MySpace - A Place For Fiends
October 27th 2006 02:49
I apologise for the tardiness of this post. I got writer's block yesterday. And you know when I say "writer's block", I actually mean "drunk".
For anyone who doesn't know what MySpace is, crawl out from under that rock, pull your fingers out of your ears and pay attention.
MySpace is the biggest social networking website on the planet. It has a database of over one hundred million users, and gets, on average, 230,000 new registrations a day, making it the fourth most visited English language website in existence.
Its concept is deceptively simple – you sign up for free and get your own “profile”, on which you can put as much, or as little, information about yourself as you like. Age, name, location, occupation, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, interests, hobbies, favourite music, personal heroes and up to 12 photographs can be uploaded for all the world to see, along with anything else you might feel like throwing in. Change the background colour. Change your font. Add a song on mp3 that plays whenever anyone visits your page.
Then, start making Friends. Note capitalisation.
Visit someone else's profile and you'll see and “Add To Friends” button. Click this and an e-mail is sent to them conveying the request. If they accept, they are added to your Friends list. When a user first starts out, they have only one Friend – Tom, one of the two young American men who created the site, who acts as an administrator. Depending on the discretion you exercise in choosing your Friends, you may end up with twelve, or a hundred, or a hundred thousand.
Once someone is your Friend, you can leave Comments on their profile, which is just like sending a brief e-mail which is visible to everybody, send them a private message, leave a Comment under one of their displayed photographs, or post a “Bulletin”, which is a short message which can be viewed by everyone on your Friends list. So in a nutshell, MySpace ingeniously combines the communicative features of the media of e-mail with live messaging services such as Skype, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger.
Some MySpacers are just ordinary (usually aged 15 - 25) people, there to keep in touch with friends (REAL friends – note lack of capitalisation). Some are there to make friends, and they succeed. Some people are there for the voyeuristic aspect, of which there is no shortage. Bands – signed and otherwise – make profiles and post music, which is a very efficient method of getting it to as many listeners as possible. Some are professional models, looking for work opportunities. Some are amateur models, posting mostly-naked photos of themselves in the hope of launching their careers. Some are porn stars, advertising their homepages and movies.
I've got a MySpace profile. My sister's got one. My friend's dog has got one. There are hard-edged journalists, ultra-conservative Christians, left-wing intellectuals, and always just a click or two away, a gibbering, masturbating legion of perverts.
MySpace is a 21st century cultural phenomenon. It has resulted in friendships, sexual liaisons, marriages, criminal charges. It has spawned its own lexicon – seemingly innocuous words like “friend”, “add” and “bulletin” have taken on whole new implications. It spreads the use of text-message lingo like an oil slick on water. It's an outlet where anyone with low self-esteem can create an immortal image of themselves as they'd like to be seen by the world. Social occurences on MySpace have become prime movers in the friendship circles of young people in day-to-day life. It is so ubiquitous that it has found its way into popular culture – musical comedian Weird Al Yankovic referenced his “pimped out” MySpace profile in a song called “White And Nerdy”, and an extremely popular web-based humorous t-shirt company named T-Shirt Hell has produced two shirts featuring jokes about MySpace. And in July 2005, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp purchased MySpace for $580 million.
Of course, MySpace's success revolves on one sure-fire selling point – sex.
While photos actually showing full frontal nudity are not allowed, anything else goes. The result of this is an unprecedented wave of narcissism, of creatively-angled photographs taken in bedrooms and bathrooms with digital cameras and mobile phones. If MySpace has proved nothing else, it has certainly proved this – with carefully chosen angles to highlight your face and body's finer features, a little playing around with contrast and tint to hide those unsightly acne blemishes, a long fringe covering part of your face to add an air of mystery, and a pensive expression as you gaze anywhere but at the camera lens - anybody can be beautiful. I know fat girls that look like supermodels, acne-scarred girls that look smooth and perfect as porcelain dolls, unattractive boys who look so impossibly fine-featured that they resemble women, and people who are pretty good-looking anyway, that make themselves look like Greek love gods.
