Ed Note: It is with great pleasure that AiP plays host to Eric
Michael Johnson as part of the Primate Diaries in Exile blog
tour. Eric has written a fantastic post on the anthropology of
social networks, covering the racial and economic disparities of
Facebook and MySpace. You can follow other stops on this tour
through his RSS feed or at the #PDEx hashtag on Twitter. Eric,
you're definitely welcome any time! Readers, thanks for joining
us today—if this is your first visit to Anthropology in
Practice, please make yourself comfortable and peruse the
archives. You are also welcome any time. - K Humans are social
animals and our network of friends and close relations are
essential to most peoples sense of self-identity. Across
cultures humans easily form groups and seek to define those
groups as being separate and unique from "the other," whatever
that other happens to be, whether it's religion, politics,
lifestyle, or race. A common occurrence in humans (as well as
other apes) is to pay attention to what presti