Thursday, December 18, 2008

Kind of Interesting Maybe?

When researching MySpace, I found this complete interview of Rupert Murdoch with Charlie Rose from August '07. It didn't seem to fit anywhere quite right in my look at MySpace, but I found it pretty fascinating nonetheless.

Check it out:

Identity, Globalization, and MySpace

It confounds the mind to think that Myspace has only been around for about four years and see that the site’s own Tom Anderson currently has 252,710,328 ‘friends.’ Obviously, something of significance has occurred, but what implications does the mass internet migration of several hundreds of millions of people really have? In presenting an altogether alternate version of reality for millions of users, MySpace creates a new paradigm of social interaction, one that has the potential to profoundly affect not only an individual user’s sense of self but also the transaction of ideas on a global scale.

“The Public Person”

MySpace is a vehicle for individuals to interact with the world. This is made possible only with the internet, since such an infrastructure was unavailable before it. At first, only nations had the ability to interact on the world platform, then companies were able to with the advent of industrialization. The change the internet has brought has also created a new paradigm. The world created by MySpace is completely and utterly centered on the individual. This egocentric shift puts key importance on the self while diminishing the value of the group. A person-centered world has many effects both subtle and far-reaching.

One of the most evident changes MySpace brought was the creation of the mass public individual. Before the internet, the only individuals with access to the public sphere were usually celebrities of sorts, be they writers or television personalities or musicians. MySpace made it so anyone could have their presence known on a relatively global scale. To the many users of Myspace, this is assumed to be a good thing. The site helps you keep track of your network of friends and essentially puts some semblance of a human face on the oft impersonal realm of the internet. There have been a few cases, though, when MySpace has enabled the internet to be a little too personal. The most extreme accounts concerning child predators and MySpace party crashers showcase the dangers possible when what is usually private enters the public sphere. In the grand scheme of MySpace, though, these incidents are few and far between representing the dark fringe of its use.

More so than being a place for the transfer of personal or “hard” information, MySpace is a virtual space out of which users craft an identity. This is most closely associated with the postmodernist conception of the self as one having “shifting, fragmented and multiple identities” (Barker 220). MySpace leads its users to create an identity for themselves that is not necessarily grounded in reality. This fact makes it a prime space for two particular types of usage: forming an idealized self or experimenting with wholly new conceptions of your identity . These usages bring up many of the fears individuals have in typical social interactions but these fears are played out all the time and in the private space. Media pressures to live up to a certain standard of beauty are pushed out across personal profiles. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that the common joke about “MySpace angles” has occurred, as many attempt to live up to an imaginary ideal of beauty. There have even been occurrences of cyberbullying over MySpace, the most public event involving the suicide of 13-year-old Megan Meier, after being harassed by a fictional boy she met on MySpace created by a classmate’s mother. An interesting tribute to the strength of these identities has been the advent of MyDeathSpace, a site devoted to archiving obituaries of MySpace’s users. Some will even go as far as creating a memorial MySpace area where friends and family can grieve online.

“Friends: Not so Human Interaction”
Stemming from the creation of new and fictional identities, the interaction in MySpace can also be given a substitutive nature. It seems, especially in how bands and comedians advertised themselves over the site (some not even being real artists), that ‘friends’ are more collected than made. Not a complete danger, but this can lead to ‘packrat’ like tendencies in finding and making friends. When friendships become collections, this can lead to the “devaluing of real friendships and the reduction of face-to-face interaction” (psyorg.com news via UCLA). The Law of Diminishing Returns applies here, the more friends you seem to add to your collection, the less each additional one adds value. And when someone has a multitude of friends, it becomes harder and harder to keep up a semblance of personal contact. In fact, MySpace’s use seems to lend itself to a streamlining of interaction that can sometimes become a replacement for face-to-face contact. Making life more efficient, MySpace makes it possible for one to post messages or bulletins to their entire friend base, making it unnecessary to contact friends individually. Taken to an extreme, this can lead to a fragmenting of relationships, leaving users to neglect building strong genuine relationships with others. This fact has been one of the fears of a technology and internet driven world, that people can have whole relationships separated from each other, lending to a deeper existential issue similar to the Marxist laborer-end product dilemma. The ambiguity these relationships create further adds to an individual’s fracturing identity.

Even though identities are created on MySpace, there is still afforded a certain degree of anonymity to members as it is not generally considered a wholly factual medium of interaction. It is this potential for anonymity that allows for situations like Megan Meier’s to happen. People like Clay Shirky, a journalist and professor at NYU, recognize the danger of anonymity on a public space like MySpace. What they see is popularly referred to as “John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory” which essentially states that normal people given complete anonymity and an audience are prone to allow their most negative characteristics to surface.

Baudrillard’s writing on the consumption of objects plays a huge role here. MySpace users objectify themselves as people into the signs represented by their MySpace profiles. Others are able to draw conclusions about the individuals on MySpace based solely on the sign they display on the internet. In this way, we create a complete abstraction from a fragment of a person. The fragment or sign created becomes an object of consumption, just as the masses consume the ideas and half-knowledge we receive about celebrities. And just like celebrities, the sign is believed to be the true representation of a person when such a thing is impossible. Through this interaction, people continually consume the idea of interaction with a real person never actually making contact with that person.

