Recipe for a Perfect Storm: Combine one part Class Division, one part New Media, and sprinkle with Teenagers

Some time ago Danah Boyd posted a blog entry titled “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” which got a huge amount of attention on academic lists, the blogosphere, and in the mainstream media. She wrote a response to all of the coverage recently. It was completely astonishing to me (and to Boyd) that a blog post that was an extended analytical field note (my term, not Boyd’s) and didn’t really come to any surprising conclusions (IMHO and Boyd’s) was such a phenomenon. How would something like that get covered in Le Monde, MSNBC, and thousands of comments on Slashdot?

I guess the subject matter of new media, teens and class is a perfect storm, that and her blog had pretty high visibility to start with, technorati ranks it at 1,013 today - pretty darn high considering how many blogs are out there. Everyone from journalists to academics to teen bloggers has something to say about those subjects. Unfortunately, I don’t think it indicates a growing public interest in qualitative research. I suppose that’s something positive about the attention, more people might find out something about qualitative research if they bother to read her posts.