Yes, as many of you know, I am (and have been) rather opposed to MySpace. I can waste time like a champ as it is…so why do I need another site to peruse? And plus, all of the music, hideous colors, and sketchy code make for an entirely unappetizing site. I have yet to understand why MySpace is so popular.
Until tonight.
I got an email from a girl I knew in High School…she was a friend of my sister and dated one of my best friends. At any rate, my sister got a MySpace account and through that account, I happened to get an email from this girl. Boom…In an instant, lost and missing friends are no longer lost and missing. It is an interesting concept.
I spent a bit of time on MySpace tonight, clicking on faces and running through the list of folks that graduated from my high school. It was interesting to see the status of all of them….how some have kids, how some are single, how some never change, and how good little private school kids can still turn out in ways that you wouldn’t expect.
It was a fascinating experience. Never at any time in human history has there been so much information about us so public and so available. All of these people willingly place their lives online (I do the same…), unafraid of all of the ramification. Stalkers have to love MySpace. And this make friendships completely different–you can keep up with old friends without ever saying a word to them. You can watch their children go up without having to be involved in their lives. It’s like a television show…except you know the actors and actresses.
And out of all of this information, I wonder why people still clamor about the lack of privacy in society today. If you’re willing to post that information online, then why should we want privacy? It doesn’t seem to make much sense.
I don’t forsee MySpace of social networking going away any time soon, but I do wonder what sort of lives we are building by constructing these artificial and impersonal edifices on a place that only exists as a bunch of ones and zeroes.