student said of MySpace, “The only people who use it are trashy people.”

The students over at Southern Exposure have their own thoughts on who’s using social media networks, one stating, “Not to be racist or anything, but there’s more white kids on Facebook.”

While this is just a microcosm of the real world, research (and a lot of it) is supporting the idea of social stratification on social media. One social media researcher, danah boyd (name spelled in all lower case) thinks the online social world is dividing up – just like the real world – into neighborhoods.

“Young people – and for the most part adults as well – don’t really interact online with strangers,” says boyd. “They talk to people they already know. You have environments in which people are divided by race, divided by class, divided by lifestyle.”

boyd theorizes that business analysts have been dismissing MySpace because they do not belong to the social groups using that site. Because studies show that lower income users are more likely to click on ads, boyd feels MySpace is an excellent place for advertising

What do you think?

Click here to read the full article.