Whha---
Is Sarah McLachlan releasing a new album? I thought she was done, wanted to raise her kid and all. It will be an album of Christmas carols, so like for the first time in all of history we'll be able to hear every track on a newly released album on the radio within its release month. Cool though, though I am not an active seeker of Christmas music.
Let's tackle Halloween first! I WANNA MAKE A JACKOLANTERN!!!!!!
The title is from a tee shirt which I find amusing. ※
I think my big thing against myspace is it is completely engineered around the teenaged mind. All the commercial ads cluttered among the margins, gimmie a break. There is such a large emphasis on user photos, and advertising the photo and preferences to the point where it seems more and more like some online dating hotspot than a blogging community. Half the pictures of the girls on my space are ones where they try to look at the camera as with as sexy a look as they can come up.
It completely caiters to the teenage mind, where what mostly matters is the bands you like, the people you hang with, favorite color, pet peeves etc is splattered all over your front user page. Such things are common in profiles, but then again profiles will cover a little more than that, or a little less, the difference is in the coverage of the interests.
Interests are key elements to illustrating a profile, but when pictures of those interests such as sports team emblems, banners for television shows and movies, not album work but portraits of favorite bands COMPLETELY take over the page with JPEG space with little text at all? It's overcrowded with all these glorified media influences that say little about who the person is (except for music) and it all quickly becomes cliche. It completely enshrines these media influences, and favorites and piss offs making everything so overblown. Sheesh. Not to mention paying homage to the teen mindset of clan associations, who I am hanging round with these days (cause company *hem* groups, say(s) so much about a person, whatever) a pretty sizeable corner to keep all your friends on your list in.
Elements of a my space profile
1- Personal Photo. This is big stuff. Smile big, you never know who is checking you out.
2- third party Interests and commercial Interests consuming your page. these things rock, "johnny dep is the best ever and I love abercrombie and fitch"
3- Extensive photos and images to represent Interests (instead of words God forbid we ever use them to explain why we are drawn to what we are drawn to)
4- Ads for teen appealing media, and merchandise - tv Shows, music, ex" Jackass epidsodes, name brands etc.
5- League of Friends- Always always always reserve a little shrine to say hey these peeps are kewl and they think I'm kewl so yeah.
Leave the rest of the page for your turn ons.
I will agree that this is a reliable channel for communication purposes. While I have met some who have used it purely for open discussion, it seems more and more like a chaotic mosh pit where all the little teenie bopper warlords have a good yak all about themselves (but more about the thinks they like). ( I HATE YOU I HATE THE BANDS YOU LIKE!!! starts to make sense in this light, no?) I could keep in touch with many a friend via my space if I chose to. I just don't like what myspace attempts to target with its features, and what it is commonly used for. And for all those people hounding me to join it's not all that jazzed up in my eyes.
No no no, I shalt not join.
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4 comments:
Hey, I only used half of the page for my shrine of friends and turn ons, and you'd be foolish to think that music is the only outlet of your personality.
Everything that you do, that interests you, that you speak about, all reveal your personality.
Even you, with your lack of MySpace-ification and the like, that is your personality.
The presence or absense of any components reveal you.
Even if, by listing Abercombie and Finch you only reveal that you are fake, and a tool of society, then so be it.
As for the rest of it, let's think about it in the terms of the internet in general. It's not all that different. Why shouldn't we boycott and ban all of the internet for distaste and dislike of places like Adult Friend Finder, True, or even Craig's List?
Even the illustrious Google is not above listing pr0n sites in its searches.
I'm not here to pressure you one way or another, just to have you understand more dynamics than just one that you choose. Would you be better off having a MySpace? No. Will you have some insight that you wouldn't normally have? Absolutely. I did. You will find things that you wouldn't find normally otherwise. But the same could be said about visiting Tibet. Unfortunately we can't be in all places at once to learn.
Oh...
And...
Hey good lookin', how you doin'?
I hate condemning anything as a whole.
Hey, but Myspace really really grates on my nerves at times.