“A Cause for Capitalism: Advertising on MySpace”

An unavoidable caveat of MySpace usage comes from its reliance on advertising revenue. Though it remains to be free for any and all users, it is important to recognize that it has a bottom line like any business. This is where MySpace begins to have implications much broader than an individual and his/her group of friends.
MySpace has become an important advertising venue for several parties. One the one hand, the site has been of great value to corporations, especially those hoping to target the younger 18-49 demographic that would be more likely to use its services. This demographic, in particular men in this age group, are notoriously difficult for advertisers to reach.

For its members, MySpace offers a vaguely similar service. Opposed to paying to have an ad service, users actually use their own profiles and messaging to advertise. The most popular users of this advertising ability come from musicians who are able to host some of their material on their personal profile for any to see. The site has been utilized for users’ movies, comedy shows, and even to promote their humanitarian efforts. It is in this way that the entire site is actually a large advertising platform. Both companies and individuals use it to promote and advertise their interests, whatever they may be.

“Origins”

To understand further implications of Myspace, it is important to understand MySpace’s history. An article written by Trent Lapinski chronicles the history and effect MySpace has had on the digital world. MySpace launched in the summer of 2003 as a better version of another social networking site, Friendster, hoping to take its strongest attributes and gain a larger audience. This was the intention of eUniverse (later Intermix Media), a marketing company responsible many forms of internet spam before such a thing was illegal. Using their massive information base consisting of upwards to 50 million email addresses, MySpace became an instant hit garnering users fast and financed by advertising revenue.

In 2005, the now massively successful site was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp for $580 million. Three years later, reports TechCrunch, MySpace is valued between $3 billion and $20 billion. When MySpace is viewed in the context of being a business segment of one of the world’s largest media companies, the issues affecting the world on a global scale come into play.

“Globalization and the Internet”

MySpace is not limited to solely the American consumer base, there are permutations of MySpace available in several nations across the globe. Implicit here is that MySpace, namely News Corp, has a potential influence on a mass of individuals the world over through its ubiquity as an online social network. Express or implied, this marks MySpace as both an influence of a world capitalist economy as well as a global information system.

“Potential for Manipulation”

As MySpace presents a similar way to interact with people across the globe, aided by the advertisements they host on their pages, it is easy to perceive a global homogenization of culture through its use. Barker explains that “the cultural homogenization thesis proposes that the globalization of consumer capitalism involves a loss of cultural diversity.” Though this is usually viewed in nationalistic terms and News Corp is considered an American company, this can really be seen as a homogenization created by News Corp itself. An interesting dichotomy forms from this, as fractured and ever-changing individuals are actually becoming more alike through the very form of the website. Of course, there are variations between the several MySpaces all over the world, but the essential form remains the same.

With the standardization of form and a singularity of leadership coming from News Corp, it is very easy for hegemony to occur. Inevitably, when one source has the power to shape the information the public reaches, though it may not be consciously, the inherent attitudes and beliefs of the gatekeepers will be given. At the least this comes in the form of further fracturing identities and the pushing for a vague acceptance of a capitalist economic model. This flow of cultural ideologies has been slowed in more strict countries, such as China which blocks certain subject matter from being discussed, usually centering on current political issues though. Continuance of these habits contribute to cultural imperialism through the digital domain. Barker describes cultural imperialism as "the domination of one culture by another and is widely associated with the leading role played in the global economy by multinational corporation of American origin" (Barker 370). It is in this sense that MySpace has undoubtedly had an affect, as English remains the second-most spoken language in the world and online. Schiller notes that "with the spread of English comes the ready adoption of Anglo-American ideas...and so the free flow of ideas in practice means the ascendance of US cultural products" (Barker 371).

More alarming is the idea of overt agenda setting. Though no exact examples have come up involving MySpace, there has been some cause for concern. At the World Economic Forum, Rupert Murdoch as much as said he has tried to push an agenda when it came to the Iraq War, supporting it though noting that public opinion has not kept that support.

So, is having 252,710,328 ‘friends’ ultimately a positive force in our world? While it may seem very innocuous to Americans in particular, there are still some very real concerns. Even without some kind of agenda at work, MySpace has successfully built a massive subscriber based on their own changing and idealized identities. These identities are unified and held together by MySpace for the purpose of perpetuating the capitalist economic machine through advertising. If anyone so desired, News Corp could use MySpace as a powerful tool for cultural imperialism. In a world where the current financial crisis begins in America and has the ability to send shock waves of disaster to economies worldwide, many wonder if these massive multinational financial firms are "too big to fail." The fear is that one company could wield so much power in the economies of the world that their collapse would cause complete devastation. Maybe the same can be thought of companies that hold a fragment of the identities comprising individuals across the entire earth. Not that the collapse of MySpace could cause cultural collapse per se, but perhaps it is a dangerous thing to leave so many of those identities under the watch of a single company. While it is up to the public to decide if this is truly any kind of threat, the potential for it gives at least some reason for pause.


Works Cited
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