Myspace: The New American Social Icon

Myspace.com, the fastest growing website in the nation, has over 100,000,000 created profiles. It is the epitome of modern social interaction, it allows teenagers to talk to their friends (as well as the occasional pedophile), it allows upcoming artists to promote their work and has helped a lot of underground musicians get signed to major record labels.

It's an addiction, a highly developed way to come into contact with old friends, and also a breeding ground for an extreme amount of twisted internet stalking and voyeurism.

If you do a google search on myspace you recieve a grand total of 212,000,000 sites, if you google the keywords myspace and predator you receive over 1,200,000 pages. Myspace is in itself both a modern mecca of electronic socialization and an inherently evil form of communication. It has overtaken the internet as we know it.

There have been a multitude of stories I have recieved through interviews with myspace users about such things as: Getting turned down for a job because their prospective employer searched for their profile on myspace, read their blogs and decided they would not function properly in the position they had applied for.
Women in their mid-twenties having to change their profile age to pre-teen numbers, in order to prevent sexual predators from contacting them, and sometimes men being more interested in the fact that they are pre-teens.
People that I personally know have told me stories of being "watched" on myspace by old boyfriends, who in turn create false profiles in order to become their friends, and keep track of their every electronic-move. Watching and waiting, looking up their family members and becoming their friends only to harrass them and inquire about their old girlfriends new husband and children.

The addiction to myspace is one of the strangest phenomenon's that I have ever encountered, people abandon all other real-life social activities to associate with representations of people they do not even know. Contests are entered into between people to see who can get the most friends in an alloted amount of time. Words and phrases like, "add""bulletins" "that bastard deleted me" and "please be my friend", reign supreme in this cyber-society. Everyone believes they are a celebrity.

It seems to me that as technology becomes more advanced, the world will keep getting smaller and smaller until we are all trapped into self made cubicles where we know longer have to interact with real people. Friendships will cease to mean anything. No one will know who anyone else is. So the question I have to ask from a journalistic standpoint is this: When will we as a society realize that it is not healthy to use the internet to form pseudo-friendships with people who may not even exist? Will our society in the future be nothing more than a mass of wires and circuitry and e-mail messages? Consensus states that the answer is a big fat YES.

Do we really want to become a colonialised, imperialistic, confused, and chaotic world society where electronic consumerism and capitalism reign as king. A world where cyber-wars are fought which electronically demolish third world infrastructures and economies, causing civil war in all areas of the world? We are well on our way and sites like myspace are the underestimated beginnings of such a civilisation.

There is humor to be found in myspace and other sites of the same inkling. For instance on my myspace profile I am friends with God, Timothy Leary, Jesus H. Christ, and George W., the fact that these people created well designed profiles which are convincingly representative of these pseudonyms, shows that it can also be used as a satirical, humorous, and creative platform. My friend George W. sends out bulletins about how to handle yourself in encounters with police, and he is also friends with stopthedrugwar.org. God sometimes sends out bulletins about "people I would love to bring my wrath upon, but can't for internal administrative reasons."

So can we come together and realize that real friends consist of real people, and not internet based profiles and identities? I hope so, for the sake of the human relationship in the future.