MySpace

I recently posted the blog below on my MySpace. Sad, I know, I've signed up to yet another mainstream phenomenon, but in all fairness, I started my blog light-years before it had erupted into the mushroom cloud it is now.I also read the below article before deciding to sign up to MySpace. My reasoning is that MySpace is where my Gold Coast friends and youth are at, and I'm gonna go where they are, otherwise my ministry is defunct.
In essence, I posted this blog to make those two groups think. Those who will bother reading it. I wouldn't call it an argumentative essay because I really have no opinion or agenda to push, but rather a few thoughts and a couple of other people's opinions to get people thinking...something which we all forget to do sometimes.

*Mum, I think this would be a fascinating topic for you to look into. You know, in your spare time :P. You have no idea how HUGE MySpace is among teenagers down here. I was flabbergasted to also discover that the majority of my old school friends have signed up. You should search for the whole article on a database.

...to blog or not to blog...

Blogging fascinates me. I’m not really sure why. Perhaps because we’ve been lining up to see the mechanics of our mate’s brains since they first said ‘hey’?

What is it that makes us so desperate to understand each other? To know each other.

Perhaps I've wandered from the point. Since we are our own authors, we are able to misconstrue our messed up profiles to show people the 'me' we want us to be. Not who we really are. We take snapshots of ourselves, photoshop them and broadcast 'the me I want to be' to the world.

The September 16 edition of New Scientist ran an article entitled, ‘This is your space’ about the social networking phenomenon. Below are some quotes which really hit the spot to me on blogging. Perhaps ‘to blog or not to blog’ is not a dramatic monologue plaguing your mind, but this is my blog and it’s a question I’ve been thinking about. Ironic I’m blogging about it.

‘This is your space’ (pp. 46-48)

‘If the web was once an enormous library, it is now a vast conversation…Young people now communicate more through social networking websites than through email. Instead of keeping diaries, they keep blogs; instead of photo albums, they have Flickr.

While older adults go online to find information, the younger crowd go online to live…Welcome to the MySpace generation…

Social networking websites have evolved from something you visit in your spare time to an integral part of daily life that many today cannot imagine living without…

If you’re unconvinced, take a look at the numbers. Friendster, one of the pioneers of online social networking, now has more than 20 million members…MySpace has just registered its 100 millionth website among US internet users, receiving more hits in a one week period than even Google…Technorati, which monitors the blogosphere, says it is currently tracking 51.3 million blogs worldwide, and claims that 75,000 new blogs are created every day – that’s almost one per second…[the blogosphere is] doubling in size roughly every six months.

With people spending so much time communicating online, how is this changing real-life social behaviour? Recent studies have drawn contradictory conclusions. Some claim that individuals who socialize online become more social, extrovert and happy, while others claim that such people draw away from their family and friends, break social ties and become isolated and depressed…

The distinction between ‘real life’ and online is no longer clear-cut…Users of social networking websites are no longer anonymous – they have real names, jobs and relationships…
Despite the media hype, young people on social networking sites are interacting for the most part not with strangers, but with friends from their real life. Thus their online social life doesn’t detract from their real one as the two are simply different manifestations of the same network of friends. Online socialization is just an extension of the kind of interactions that people have daily by phone, text message and emails, so the line between what is real and what is virtual is beginning to fade…

For those who are interested:
Another article, ‘I’ll have to ask my friends’ (pp. 48 & 49)
Sociologist Sherry Turkle tells Liz Else why she’s concerned about the transforming human psychology.

Is social networking changing the way people relate to each other?

For some people,, things move from “I have a feeling, I want to call a friend” to “I want to feel something, I need to make a call.” In either case, what is not being cultivated is the ability to be alone and to manage and contain the emotions. When technology brings us to a point where we’re used to sharing our thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place…

How is it affecting families?

Let me take a simple example. Tethered [tethering being a way we connect to people on communication devices] adolescents are given a cellphone by their parents. In return, they are expected to answer their parents’ calls. On the one hand, this arrangement gives the adolescent new freedoms. On the other, the adolescent does not have the experience of being alone, or having only him or herself to count on: there is always a parent on speed dial…..tethered children think differently about themselves. They are not quite alone.

Does it worry you?

…We communicate with instant messages, ‘check in’ cell calls and emoticon graphics. All of these are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not meant to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling…Self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one’s time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it.

Is this a bad thing?

…We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think, uninterrupted…are we leaving enough time to take one’s time?

Are you talking about a permanent change?

It seems to be part of a larger trend in media culture for people not to know what they think until they get a sense of what everyone else thinks. But we learn about what everyone else thinks by reading highly polarized opinions that encourage choosing sides rather than thinking things through…This kind of behaviour used to be associated with early adolescents, with their need for validation…

Surely being socially enmeshed can also have a positive side?

The challenge for this generation is to think of sociality as more than the cyber-intimacy of sharing gossip and photographs and profiles. This is a paradoxical time. We have more information but take less time to think it through in its complexity…

Are you saying that people are missing the broader picture?

People are connecting one-on-one – they have their online social network or their cellphone with 250 people on speed dial – but do they feel part of a community? Do they feel responsibility to a set of shared political commitment? Do they feel a need to take responsibility for issues that would require that they act in concert rather than just connect?...It is a concern when self-expression becomes more important than social action.

And a final quote from ‘Things you wouldn’t tell your mother’ (pp. 50 & 51):

Anything you put on the internet has the potential to be made public and you should treat it as such,” says Jones. “If you put something on MySpace or Facebook, ask yourself whether you would be comfortable shouting it out at a family reuntion. If the answer is no, then don’t put it up.