2006-08-12 - 5:24 a.m.
All right, I just got my first Myspace account something like a month ago, and can I just say that I am already totally over the whole thing? Perhaps it is a generational thing, but I honestly don’t see the use of Myspace at all. What’s the point? I feel like my grandmother, who, when she saw the first computer that the family owned about 20 years ago, muttered, “What, a typewriter isn’t good enough?”
But the thing is, I don’t get it. I really don’t. The profile one fills out is jam packed with the same useless stuff you see in any website where they are trying to create a “community.” Oh, and there’s a revolting Marketing 101 term that I loathe. “It is our dream to create A Community. And then we can sell things to em!”
And yet, why do I want to spend hours and hours clicking some form to tell everyone that I like Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica, and hate Rap and cheese cake? If I am not going to get laid, which is what explains why one laboriously types together all the crap in, say, a Gay.com or a Manhunt.net profile, why would one want to create this cookie cutter thing that is exactly like everyone else’s cookie cutter thing? For this is what I have noticed about on line friends and aquaintences. They are essentially useless.
Oh don’t get me wrong: There are some very pleasant folks on line and a few of them even tend to become decent friends who love one and whom one loves. But so many more are just time wasters and drones, who feign an artificial closeness for a time, but then drift away to the next pleasure. Some may fool you for a while into thinking that they are well and truly friends of yours – but then it turns out they vanish without explanation or move on or dump you for the next low key pleasure or diversion.
I don’t mean anyone in particular when I say this – but it is a sort of general presumption that I have found which holds true. On line pals are a new form of friend, really, unknown to past generations. In the old days, how would you know someone in some far off city, with whom you might have casual chit chat at all hours of the day and night? You could have had pen pals, I suppose. Or rung up huge phone bills to phone chat lines, or something like that – though even those were unheard of before the 1980s. On line pals are really a new phenomenon – a fin de milleneum phenomenon. And most of them are really frickin useless.
Compared with real world friends, on line pals are tepid and lukewarm. Somewhere slightly above a guy you start chatting with when you’re sitting next to him at a bar, but below someone who you actually know. You have less responsibility for them – and they, naturally enough, have virtually no responsibility for you. They can be polite one moment, and then abysmally rude, with no one taking it amiss. After all, an online friend isn’t real. He’s not human. Dump him and you can find someone else in 20 minutes. That’s the beauty of the Internet.
But you must excuse my digression. We were talking about Myspace, which I have only just discovered I really don’t get at all. And now that the site is owned by Rupert Murdoch – well, how pleasant it is to be involved with what is essentially a means to “brand” me and turn me into some kind of a pipeline for ads for the Hottest Movies or the Coolest New Thing Merchandised for Kids Between 16 and 24? Leave me alone. I do not wish to be branded. I do not wish to help some revolting Marketing Guru slap his hands together with glee as he delights in his new and innovative way to Reach Me so he can Convince Me To Buy Stuff.
Part of my serious annoyance is that I just received e-mails from a whole flurry of folks who asked to be added to my Friends list. And I don’t know a single one of them! Who are these lepers and drones and skanks? They’re all hookers and whores, I think! No, seriously. I am kind of amazed.
I mean, look at this person called “Angelyne.” What the hell? And that whore-ish woman “Ernestina.” I swear I ain’t never seen her before in all my born days. Then there’s the person who sent me a “friend” request who seems to be some kind of a singer in Sherman Oaks. I clicked “add” and then went to visit his site – and, lord, I never did hear such atonal caterwalling. How did someone like that even find his way to me? I guess “friend” adds are the new way to whore about and spam.
You’d think Mister Murdoch would have something to say about skanky hookers adding upstanding citizens onto their friends list, really you would. Everyone’s now going to think that I am just looking for a cheap “massage” by some big-breasted bimbo. Nothing could be further from the truth, as my long time readers know.
