The sad shrinking of Myspace into the digital void
Its user pages may be gaudy, but Myspace encouraged chaotic self-expression in a way that's anathema to Facebook
o Luke Lewis
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 January 2011 09.00 GMT
Myspace 'Myspace was a staggeringly popular site that transformed youth culture in an incredibly short space of time.' Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images
There's unintentional symbolism in the fact that Myspace, as part of a last-ditch relaunch, recently changed its logo to an enigmatic ellipsis: My_____. This is a site that is rapidly disappearing into the digital void; half its workforce are to lose their jobs. There's no longer any pretence that it can compete with Facebook as a social network. Myspace seems to be shrinking itself down, ahead of (best outcome) a sale to Yahoo!, or (worst) closure.
No one seems very sympathetic. The general tone among bloggers and on Twitter seems to be, "Ha good riddance, it sucked anyway". I think I know why this might be. Myspace reminds us of our younger selves – our first faltering attempts to define ourselves online – and we're embarrassed by the memory. Our scorn for Myspace is really sublimated shame for the people we used to be.
Many people my age (I'm 30) have a neglected Myspace profile that they haven't touched in years – a time capsule floating there forlornly in the online ether. Compared with the clean lines of Facebook, Myspace circa 2005 was a jamboree of renegade fonts, Flash animation, emo hearts and bodged html. We look back, and we can't believe we were ever that gauche, that gaudy.
I haven't updated mine since 2005. Revisiting it now, I'm horrified. Was I ever really into Fall Out Boy? Why did I pretend to have enjoyed The Bell Jar? Why is there an embedded YouTube clip of J Robert Oppenheimer talking about the atom bomb? Who is this weirdo? Oh wait, it's me. God, what a try-hard.
But we shouldn't blame Myspace for our own immaturity. We need to relinquish the neophilia that renders all recent technological history laughable. The fact is, Myspace was a web phenomenon – a staggeringly popular site that transformed youth culture in an incredibly short space of time.
Founded in 2003, Rupert Murdoch bought it for $580m two years later, in one of the great mis-steps in corporate history. The site's user base peaked at 100 million in 2006, before beginning its slow decline. But if Myspace really is doomed, I'll be enormously sad to see it go.
Quite apart from anything else, Myspace changed music forever – though not in the way you might think. We used to hear endless hype about how acts such as Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen "built an audience via Myspace". That was always a myth – Lily Allen built an audience via a major label marketing spend, while the Monkeys didn't even know how Myspace worked: they just played gigs, gave away CDs, and let fans share the tracks via peer-to-peer networks.
Myspace was never a substitute for the record label system. But it did put bands at our fingertips as never before. Suddenly, you could read about a track, and listen to it instantly. Accessing music became so easy, you could discover new 20 acts in your lunch hour. For better or worse, the rapid churn-rate of new bands in modern blog culture is Myspace's legacy.
The site also had a more profound appeal for users: Myspace encouraged self-expression. As Aditya Chakrabortty recently pointed out on Comment is free, Facebook forces you to define yourself within its own narrow categories: relationship status, favourite books, a quotation – a nerd's idea of a rounded personality. By contrast, Myspace allowed you to daub your character, Pollock-style, all over the web.
The results were frequently ugly, and silly, and out of control. But there was also a vibrancy and lawlessness to those profiles, a sense of young people experimenting, playing, trying out new identities for size. You can't do that on Facebook – the multibillion dollar juggernaut that renders everyone in cool blue-and-white, ensuring its 500 million users all look exactly the same, and always will.
The sad shrinking of Myspace into the digital void | Luke Lewis | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
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I thought this at least mildly interesting. I never had much to do with myspace, but I'd already had pages on the net with much the same sort of flaws. Facebook-knockiong is more or less fair enough, but I think an aspect this article misses is that the very regulated format the facebook employs actually relives you of the responsibility to be all creative 'n stuff. There is no pressure to try and make something wizzy, as there was with myspace; I'm sure a lot of people find that a relief.
The sad shrinking of Myspace into the digital void
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