Missing MySpace

While singing the KT Tunstall song, ‘Other Side of the World’ to myself for the 300^th time yesterday, a long dormant slow twitch response in my brain activated.

“I should make this my MySpace profile song!” I exclaimed before realizing .4 seconds later what year it was.

Author and former professional basketball player Paul Shirley wrote this about MySpace in 2009.

“Sadly, myspace is a shell of its former self.  It has become the abandoned freighter spaceship from Alien – dark, kind of scary, and with only a few humans left to clank around among the robots and extraterrestrials.”

For all intents and purposes, despite a site redesign, a logo redesign, and a directional shift that egregiously rips off…well Facebook, MySpace was defeated in the social network wars all the way back in 2008.

Still, I miss it.

I don’t miss the 10,000 friend request from bands or porno stars (well I miss those sometimes), the spam messages, or the absolute lunacy of any drama involving the people in my ‘Top 8’ along with the order which they were placed.

I miss the freedom.  MySpace and its cataclysmic failure paints a disturbing portrait about our society and how it handles said freedom.

I resisted Facebook for as long as I could, and to this day I still have no idea what to do with it.  I understand its appeal for seeing pictures and the occasionally interesting musings of friends, but I cannot imagine a circumstance, other than being stuck at work, that would keep me on this website for an extended period of time.

People vex me with stories of spending all day on Facebook, assuming it’s perfectly normal.

Facebook is our prison.  Our immaculately decorated, cable TV laden, college course offering, daily group therapy and psychologist visiting, touting 7 years since our last gang rape…PRISON.

Our personal 30 acres, a utopia of creativity and expression, MySpace should have won.  Writing blogs viewable to the masses, customizing your pages with dizzying and unique possibilities, it truly was YOUR SPACE on the web to do what you wished. 

Facebook is our apartment.  It is our space to hang pictures, and keep videos, and bring our friends over for parties.  But we can’t knock down the walls.  We can’t change the fundamental design of our cell.  We can’t hide the fact that we are living in a 10x10 square, no matter how many amusing games come along that make our work day go by that much faster.

MySpace failed because we, as a people, failed.  We had the power to embrace our freedom and creativity, giving it all up for the perception of privacy and security.  “Less sketchy people are on Facebook!” was the battle cry.  Apparently the largest social network site in the world was brought to its knees because several million people couldn’t figure out how to set their profile to PRIVATE, whereas Facebook had the foresight to make it their default setting.

And that makes me sad.  MySpace should have won, yet here we are.

Stuck in a world where people will bleed a proverbial MySpace dry, whether it be a social networking site, or a person, or a job, or anything that they can manipulate, just because they have the freedom to do it. 

MySpace is the depressing reminder that if given enough rope, we will hang ourselves.