social networking sites are the new class structure

...so argues Danah Boyd in this interesting essay comparing the socioeconomic, educational, etc. status of Facebook vs. MySpace. Not lost on me is the connection to why the US military has restricted soldier access to MySpace but not to Fakebook. Weird to read this as such an outsider since I don't use either one....I'm so old... What I'm reading these days: Alvin Toffler's Future Shock. I like reading period pieces, and the analysis part of this one is reasonably well informed and strikingly prescient, though his prescriptive advice is a little too far out in left field in some cases. Also I got this book out of the "Free stuff" box at Bird & Beckett, which I love. Huston Smith's Why Religion Matters: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Disbelief. Has some important points to make but the structure of the argument is kind of sloppy, especially towards the end. His arguments about why the "worldviews" of religion and science are so different and why the worldview of religion fills a fundamental human need are good arguments. His arguments about their coexistence are less convincing, though, and suffer from what appear to be some category misconceptions about those worldviews.