Wednesday, August 30, 2006
I was reading a short essay someone had posted on the internet about how MySpace ruined their life.
What?
This did, of course, get me thinking. How does a website ruin your life, exactly? I can see if the website was your bank's, where you logged in to find someone had cleaned out your savings. Or you logged in to find out all your stocks crashed and your retirement was gone. Hell, maybe even your boss found your journal and let you go, that is a very common thing to have happen.
But these were not things sited in the essay. No. It was a "loss of self, forgetting who I really am" that was sited. Honey, if MySpace made you forget who you are, you need to seek professional help, or you didn't know who you were to begin with.
This is a strange age we live in. This is the age of using your phone to text message someone because it is just too hard to call them. The age of buying your groceries online and having them delivered because you don't feel like walking through the grocery store. The age of emailing political candidates to find out their views on issues instead of going to a rally.
We are embracing the age of noncommunication and calling it moving forward. With every day that passes, we are finding new ways to not talk to each other or interact with people at all. People flush at the wonderful thought of working from home on their computer, and forget about the great friendships and memories you make working outside the home. We are an age when even our pets are electronic.
But MySpace makes you forget who you are? It has ruined your life? The fact that any website can have such a profound influence on your very being alone is telling the world that you never really knew who you were anyway. In a small world that seems so big, MySpace is just another fleck on the information superhighway that keeps people in touch, one where you can actually see people, and another tool in making sure you don’t have to have any contact with most of them. And this is ruining your life more than anything else I mentioned above? How many people reading this, honestly, have more friends that they have never actually spoken to due to various websites than friends off the computer? And be honest. Many of the people you call friends, do you know what their voices sound like? Do you know what they look like? Are you 100% sure they are who they say they are?
And with that, would not having a MySpace account make you know who you are? You wouldn't be lost in a sea of faceless typed out words and chat speak? You would have a solid grip on reality?
You could function for a complete month without your computer?
How about a full year?
Does the thought of your internet connection being shut off for the rest of your natural life send a shiver down your spine?
Does the thought make you wonder how you would communicate with friends? How you would tell people the good news and bad news in your life? How you would sustain the priceless, life long friendship with beebop6587 when you live in New Hampshire and he lives in Australia? How you would be able to keep up your collection of every photograph ever taken of Brittany Spears?
And yet one website makes you forget who you are and makes you lose all sense of self.
Uh-huh.
Suck Lead did something BAAAAD at 8/30/2006 11:19:00 PM
