Hang your heads in shame, racist Facecrackers.

From SF Weekly:

“Last week, a study showing that older folks have flocked to Facebook was all over the news. But word of an even more provocative trend waits in the wings: white flight from MySpace to Facebook.

Self-styled social media pundit Danah Boyd [...] compared the exodus of whites from MySpace to Facebook to the exodus of white city-dwellers to the suburbs over the past 50 years. As Boyd (who is white, by the way) put it, “Many of us have habitually crossed the street to avoid what is seen as the riff-raff.”

“MySpace is a little ghetto, a little wilder, a lot more diverse in terms of my interactions with people of different backgrounds,” concurs Jonell Stooksberry, a 36-year-old white Bay Area legal assistant who still checks her MySpace account every month but scratches her newer Facebook itch daily. She prefers the user-friendly layout of the latter, and has reconnected with far more friends there than on MySpace. But Stooksberry kind of misses the “ghetto.” Back in her MySpace days, she was often contacted by guys she didn’t know in hopes of connecting — and they were rarely white.”

I’ll grant some validity in the Facebook-as-the ‘burbs comparison. There is a familiarly ingrained push toward a patterned conformity and primly neat aesthetic. But for the dual analogy to hold up, at all, MySpace would have to have to been anything other than a blight even in its heyday. When a dump is abandoned, there are no ruins. No doubt that Facebook and MySpace represent different cultural impulses. But the study’s conclusion appears to completely disregard that Facebook has surpassed its college-bound roots to have a much wider demographic reach than MySpace’s adolescent yearbooking and music-heavy approach. Cities are seen as more sophisticated in their diversity in contrast to the pleasant but boring suburbs. Can someone point me toward some cached example of MySpace’s former glory? Any exodus of dabblers to Facebook was more likely away from MySpace’s obnoxious interface. Toward Facebook’s attractive apps and the friends they attracted before them, not away from the “riff-raff” MySpace population.

If anything real-world, when I glance at MySpace, I see Wal-Mart. Any expressiveness its ostensibly greater user freedom allows for is choked out by the virtual Doritos sale racks at every door and on every aisle. Er, actually that was when I last visited MySpace a few weeks ago. Now when I go there, I see that many of the formerly saturated and graphics-heavy pages are being adapted into a samey muted shades of blue format. Huh.

Whitey’s back, and he’s gentrifying MySpace!