There’s an article in the NYT Sunday Styles today, “Do You MySpace?” It’s mostly just a survey of MySpace’s features, its uses among users, its growing popularity, and its upcoming acquisition by News Corporation (more on this later). I’m reminded of two years ago when Friendster was talked about in the same way (and MySpace was in its nascency). Now, MySpace’s hits have surpassed even Google (even Google!), and there seems to be no end in sight.
Here are a few quotes-followed-by-comments, in no particular order.
Exhibitionism
Members customize their home pages with zebra-stripe backgrounds and giant pictures of their favorite motocross riders, rock singers or bikini models. The site is also a testament to the exhibitionism spawned by cellphone cameras.
Cell phone cameras didn’t spawn exhibitionism, man. They enable it to be visually enacted by more and more teenagers daily, sure, but the impulse was largely already there.
The MySpace Generation Gap, and the Understanding of Those at the Upper Side
The time-sucking potential of MySpace became an issue at the small record label where Ms. Ward works, Suburban Home Records, at least in the eyes of her boss, Virgil Dickerson. He said he started worrying when he noticed younger employees spending hours surfing through MySpace. “It was a drag on productivity, for sure,” Mr. Dickerson, 30, said. “They were always goofing around, seeing if such-and-such added them as a friend or whatever.”
In the winter three of his single employees got into relationships around the same time, meaning they could all graduate from the “single” designation on their MySpace pages. It was a big deal, and Mr. Dickerson gave an office party, complete with an ice cream cake with the message in frosting “Congrats Kyle, Joey, and Naomi on your MySpace Upgrade!”"
This is a great example of there being no strict boundaries between online and offline life; they bleed together. But it also can have an affect on one’s relationships, it seems. Friendster recently added a relationship status possibility of “It’s complicated,” which reflects the tendency among young adults now to refuse definition of relationships. Something like Friendster or MySpace veritably forces you to define yourself in all these little categories, as well as defining your relationship to others. You have to ask: At what point do I change the status to “in a relationship”? Does the other person I’m “in a relationship” with think that we’re “in a relationship”? Should I leave it to “single” so I can continue to see who else is out there? Will the person I’m dating be upset if they see my profile and that it says “single” still? I would LOVE to do a study on status changes in online networking sites and what perceptions accompany them. Similar to at what point after meeting someone in real life, and from what motivation, you think it’s appropriate to “MySpace her” or “Friendster him.”
Bigger than MTV
As a man who makes his living from youth culture, [Dickerson] had to make peace with MySpace. His company has responded to a slow period in the record business by selling T-shirts on eBay that read, “MySpace ruined my life.” “They’re doing pretty awesome actually,” Mr. Dickerson said. “I’d say, as far as a cultural phenomenon, MySpace is as important, if not more important, than MTV.”
Like MTV, it is starting to create stars that glow brightly within its own universe. The band Hollywood Undead, which did not exist three months ago, has achieved celebrity thanks to MySpace…
Now we’re getting somewhere. So as a cultural phenomenon, MySpace creates this “own universe” of popularity for artists, musicians, etc., and it’s a universe that largely lies under the radar of mainstream popular culture, though there’s undoubtedly a huge amount of overlap. It’s this potential to effect such low-level widespread popularity that, to me, gives the internet the potential to free us from our shackles of celebrity cult, to unseat the mainstream media’s power over what we get for entertainment, what entertainment we view as “good,” etc. It could do this in two ways: One, by giving ordinary people an outlet for their pinings for self-celebrity, and introducing ordinary people to an external audience, however small, thereby reducing the “specialness” of “being seen” (through things like, e.g., my blog). Two, by circumventing Big Media to create organic followings based on personal, not prescribed, taste.
Oh, but enter Rupert Murdoch…
One adult who has paid attention is Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of the News Corporation, which agreed in July to pay $580 million to buy the site’s parent company. At the time News Corporation executives explained the investment by citing MySpace’s surging popularity among young people, who are often difficult to reach through newspapers and television.
…
The founders seem reluctant to discuss anything about their coming absorption into the world’s largest media conglomerate. Their silence suggests they may be nervous about losing their credibility as alternative-culture figures with MySpace members. They insist nothing will change. They will keep the same job titles, they say, and the site will look and feel the same.
“We get to keep doing what we’re doing, and have more money to do it,” Mr. Anderson said. “We’re not moving over there, they’re not coming over here. We just kind of go talk to them once a month and let them know what’s up.”
Riiiiight. Just keep thinking that. Just keep thinking that. Myself being a vitriolic Rupert Murdoch detester (please, please watch this), this acquisition is almost enough to make me want to take myself off of MySpace. Thing is, probably 90% of the people on MySpace who think about such things would agree (the young hip crowd no likey the Bush, you see?), but of course we’re not all going to just up and drop something that has become such a part of our lives, something that makes us feel connected to a larger world even if only through a tiny screen. Something that, in however a way, makes us feel cool. Murdoch knows this, and therein lies his evil, evil genius. We’ll have to see what happens to the site in order to know the effects of the acquisition, of course - but when the mondo corporation gets involved, the hipsters might walk. [WHAT MAKES IT EVEN THE LEAST BIT COOL IS ITS LACK OF ASSOCIATION WITH ANY BRAND THAT ALREADY HAS MAINSTREAM CONNOTATIONS. -PC's Inner Hipster, who is aware of the fact that MySpace and Friendster both make money via targeted advertisements, but maintains that this is different from joining a Media Empire] Then again, already MySpace is only cool amongst a certain kind of hipster, with the hippesters* swearing off it altogether.
*Please, let’s start using this word.
UPDATE: I just found this AP story from earlier this month about users’ concerns about Fox’s buying MySpace. Also this Voice article.