MySpace: should you really be rushing for it?

I think we in the UK underestimate just how widespread MySpace has become over in the States. Sure, I get the occasional invite from a friend to join up, just like I do for any other similar service like bebo or hi5. However, in America, it seems to have caused quite a revolution, with all kinds of musicians and ordinary people using it to blog and to widen their horizons.

All the while, I have kept out of this whole social community phenomenon. I’ll admit to riding the wave of Web 2.0 and Social Browsing, but when it comes to signing up to some really quite shabby social network where I can discover new people and start a serious relationship, I’m just not interested. I mean, no matter how much you talk to someone, you really have to meet them to get to know them. For all you know, I could really be a 65-year-old pensioner living in Cuba, because blind words on a page or screen can hide our insides.

And that’s roughly why those email invites really get my hackles rising: I don’t want to join your crappy site!

But MySpace is a whole different ball-game. For a start, Rupert Murdoch’s evil twisted News Corporation has a large stake in it. I hate to get really political, but let me assure you that Murdoch is one of the largest donators to the Labour Party, and that all 160 of his newspapers around the world were in favour of the war in Iraq. Yes. Even the ones in Fiji. To top it all off, his Fox News Channel is widely believed to have won George W. Bush the 2000 election, by cunningly telling all of its stereotypically ignorant viewers that he had won. Word got out and, pretty soon, Gore was hanging his head in shame and growing a long beard.

Fair enough, I do watch The Simpsons, which owes its fame to Fox TV, but that’s pretty much the limit. I don’t read The Times; we don’t subscribe to Sky at home; and I don’t bother with MySpace, because all of these things are essentially surviving due to the malevolent interests of a certain man. I mean, you wouldn’t exactly be rushing to buy a McDonald’s if you knew they were indirectly funding the IRA (I heard that this was actually true, but I’ll leave that for another time), would you?

And to add to the dubious politics of MySpace, you gotta agree that its visual appeal is somewhat lacking. In an internet full of examples of great design (Digg, Newsvine, flickr), you can’t get away with murder unless you’ve got some strong perfume to hide the stench. So what if you can upload audio tracks and your favourite photographs onto MySpace? The interface for performing even the most menial of tasks is antiquated and mouldy. I am aware that Derek Punsalan has come up with an ingenious way of making your MySpace page look vaguely acceptable, but that doesn’t solve the problem, that the whole system is the complete opposite of intuitive and creative (for a good example of this, check out the small DeviantArt portfolio-style rival/upstart Carbonmade). Punsalan raises serious questions, asking why, if all this money is being pumped into MySpace, nothing is being spent on visuals.

So I urge you to think twice before using MySpace. You may have known me for only about 6×10^-3 seconds, but I hope that you’ll have a think about just how suspicious all of Murdoch’s enterprises can sound.