On MySpace, you can trawl endlessly through the millions of profiles, gawking at photos and personal information in total anonymity. If you are someone's Friend, you can post public comments below their photos, providing a sort of no-embarrassment failsafe for under-sexed young men and women to give free rein to their libidos. There is no restriction on Comment content, and many are openly sexually explicit. Others are merely suggestive, allowing a brazen social confidence that many MySpacers are lacking in real life.
It's like flirting with somebody, without fear of rejection or looking stupid. MySpace can turn the meekest of socially dyslexic teenagers into a digital sexual Tyrannosaurus. It is, in many ways, the ultimate courting tool. And don't forget, it's easy to feel like god's gift to women (or men) when your photos show a physically perfect, Platonic sort of idealised version of yourself.
This sexual voyeurism aspect was something MySpace's owners have always capitalised on. Many of the ads which saturate the site are for “adult matchmaking” websites – a euphemism for fuck-buddy databases.
For many people, MySpace has become like a digital extension of the sex organs, some infinite wet dream where everybody is beautiful and your charm is not subject to the vagaries of your social skills.
The sprawling MySpace social network has even created its own sort of twisted etiquette.
A person's profile displays 8 of their Friends in a certain box, with an option to view the rest with one mouse click. But those 8 are your “Top 8”, which can be changed at will, and that phrase has taken on new significance. It has come to represent your Top 8 people in the world – highly coveted positions which are usually reserved for significant others, best friends, and people you really want to sleep with. To be in someone's Top 8 is seen as the ultimate compliment one can give on MySpace – the online equivalent, perhaps, of being the best man, or a bridesmaid, at their wedding. It's a way to show a person's significance to you.
On the other hand, to be excluded from this list – or even worse, to be in there and then be replaced by someone else – can be seen as a grave insult. MySpace is littered with heated Comment and Private Message exchanges, the bloody remnants of Friendships destroyed by Top 8 politics. Sometimes, even being moved from #1 to #2 is enough to break a certain camel's back.
Adding complete strangers is commonplace, but some people place restrictions on these sorts of Friendships. To Add someone and never Comment or Private Message them is to risk being seen as just accumulating as many random Friends as you can, ostensibly to gain some kind of status. The nature and authority of this status, which I have heard mentioned many a time, remains a mystery to me. Perhaps my research here is inadequate, but most relationships forged on MySpace seem fairly trivial and unimportant anyway, and some user's outrage at these Friend Collectors seems totally out of reasonable proportion. Perhaps some MySpacers feel used by these kind of people. In any case, the Friend Collectors are often ostracized and degraded by a certain kind of MySpacer – usually the I'm Too Good For MySpace MySpacer. (MySpace is such a popular phenomenon that it's sparked a sort of knee-jerk anti-MySpace sentiment – even among its own users. The same kind of thing springs up from all trends.)
The universe of MySpace is a weird and intriguing one. There's something insidiously addictive about checking out total strangers advertising themselves, and even moreso about perusing the pages of your real-life friends. A person is a very complicated creature, composed of millions and billions of likes, dislikes, fears, idiosyncrasies, motivations, desires and neuroses. It provides a fascinating window into someone's mind, to how they see themselves, to see which elements of their own persona they choose to provide to encapsulate themselves to the world. From the cheerleading ditz profiles littered with “lol”, “omg”, a confessed penchant for Ministry Of Sound techno compilations and sporadic clusters of mulitple exclamation marks, to the hyper-individualistic pseudo-intellectuals spouting Frederick Nietzsche and Tyler Durden dogma, The Cure or Sonic Youth droning away in the background.
I think at the end of the day, this window into other people's lives and minds is what turns so many people onto MySpace and irrevocably hooks them. It's that carnal, fiendish, voyeuristic urge catered to by everything from “Big Brother” on television to Russian spy satellites; and, now, MySpace.
