Myspace chapter...

So I have just finished a book on numerous subjects and I wanted to post a chapter of it here to get feedback or for your own amusement....

Chapter 4: Myspace, the epic battle for the less retardation of America’s youth.

I am sure that the reader of this book is familiar with Myspace.com, but I will rehash its purpose here. It’s basically a network and a place where people from 8 yr olds to those in their mid twenties go and write about themselves and take pictures of themselves and look at their own profiles and gather up friends and post songs and use the letters of their names to make acronyms and have a particular type of alcoholic drink that describes them and talk about what they did or are planning on doing and discuss who they are and look for people to date and tell each other how pretty they are and where all of that comes together to leech off of the entire collective soul of the American youth and then regurgitate it down the drain. First off, the Fox corporation now owns Myspace (Rupert Murdoch) and apparently bought Intermix Media, the majority shareholder in myspace.com, for 580 million dollars. I wont say anything about Fox because I realize they can shutdown Disney and assassinate Mickey if they wanted to, or even skullfuck a muppet, and get away with it, and although I may be a physically smaller target, if they can shoot an adorable panda-like stuffed animal that has pancakes for ears they could surely eliminate me. Also, police are now starting to use Myspace as a tool to track down people. In addition, Myspace is starting to become a major marketing tool, as it must generate revenue, where you see ads, profiles, and messages all structured to become some faucet to some corporate identity. For example, http://www.myspace.com/joinbode has been featured on Myspace’s mainpage, part of a Nike campaign. Fox isn’t to blame though; Myspace is just an evolution of the teen online community, which came out of places like facebook and the like. Myspace claims they have over 20 million users. So what’s so bad about online communities, for example Wikipedia has spread free knowledge to everyone and isn’t that helpful? Yes, but it is a valuable service to everyone because it opens up knowledge to the world, even to those that don’t contribute. Just like all online communities bad and good things can come of it, such as with Craigslist. Craigslist is a San Francisco Bay Area based website that is amazing. It found me my apartment and linked me to a jobsite where I found my job. Although they provide all of these great services (AD FREE!) they also provide a service called casual encounters ( which is a synonym for no strings attached sex.) Basically it’s a get-laid-quick service, kind of one of the downsides for CL, because who knows how many people now have the AIDS because of raunchy internet-hookup sex, you can put down your hands now. Basically, information that comes out is not going to be better than the information that you put in. So we have determined that the idea of Myspace isn’t a bad one and that ads can be a necessity of free services. Plus, online communities can do good. So why does Myspace get it’s own chapter? It’s because it gives teens with no focus a place to waste good energy. Think about if all of these kids spent half of the time they do on Myspace exercising, reading, bettering themselves, voting, masturbating, or helping old people cross the freeway. At the end of the day Myspace is more addictive than just a game because of its psudosocial interaction model. Unlike a single player game, where you have not gained anything or received social interaction, but have just received some latent playtime, Myspace is tricky. It allows you to interact with people, but without the important medium of touch. Kids seem to spend so much time writing about themselves and making a colossal media central of all the things that define their life, but at the end of the day after all of the pictures, the comments, the bulletin posts, the more pictures, the videos, the music, the offers for sex, they still have not touched anyone physically or looked at them in the eye or made the move to kiss someone. The problem is once again one with communication, if we build new barriers for direct communication by inventing other means of communication and stream lining the speed (ala Myspace instead of driving a car three blocks to a friend’s house and interacting with them) then we drive down the number of possible occurrences for physical interaction. The difference between Myspace and Craigslist and Wikipedia is that two of these are outlets for new information and productive services such as job search, knowledge outlets, room search, and more. Myspace, on the other hand is like a dating service on steroids for 8yr olds and up. People use it to pull down check boxes, play music, and post pictures all of which is just a recycling of information or pushing of personal information to others. None of which really adds to society. However, who knows where this will lead? Will my generation setup a Myspace-like system for government where Rousseau’s implementation of direct democracy could be possible in the Internet age. Yes, so long as there is a “Hot or not” rating for each congressman. Only then would a true system of representative democracy work, when users of Myspace would vote on their congressmen based on their “hotness” rating or number of friends.

The cliff notes/moral of the story:

So let’s make an analogy. Myspace is to intelligent discourse as a deer hunter in an H2 is to the safety of Bambi. The problem boils down to injection and not the system. If you inject real content into a system, it can be productive and a valuable resource. Myspace is void of a lot of valuable content. Just like blogging isn’t generally the equivalent of journalism, because one has standards, fact checkers, a budget, and the other only requires some guy who doesn’t exercise and is a virgin to type into a box and hit publish. If my peers can get off their kick to see pictures of pretty people and read about the stupid shit that their friends did today and pay attention to world affairs, learn how to play the piano, or even physically talk with someone, maybe we wouldn’t be seen as a generation of retarded apathetic voters who are more concerned with the smell of each others farts than we are with the collective poisoning of the atmosphere. Maybe I am wrong, maybe if we interviewed these Myspace people we would find out they can all add, subtract, multiply, and possibly divide things other than their legs. Basically, Myspace is like a gigantic highschool and now that we have an online version of this I hope that the University of Phoenix trend can carry down to the highschool level so we can all get our fill of vacuous teens online such that the 6 bright people in school don’t have to have their lunch money shoved so far up their ass that they feel violated by George Washington himself. At least that way EVERYONE would be equally socially inept instead of that only happening with the social outcasts. Read a book, or spend some real time with people and avoid Myspace not because it is bad, but because it can become a bad addiction just like anything else, except that it has pictures of hot smutty people, so the potential to get sucked in is exponentially greater. However, if you do have a Myspace please add this to your favorite books of all time, I will totally add you as my friend if you do it! No, but seriously, don’t do that. SEACREST OUT!