Life: Myspace

Reasons why I hate myspace:

1. Unless you're going to use it for blogging purposes, then why exactly are you using it?

2. myspace reminds me of our address books in the eighties. Remember how life was, before iphones and emails? Remember how you'd carry around your little address book on the last day of camp and get everyone to fill in those little squares with their info? We spent as much time picking out the perfect address book as we do our cell phones today. (Should I get the one with the Snoopy cover, or the one that has a special line for birth dates? Do I really need metric conversions on my last page? Spiral or lock-and-key combo?). And of course, you never really collected all those addresses for the purposes of actually writing (by hand!) letters to those people... We just wanted to fill the pages. We wanted to be able to say, "Oh, your last name starts with an S? Hmmm, I'm all out of room for people with S names..."

And of course, we wanted BOYS to fill in our address books, and we wanted people to SEE that we had BOYS in our address books (not that we ever intended to call them of course, it was just nice to know that the option was there). And speaking of BOYS, they really didn't have address books, did they? This was really a girl thing, wasn't it? Or, was I just never asked? Hmm.

OK, what was my point? Oh yes, that myspace reminds me of this. This pointless, ridiculous collection of names (aka "friends") that makes a myspace page scroll down, down, down....... We want to say it doesn't matter. But people, if you have a myspace page, you know it matters. I know that you know your "friend" number by heart.

3. Yeah, there's more. Anytime I'm on a friend's myspace page, or worse, a non-friend, I feel compelled to look at the comments people have left them. And it makes me feel icky. It makes me feel like I'm reading someone else's yearbook autographs. Why do people feel compelled to have "actual conversations" on the comment boxes of myspace? Seriously, why can't people just send private messages, or actual emails? Why must they leave actual between-you-and-me messages to each other, which anyone can read? The answer is, because myspace is a competition. It's a way to show people, or appear to show people, that you have more fake friends with more fake inside-jokes than anyone else. The battle of the inside joke, that's what I call it. There is no one quite as cool as the person who has a long list of artsy/indie looking people leaving public commentary like: "Last night was sooo awesome" or... "I luuuuuuvvvvv you and you r SO right about that thing u said the other day at that place we were at" or... "we r totally ON for tomorrow at you know where."

4. You know who I respect? People who actually build blogs of their own. People who actually have an interest in something, and build some sort of online ode to that interest. People who actually care about design and online community and take the time to create something to support that. The easy way out? Build a myspace page.

5. I know this is a rant. But I've got more. I find it quite irritating when people who are MY age build myspace pages for themselves, fill it with inappropriate commentary, and don't realize that when they are GOOGLED by colleagues, it WILL be found! Hello? You're a teacher! And your myspace page is able to be viewed by your students within 2 seconds of typing your name into Ask Jeeves. Which your students will do, by the way. That raunchy photo of your friend referencing your drug history.... yeah, your students can see that.

Thank you. I feel better now.