Vacant lot.
Force, or farce?
Having yesterday gently mauled Twitter as 'messaging for the mindless? 'in 'Twits, tweets and twerps.', it'd not be fair to allow other social networking sites to pass-by unscathed.
So here's a constructive poke at MySpace. (With far better things to do, I don't intend to spend all week on this, so FaceBook will likely escape—besides, it's doing a good-enough self-destruct job without my help.)
MySpace… having written previously on this in 'Follow-shipping.' I don't intend to add much more to my previously-stated:
'MySpace can be a great place to make valuable new contacts.'
I strongly agree with 'can be'. Too often, it isn't. All things considered, 'whore's palace and fool's paradise…' it's not a medium for sensible professional exposure—which may be why Network Marketers seem to have embraced it, whilst marketing cognoscenti [persons who have superior knowledge and understanding of a particular field] haven't and thus stay well clear.
Sure, you can get exposure and business—sometimes lots of—but it's too gauche for those with any reasonable amount of taste… more akin to fly-posting and slapping a handbill on someone's windshield than a well-conceived, produced & delivered promotion in appropriate media.
So yeah… no doubt, used effectively it can be an effective business-building tool. And also 'no doubt', most of the time it isn't being used that way.
My personal hardline view is that the relationships developed through MySpace are schlocky inauthentic associations which often don't last or really deliver the expected benefits. There are far better ways to build a good Network Marketing business.
Of course, many people take a differing view—usually the type of person who develops a schlocky inauthentic and exploitative relationship by preying on the less-able with a three-feet-long squeeze page promising something like 'the never-before-revealed secret to eternal youth, at special today-only pricing complete with a gazillion bucks of worthless e-crap special reports & bonuses'.
Whether you agree or disagree with me isn't the point here. Just consider this… what kind of relationship can you have (and would you even want one) with someone who refers to themselves publicly as 'Sugarboopooh' or 'HomeBizSpace'?
A good perspective setter (and cheap laugh) in this clip from Chris at Wasted Network…
My Space—mindless fun or cry for help?
Now, My Space, and, indeed, most of these new blog-for-the-masses websites are all well and good on the surface, but is no one else slightly worried about a sudden new message that is emerging that sounds rather like:
'Hi, I have 2000 friends… and I've met none of them.'
Years ago we'd have thrown them in the asylum and watched them play with their own faeces.
See, I agree that people with My Space websites have an important message. The trouble is, that message always seems to be 'Please be my friend, total stranger. I'm so desperate, please want to read about my pets and be learned of the shit music I [listen] to'.
I really think we need to start coming up with some alternatives to keep these people amused. We need to get the message across that real life proper human interaction is the way to achieve enlightenment and social acceptance, not online arguments with someone called 'CyberBoyKewlz', who is most likely a 67-year-old convicted underwear thief or your own father.
Anyone got a truckload of Ritalin?
Final word (for today, at least) goes to 'thinking-person's-blogger' Nick Carr who, in 'MySpace's vacancy' has this to say:
When I look around MySpace, what I see is a dreary sameness, a vast assembly of interchangeable parts. Everything feels secondhand: the pimps-and-hos poses before the cameraphone, the ham-fisted, cliche-choked blog-prose.
It's sad to see so much effort put into self-expression with so little to express. Humanity in the raw? No, this is humanity boiled to blandness in the tin pot of personalization.
Comparing MySpace to Elvis's gyrating hips back in the fifties, MySpace isn't anything like Elvis. It's more like Jim Morrison limply exposing himself on stage in Miami in 1969: an enervated pantomime, force turned to farce.
Now, let's crosshair another soft target…
Filed by g on June 18 2008
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