MySpace: Making The Web Not-Fun

Remember Friendster? Yeah, me neither. MySpace has surpassed it in "friendliness" in such a big way that Rupert Murdoch recently bought it to add to his already-huge News Corp. empire. That's awesome that the old fossil wants to "get down" with the teens. Too bad he bought such a shitty site.

"WHHAAAAAAAA??!? I LOVE MySpace!!" Well, I'm sure you do. It's a perfectly nice place to trade banalities with people you don't know. The problem with it is that it takes away the one freedom that the internet grants all of us: to do and say whatever we want, wherever we want, with almost total anonymity.

Most sites, if they have message boards or comment-enabled blogs, you can go on there and post your Nazi hate propaganda, or tell people about your home-refinancing site, or start a fight about Tony Danza's best movie roles, and there's really not much anyone can do about it (other than kick you off, or backtrack your IP address and come to your house and kill you).

But MySpace is above those kind of shenanigans. Let's say you're looking at a band's MySpace page, and you've heard their album that inconveniently plays when you visit their page, and you want to tell them that they make Molly Hatchet sound like Molly Hatshit. Or you see some girl's picture on a page, and want to tell her she has big tits, or that her face resembles your dog's ass. Any other place on the Web, you're good to go. But not on MySpace.

In order to do any of the above on MySpace, you have to "befriend" the person you want to talk to. You have to send them an email and ask them if you can be their "friend," so that you can make fun of them (and there's a lot of shit to make fun of on MySpace). Failure to do this will result in the message "You must be this person's friend to [do whatever]." Even if you just want to throw them a "Hey, how's it goin'," or "I think your blog is 'cool'," no can do. Based upon your profile, which may be real or total bullshit, whoever you want to talk to may not give you the time of day. What the fuck is this? Real life?

I'm sure when Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web, he didn't envision a place where the free exchange of information was allowed only amongst a select group of "friends." In fact, I believe this is the direct opposite of his vision. (I'm sure he didn't envision a lot of the things his creation would be used for, but fuck him for being so shortsighted.) If you want to call someone a tool in their comments, well, goddamnit, you should be able to. It's hard enough for most people to make friends in real life, and now we want them to do the same thing in this fantasy world we call "the internet." After a hard day at the office or school or wherever, we just want the free exchange of whatever, with no strings attached. And you can do that. Just not in the exclusionary world of MySpace. Sounds like some bullshit to me.

But, to show there's no hard feelings, I've made a MySpace profile. Feel free to become my "friend"; I won't turn you away. But, be warned: If you're going to get on there and tell me that Tony Danza's role as the monkey car driver in Cannonball Run 2 isn't his Best Ever, you and I can't be friends anymore.