So for this week's blog post, I decided to re-visit the site that pretty much defined my social life in the early high school years: MySpace. In terms of layout, nothing has changed. The navigation pages look the same... fonts, locations of the buttons, color scheme, etc. The pages of each user have gotten no more sleek (in fact, many of them look incredibly '90s to me), and the quality of the photos, bios, and add-ons are still terrible.
The one thing that has changed, in my opinion, is the quality of the individuals who still regularly use the site.
Every profile I clicked on was a person who clearly enjoyed some activity that the rest of society ostracizes. I got a dragon-obsessed mother of two from Nevada, an 55-year-old rotund bald man looking for "a romantic evening," a stripper selling her wares on her profile... need I continue?
Now, I was not naive enough in high school to believe that these types weren't out there. To me, they were just far less visible. Perhaps my use of MySpace, purely to connect online with people I already knew in real life, served as a filter from these external sources of creepiness.
It's definitely one social media platform I will never use again.
I agree that MySpace had turned into almost a "Facebook reject" space. It is where more shy or eccentric people can go to interact. One positive thing about MySpace is the music or band section. Many bands and artists have used MySpace to grow and get their sound out there. Who knows what the current state of the music industry would be without MySpace and other sites like it.
ReplyDeleteOn a separate note...everyone should see the movie "Catfish". Really was an eye opener, and it fits right in with what we are doing in this class.