Internet Classism: How We Know You're Poor and Lame Online

As a poor person myself, I agree with this.

There are social media platforms mainly used by rich people, and there are social media platforms mainly used by poor people. And the poorer you are, the fewer spaces you can actually use.

In the past, there were more public facilities where you could spend time for free. These days, there are fewer places where you can spend time cheaply, and simply going outside costs money. I recently bought a single hamburger at McDonald’s, and I was genuinely shocked by the price.

As a result, the poorer people are, the more they tend to cling to the internet and spend longer periods of time in anonymous communities. The richer people are, the more they tend to cling to parts of the internet where they can display themselves. Of course, this is only a tendency, not a rule that applies to everyone.

Broadly speaking, the spaces rich people prefer are places where they can display their social class. The spaces poor people prefer are places where that class can be hidden.

The real issue is that, once this accumulates over time, taste begins to emerge from social media use. Everyone wants to show themselves in some way. But when you look at the nature of that display, there is a difference.

For richer people, display becomes increasingly local and specific. They show subtle details: where they travel, what restaurants they visit, what brands they understand, what networks they belong to, what kind of refined taste they possess.

For poorer people, display often becomes larger and more abstract. When someone is poor, they are more likely to become absorbed in grand causes, large ideologies, or collective identities. That is because poverty makes the self feel more blurred. When the individual self becomes harder to assert, the last remaining space is often filled by belonging.

The more alienated a person becomes, the stronger this tendency can become.