A while back a friend of mine suggested I start a MySpace page and I did, mostly so I could send an online "hello".
I left it alone for a while, but for some reason within the past few days, I just can't seem to get enough. I find myself browsing the profiles of hundreds of people just because we graduated the same year from the same university. At the same time, I kind of think MySpace is lame. Besides the profiles of people I know, it seems to be more of a predatory playground for random hookups. Though he jokes here, my boyfriend lived with a fellow who used MySpace (and perhaps Friendster?) for such goals. We're talking several girls a week. And looking around, a lot of women seem to dress their profiles up to welcome this sort of solicitation.
Otherwise, this online community boasts little more than high-school humor. Don't get me wrong, I can find humor in just about anything, but a lot of it just isn't very interesting. There's also something very reminiscent of high school about MySpace itself. As absurd as this sounds, I find myself feeling a tinge of sheepishness that I only have three friends linked to my page. It's this weird impulse to want to connect my page to as many people as possible. Maybe just pure competitiveness, but it makes me feel 14 again, awkward and in a new, unfamiliar place surrounded by people I don't know.
Almost everyone I've talked to says they have joined MySpace because it's a "great way to keep in touch with people". I see the merit in that, but frankly, if I want to keep in touch with someone, wouldn't I have already made moves to do so? I guess MySpace is taking the place of asking someone for their email address or phone number. There are also other means to reconnect like college alumni databases or even a simple Google search tends to return some amount of information to bring you one step closer to saying hello. If the information is out there and available, I don't feel that it is cyberstalking or an invasion of privacy. It's certainly my responsibility to keep my personal details private if I don't want any one to contact me.
The funny part about all of this is that this is my space. Everything about it. I don't have to advertise (the WordPress tag is just giving credit where credit is due, that's just common courtesy), I am not restricted to certain templates and I can have more than one page - the novelty! Why would I want to even bother with MySpace when all I have to pay for is my domain name (thanks to free hosting from this guy.)?! And yet I do. Perhaps I am just as inclined towards online exhibition as the next guy.
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