random 25 Apr 2006 12:55 am
Committing MySpacecide
Committing MySpacecide
Briefly, on November 13th, 2005, I was a friend of Tom. I’m talking, of course, about Tom Anderson — male, 30-years old, based in Santa Monica, California, and founder of MySpace. The man with $580 million and nearly 50 million “friends.”
The iMomus MySpace page was online for just 48 minutes. Barely long enough to tell the world my relationship status, sexual orientation, body type, ethnicity, religion, zodiac sign, smoking and drinking habits, income and company affiliations. To receive a message telling me to “read the FAQ and give Tom a break.” To upload the most flattering photo I could find. To notice that Tom had been added automatically as my first friend, and that Tom’s favorite music included Billy Joel, Oasis, Guns & Roses and Whitney Houston (”particularly The Bodyguard soundtrack”).
I don’t know what made me delete it. It just looked ugly: the page layout, the blue writing. I felt like a sheep, letting social pressures, memes and fads herd me around. I wondered why I needed yet another social networking website to check: After all, I was already on Friendster and Japanese network Mixi, not to mention LiveJournal, a network organized around daily content rather than mere profiles and links. Mostly, I just wondered why I needed to affirm tenuous affiliation with a new set of ghosts.
I didn’t know at that point that just four months earlier, on July 19th, MySpace had been bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News International. That’s where Tom’s $580 million came from. I think if I’d known that, the MySpace iMomus page wouldn’t even have lasted 48 minutes. Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, isn’t my favorite guy.