Thomas Friedman loves MySpace

i've been meaning to blog about this for a while now.

i'm really getting sick of myspace and friendster and facebook and myface and bookspace and friendmyfacespacebookster.

in the spirit of full disclosure i will admit fully that i am indeed on myspace. it's quite a usefool tool for keeping track of my good friends -- but mostly just my sister M, who has admitted in the past that her use of these pages have affected her relationships. i'll say more about this in a sec.

but let me ask this: if, as tom friedman practically yells at the top of his sometimes shrill voice, the digital revolution has "flattened" the playing field -- so that practically everyone who has a connection to the internet has an equal shot at all the spoils of development -- why has the spatial and temporal neutrality of the internet spawned such superficial, surface-level, oversexed, unintellectual garbage? ninety-five percent of what goes on in myspace, friendster, and facebook is related to stupid-ass sexual pursuits.

now, i say this not as a prude or a sexual or social conservative -- i'm completely liberal in this respect and don't believe in social mores beyond taking care of one another (you know, universal healthcare) -- but as someone seriously concerned with how freaking dumb most americans are.

yes, yes, i can hear everyone now: you hate america you big jerk. but i don't. if i did i'd move to toronto in a freaking heartbeat. but i want to stay and help bring about a more democratic democracy. and i think, frankly, that all the time people spend avoiding real human interaction (he writes, digitally) and searching for quick, easy, and stultifying entertainment (sexually and otherwise) is freaking destroying us. this is why foxnews rules here.

using myspace as a way to keep track of loved ones is not only understandable but also a pretty shrewd use of hypertext. while friedman is right about the leveling of the playing field, neither he nor anyone else has accurately documented the drawbacks to the decentered and disconnected subjectivity encouraged by digital technology.

it seems to me that like anything else, any new progressive technological advancement, there is the near certainty that at some point what is termed "the dialectic of enlightenment" presents itself. that is, new technologies that usher in a more enlightened way of life also, at the very same time, are used by many to thwart, warp, and water down those positive changes. look, if you will, at what conservatives did to the 1960's focus on those crazy hippy ideals of peace, rejection of militarization and sexual prudishness, and equal rights for minorities.

i am in no way advocating for censoring the internet. not a chance. you have to take the bad with the good. same with all the arts -- we may think high art is better than low art, but you can't get rid of low art (or porn, conveniently) without curtailing creativity. and porn. no curtailing porn.

what we have to do, though, is THINK. use our minds. ask ourselves what the drawbacks to mediated existence are.

one way to tell what myspace is really all about is to ask who is using it for less than legal or appropriate means. sexual predators are taking advantage of the very superficiality and idiocy that electronic mediation allows. you may think surfing users' pages of myspace to find "hotties" is somehow not as bad, but it's really the same kind of activity.

the ends are quite different but the means are the same.