i don’t get MySpace
lotta things in this life that i see no reason are popular, but MySpace is one of the more perplexing. for years i’ve been trying to figure out what people like about the place, and i’m further away now than before. IMO, it’s one of the ugliest, klunkiest, least usable sites around. it repels me like a boxing glove coming out of the screen. somebody says, “check my MySpace!” okay. i go there and it looks like a litterbox of skrawnky fonts/graphics and shit colors over an incompatible background. a girl on skype last month unlocked her MySpace page so i could see her picture gallery. that was fine and usable enough, but hardly typical of the normal garish trash i see there.
what do people do at myspace? seems to me it’s essentially a single blog entry that people comment on in drive-by screams of inside/cutesy nothingness. from what i’ve seen, most of the messages are mutual blowjobbing over “adds”. “will you be my friend?” WTF. the MySpace blogs are even worse than LiveJournal (gulp).
if anybody drops by and has examples of MySpace pages that don’t have that butt ugly MySpace look/feel and mindless jibber jab, please link in comments, preferably using an anchor tag:
<a href=”http://myspace.com/pureshit”>pureshit</a>
if they all have that MySpace taint, it’s just one more thing i don’t and probably can’t understand, just like the rest of these noise “socializing” sites. guess i’m just too old. can’t even stand IMs anymore, something i haven’t done in years. got burned out on skypecasts within a few weeks.
October 14th, 2007 at 11:48
I don’t get MySpace or social networking sites in general either. Another one that didn’t make sense to me was Facebook.
Facebook was, for a time, sort of like a “college people only” myspace, in that membership and access to the site’s social networks were based upon having a valid college e-mail address. Now, it’s open to everyone. Either way, the site doesn’t make much sense to me, beyond its use as a photo gallery or calendar/party planning tool. Idiotic features such as the “wall” and the internal site messaging system seem like pointless ways to avoid real contact with real people. Among the various retarded messages I’ve seen posted on peoples walls over the years, a 10-message long exchange between two roommates which occured within a space of about 15 mins while they were both home, sharing the same room, had to be one of the more moronic.
I deleted my facebook several months ago after asking myself “Why do I need this and what do I get out of it that’s meangingful?” and the only answer I could come up with is “I don’t, and nothing.”
As for myspace, I never had one, but I agree it’s got the klunkiest interface ever, and the way most users lay their profiles out… oh christ. Looks like a suicide aftermath beat with an ugly stick.
In highschool I was a mentor senior year for a number of freshman who were deemed “at risk” by the school administration. I had one of the “mentees,” a young 14 year old girl, over at my house one day and watched her using the computer. She of course had to check her myspace several times, and I was amazed at how interested she was with random people sending her messages, calling her hot or asking to be her friend or whatever.
“What’s the point?” I asked. “Why do you care if random strangers are your friends or not?”
“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t I let them be my friend?” she responded.
I don’t know if it was an ego thing or what, but this girl seemed to appreciate the site because it made her feel like she was well-liked and popular. This girl, however, came from an abusive household where the mom was on welfare and drugs, and this girl had major self-esteem issues and drug problems herself, so I wonder if that can explain the lure of “networking” sites for other people whose lives are less fucked up or not.
Point is, I sat and watched her read and respond to her message board posts on her profile for about 20 minutes, she absolutely loved it. And I still don’t get it.
I’ve never understood socializing with strangers (one reason that I don’t get why young people like going to bars, not to meet new people but to hang out with their existing friends in a circle), and I’ve never understood the need to be popular on a site like Facebook or Myspace.
October 14th, 2007 at 14:06
years ago when i was an AOL chat slut (eventually meeting these girls in person accounted for 100% of my sex life), a woman i’d been messing around with online for months came to visit. she claimed to be loopy “in love” with me, and genuinely seemed to be so… when you could get her off the computer.
she was insane for IMs. one of the stupidest, most sex-pathetic things i ever did was not pick up her bag and take her back to the train station the first time i saw her working the computer like a lab crack-rat spaz. her self-esteem was almost unmeasurable.
not that i’ve excess self-esteem, but i got that chat/IM shit out of my system after the tech bit wore off, since anybody with a brain soon figures out that chat rooms, and online social places in general, aren’t far removed from going into a grocery store and trying to converse with whoever walks by — like you give a fuck. worse than a waste of time.
one of the things that creeped me out about skypecasts is how many people you’d talk with would want your contact information. at first i didn’t give a fuck, then i found that a few of these types would hit you up for energy every goddamned time you logged on, like there wasn’t something nice in having an involved conversation one night and then never talking to each other again; needed to be permanent and personal. that’s fine in rare cases, but most of these people would never step back and wait for you to contact them (which normally wouldn’t happen).
one of these was a nice looking 23-year-old with a perfect rack who liked to vidcam me, rubbing her tits, and twiddle herself while i talked-ah the sexy talk. compulsive and multi-orgasmic. gets to the point where you’re saying, “if i have to listen to this girl orgasm in my ear one more time i’m gonna find a truck to run me over.” maybe it’s an age thing; guess that stuff was fun when i first discovered the telephone. eventually blocked her so she wouldn’t start up any more conversations that were always her waiting for phone sex. nothing to talk about otherwise.
of course, if she’d lived closer than 5 hours away, i’d still be talking to her like the pathetic shit i am. she’d probably be sitting next to me right now, playing with herself and hounding me to have sex for the 5th time that day. most women i’ve met in meatspace via the internet are compulsive masturbators and sex junkies. those are the kind you want never to know where you live or any permanent contact info.