My problem with My Space is that I find my principles about my pride conflicting with my feelings about putting myself on My Space. My issues rest with my inability to quickly find my friends and my collegues from my past on my own. My patience is too short to do my research without my websites and my hobbies taking over my attention, and my belief is that without my absolute focus my will could be my downfall. MySpace is my solution, except that MySpace is my sworn enemy. My temper rises envisioning myself on MySpace where my screen is hijacked with colors that hurt my eyes, my browser is frozen by multiple music tracks assaulting my ears, and my computer freezes because MySpace is eating up all of my resources. God help us if someone posts this stuff on my profile, then it’s my job to fix my site before my friends close my page and remove themselves from my buddy list thus decreasing my count and my worth to myself and my other friends since my participation is my measure in MySpace… but alas…
There are just so many people on this one site that it really makes sense to join, but I can’t. I can’t because it sucks, and it sucks so bad. The thing is, I am against it in principle, not just because it’s the ugliest site online. I am against it because it encourages all the negative things that kill me about — Yes, I’ll say it — America! It encourages ignorance: it’s cool to misspell words and speak poorly. It’s cool to leave pointless, but often sexually suggestive comments on young children’s profiles, it’s cool to post information online that really SHOULD be private. It encourages young kids to develop a social network that they don’t understand yet, especially young women. And furthermore, it rewards those who can amass the most friends, whether they know them or not, cementing the fact that having more friends is better than having good friends.
Now, this may not be the motivation for most; it’s entirely possible that many use this service as I would like, which is just to keep in touch with some friends. Although, several of my friends use it to forge these superficial relationships that exist solely online and that idea is kind of weird. If you’ve ever used an online dating service you know that many times online banter does NOT translate to real chemistry.
But all of the real issues aside, more than anything, it’s more the fact that it shoves into my space the general crap: the lack of design, the collage of crap all mashed into a single page, the foolishness displayed with pride by some. The very thought nauseates me.
I must be getting old.
Awsome piece
Check out Mugshot. Its aims to be a social networking site, and is being developed by Redhat.
Have you used Mugshot? I can’t even figure out what it is. What am I supposed to do, just amass membership to groups?
I follow Red Hat and Havoc Pennington closely, and I’ve been privvy to some interesting emails that have gone back and forth about Mugshot’s user interaction, but I generally agree: what IS it? What am I supposed to do with it?
Are you a MySpacer? If I recall, you use LiveJournal, right? Isn’t that kind of its own community?