danah boyd is super. If you can be smart and likeable, you really have something in life, and she’s got it. She’s a sociologist I suppose, mostly working in online communities. Here’s paper from her:

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Amongst other good and fresh points, she relates an existing one about class in the US. I think I’ve heard it made before, although I can’t remember where, but in any case it strikes me as stubbornly true.

‘In sociology, Nalini Kotamraju has argued that constructing arguments around “class” is extremely difficult in the United States. Terms like “working class” and “middle class” and “upper class” get all muddled quickly. She argues that class divisions in the United States have more to do with lifestyle and social stratification than with income. In other words, all of my anti-capitalist college friends who work in cafes and read Engels are not working class just because they make $14K a year and have no benefits. Class divisions in the United States have more to do with social networks (the real ones, not FB/MS), social capital, cultural capital, and attitudes than income. Not surprisingly, other demographics typically discussed in class terms are also a part of this lifestyle division. Social networks are strongly connected to geography, race, and religion; these are also huge factors in lifestyle divisions and thus “class.”‘

That certainly seems true in Canada as well. Even during times that I have been working minimum wage jobs, or not being able to get minimum wage jobs and struggling to cover rent or food, I have never really been of the lower class. If you met me then, hungry or worried as I might have been, you probably would have somehow “known” that I was a middle-middle-class kid. And that was probably true too when I was living with my parents after they both became solid income earners and we had two solid cars and moved to a nice house in the suburbs. Even then, if you were sensitive to class, you would likely have pegged me as middle-middle despite my family’s upper-middle income bracket. I observe this in my friends as well. I hadn’t thought of it as being correlated primarily with social networks and their follow-on-effects, but I suspect she’s got something there.