MySpace - A Place For Fiends
For anyone who doesn't know what MySpace is, crawl out from under that rock, pull your fingers out of your ears and pay attention.
MySpace is the biggest social networking website on the planet. It has a database of over one hundred million users, and gets, on average, 230,000 new registrations a day, making it the fourth most visited English language website in existence.
Then, start making Friends. Note capitalisation.
Visit someone else's profile and you'll see and “Add To Friends” button. Click this and an e-mail is sent to them conveying the request. If they accept, they are added to your Friends list. When a user first starts out, they have only one Friend – Tom, one of the two young American men who created the site, who acts as an administrator. Depending on the discretion you exercise in choosing your Friends, you may end up with twelve, or a hundred, or a hundred thousand.
Once someone is your Friend, you can leave Comments on their profile, which is just like sending a brief e-mail which is visible to everybody, send them a private message, leave a Comment under one of their displayed photographs, or post a “Bulletin”, which is a short message which can be viewed by everyone on your Friends list. So in a nutshell, MySpace ingeniously combines the communicative features of the media of e-mail with live messaging services such as Skype, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger.
Some MySpacers are just ordinary (usually aged 15 - 25) people, there to keep in touch with friends (REAL friends – note lack of capitalisation). Some are there to make friends, and they succeed. Some people are there for the voyeuristic aspect, of which there is no shortage. Bands – signed and otherwise – make profiles and post music, which is a very efficient method of getting it to as many listeners as possible. Some are professional models, looking for work opportunities. Some are amateur models, posting mostly-naked photos of themselves in the hope of launching their careers. Some are porn stars, advertising their homepages and movies.
I've got a MySpace profile. My sister's got one. My friend's dog has got one. There are hard-edged journalists, ultra-conservative Christians, left-wing intellectuals, and always just a click or two away, a gibbering, masturbating legion of perverts.
MySpace is a 21st century cultural phenomenon. It has resulted in friendships, sexual liaisons, marriages, criminal charges. It has spawned its own lexicon – seemingly innocuous words like “friend”, “add” and “bulletin” have taken on whole new implications. It spreads the use of text-message lingo like an oil slick on water. It's an outlet where anyone with low self-esteem can create an immortal image of themselves as they'd like to be seen by the world. Social occurences on MySpace have become prime movers in the friendship circles of young people in day-to-day life. It is so ubiquitous that it has found its way into popular culture – musical comedian Weird Al Yankovic referenced his “pimped out” MySpace profile in a song called “White And Nerdy”, and an extremely popular web-based humorous t-shirt company named T-Shirt Hell has produced two shirts featuring jokes about MySpace. And in July 2005, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp purchased MySpace for $580 million.
Of course, MySpace's success revolves on one sure-fire selling point – sex.
While photos actually showing full frontal nudity are not allowed, anything else goes. The result of this is an unprecedented wave of narcissism, of creatively-angled photographs taken in bedrooms and bathrooms with digital cameras and mobile phones. If MySpace has proved nothing else, it has certainly proved this – with carefully chosen angles to highlight your face and body's finer features, a little playing around with contrast and tint to hide those unsightly acne blemishes, a long fringe covering part of your face to add an air of mystery, and a pensive expression as you gaze anywhere but at the camera lens - anybody can be beautiful. I know fat girls that look like supermodels, acne-scarred girls that look smooth and perfect as porcelain dolls, unattractive boys who look so impossibly fine-featured that they resemble women, and people who are pretty good-looking anyway, that make themselves look like Greek love gods.
On MySpace, you can trawl endlessly through the millions of profiles, gawking at photos and personal information in total anonymity. If you are someone's Friend, you can post public comments below their photos, providing a sort of no-embarrassment failsafe for under-sexed young men and women to give free rein to their libidos. There is no restriction on Comment content, and many are openly sexually explicit. Others are merely suggestive, allowing a brazen social confidence that many MySpacers are lacking in real life.