Yes, every interest one has says something about them. Hell, even the things you bring to pass time in meetings says things about you.
The biggest problem was not that interests were listed. It was the way they were listed, overblown, and drawn out to the point where the brand name companies and movie productions didn't have to make websites anymore because its slapped on a huge scale all over my space profiles.
Would I get along with every Ani Difranco fan, anthropology major, freethinker, music lover, old school gamer, or philosophy minded indivual? No. So why are interests so magnified on my space, interests do not tell all. Its not even about interests anymore, it's about the VENDORS of the interests. Interests are not filler paper to prance all over profiles because teens no longer know what to say about themselves either then I like hangin out.
If there is one thing our generation is losing it is the ability to express oneself. Yes, it will always be the young adult's goal to say why he or she is different, but how well the average young adult is able to say it is becoming depressing and alarming.
Holy god. We live in a country where we need to think actively for our government to survive. This is bad.
An old teacher of mine informed the class that the average highschool graduate had lost 400 words ( I can't remember the exact number but it was big and scary) from their vocabularies as opposed to twenty years ago.
That is alarming.
The presence or absense of components reveal you, yes, but should not be the #1 way to express your personality. However, young adults these days believe that is the best way; to hang up all sorts of banners, and make their whole page .jpegs, instead of written words. Myspace had done much to observe and compensate that.
I never damn anything as a whole. Plus I don't think bans alone are affective enough it needs to go deeper than that, and inform the public instead of putting up a stop sign. Like I said it is a useful communication tool due to its high volume of users. I just don't agree with the myspace genre of blogging and the unnessary hype.
And holy crap, I need to stop posting early in the morning I start seeing how many typos and slaughtered sentences I make when I come back to comment.
and...
oh...
you know, casual day. same old thing, different battalion. ;)
Different battalion?
Anyways.
A further rebuttle to your counter-rebuttle:
Did you know that 98% of all statistics are made up on the spot? Of course you did, I stole it from someone who made it up.
That being said, losing 400 words means nothing to me when you think of the context. How about losing words like jiffy and thing-a-ma-jig and majuscule? (BTW majuscule is defined as:
majuscule • \MAJ-uh-skyool\ Audio icon • noun
: a large letter (as a capital)
as per http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/mwwod.pl)
But who uses these words other than those that are ecclectic (yes) and fond of the old-fashioned true english of ol'?
The point being that we lose, permanently, more sub-species of life per day then we will ever lose words like majuscule, and I personally don't find any use for having that word anyways, if the English language had not been created by whim, perhaps the dictionary would be a quicker read and we wouldn't have such a tough time with the language as even native speakers!
*Deep Breath*
That being said, I also find it interesting that you think that the point of listing your interests is how most people will wholesale categorize their relationships with one another.
In that case, Ms. 'Fan of Anime' we shan't ever get along, but furthermore, the idea is to pique your interest to get you to find out more.
If I write something absurd and blatantly a forgery, I will get every bit the reaction as if I had interests worth sharing.
The point is, while we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, we do. With that in mind, we try to put our interests forward and attract those of 'like mind' or 'like interests' to talk to us, because if I'm not into the Anime scene, why would I want to talk to you at length about it?
We all realize that your interests being stapled to your forehead isn't going to tell you who is who, but we do realize that it will be an ice-breaker to make new relationships without actively seeking it. Many people have gotten to know more about me by having but a taste in passing.
Only the shallow or uninformed or inexperienced will write you off without ever trying to get to know more about you after reading your profile. That or the lazy, like me.
If you are shallow, it really doesn't take anything more than a hot exterior and a pulse to attract you, that being said there are sub groups of society that can live without one, the other, or both.
For those of us that are interested or at least pretend to be, we find sustenance and worth wherever it be, in the darkness gleaming or out in the open sun.
I don't know if you understand the concept of AGDs (Attention-Getting-Devices)but that is all your profile is, and even more importantly, a picture is. Even with nothing but A_Shadow to represent myself, you do get a sense of my personality, or at least a piece of it from which to judge.
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