It's like flirting with somebody, without fear of rejection or looking stupid. MySpace can turn the meekest of socially dyslexic teenagers into a digital sexual Tyrannosaurus. It is, in many ways, the ultimate courting tool. And don't forget, it's easy to feel like god's gift to women (or men) when your photos show a physically perfect, Platonic sort of idealised version of yourself.
This sexual voyeurism aspect was something MySpace's owners have always capitalised on. Many of the ads which saturate the site are for “adult matchmaking” websites – a euphemism for fuck-buddy databases.
For many people, MySpace has become like a digital extension of the sex organs, some infinite wet dream where everybody is beautiful and your charm is not subject to the vagaries of your social skills.
The sprawling MySpace social network has even created its own sort of twisted etiquette.
A person's profile displays 8 of their Friends in a certain box, with an option to view the rest with one mouse click. But those 8 are your “Top 8”, which can be changed at will, and that phrase has taken on new significance. It has come to represent your Top 8 people in the world – highly coveted positions which are usually reserved for significant others, best friends, and people you really want to sleep with. To be in someone's Top 8 is seen as the ultimate compliment one can give on MySpace – the online equivalent, perhaps, of being the best man, or a bridesmaid, at their wedding. It's a way to show a person's significance to you.
On the other hand, to be excluded from this list – or even worse, to be in there and then be replaced by someone else – can be seen as a grave insult. MySpace is littered with heated Comment and Private Message exchanges, the bloody remnants of Friendships destroyed by Top 8 politics. Sometimes, even being moved from #1 to #2 is enough to break a certain camel's back.
Adding complete strangers is commonplace, but some people place restrictions on these sorts of Friendships. To Add someone and never Comment or Private Message them is to risk being seen as just accumulating as many random Friends as you can, ostensibly to gain some kind of status. The nature and authority of this status, which I have heard mentioned many a time, remains a mystery to me. Perhaps my research here is inadequate, but most relationships forged on MySpace seem fairly trivial and unimportant anyway, and some user's outrage at these Friend Collectors seems totally out of reasonable proportion. Perhaps some MySpacers feel used by these kind of people. In any case, the Friend Collectors are often ostracized and degraded by a certain kind of MySpacer – usually the I'm Too Good For MySpace MySpacer. (MySpace is such a popular phenomenon that it's sparked a sort of knee-jerk anti-MySpace sentiment – even among its own users. The same kind of thing springs up from all trends.)
The universe of MySpace is a weird and intriguing one. There's something insidiously addictive about checking out total strangers advertising themselves, and even moreso about perusing the pages of your real-life friends. A person is a very complicated creature, composed of millions and billions of likes, dislikes, fears, idiosyncrasies, motivations, desires and neuroses. It provides a fascinating window into someone's mind, to how they see themselves, to see which elements of their own persona they choose to provide to encapsulate themselves to the world. From the cheerleading ditz profiles littered with “lol”, “omg”, a confessed penchant for Ministry Of Sound techno compilations and sporadic clusters of mulitple exclamation marks, to the hyper-individualistic pseudo-intellectuals spouting Frederick Nietzsche and Tyler Durden dogma, The Cure or Sonic Youth droning away in the background.
I think at the end of the day, this window into other people's lives and minds is what turns so many people onto MySpace and irrevocably hooks them. It's that carnal, fiendish, voyeuristic urge catered to by everything from “Big Brother” on television to Russian spy satellites; and, now, MySpace.
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Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Whistler
Comment by Connor
Middle Class Guilt
And to answer your question, no, I don't. I suppose I don't like my chances of a newspaper wanting to pay money for writing from chumps with no education, qualifications or experience. I mean, I guess I'd like that eventually, but at this stage it seems unrealistic.
Comment by Eamon~