Funny timing that this week's blog post is about technopanics and MySpace-- just the other day, one of my Facebook friends updated her status to say, "I suggest everyone goes and logs into their Myspace for the first time in years so we can all laugh at our ridiculous past selves." A lot of people commented on it, making remarks like "omgzz I can't believe I did that" or "I can't log in because I forgot my password and email combination." I actually deleted my MySpace page awhile ago, before it became apparently impossible to do so, but I went back to find the old profiles of my friends, as well as of 15 random people.
On my friend's profiles, much of the information is terribly outdated. Their log on dates are from years ago, and their information is still about high school. While outdated however, many of the profiles still list information about employment, relationship status, income level (why was this ever necessary?), current city, AIM screen name, random things about their life that can be determined via reading their comment feed, etc. That's an incredible amount of information about your past to still have sitting dormant on a public profile.
Upon looking at random profiles, I found more private profiles than expected, but I was still able to find public profiles fairly easily. However, these open profiles seemed to also be dormant, with status like, "hey, I'm going back to Facebook now," or comments that are marked as over a year old. I had a lot of trouble finding a public, active profile.
The one active profile that I found was actually shown to be "online." This profile is quite interesting because it is a kid who is self-proclaimed "shy," "lonely" and a screen name that reads, "[*THE OUTCAST*]. Outcast's about section reads:
"im not always an outgoing person. i dont love alot but i do my friends (atleast the few that i have) are really good friends and the talk me out of watever i was gonna do if its stupid."
Outcast represents the idealization that social media brings people together and acts as a tool to foster human relationships. Clearly, Outcast is turning to her profile to supplement her real life relationships. Theoretically, Outcast should be a target for Marwick's predators. However, Outcast only has a few friends (instead of hundreds or thousands), and almost no recent comments. The comments that do exist seem to all be from the same person, who is in her "top 8." It seems that while her profile is active on her end, there is not much engagement from others, and definitely not observable contact from random people (or internet predators).
Additionally, of all the profiles that I randomly looked at, none fit the stereotype of the online predator. All the profiles were women aged 18- 25, with pictures of themselves and either their baby or significant other.
MySpace is stuck-- the profiles that exist are outdated with a backlog of high school immaturity. I don't understand why my friends who recently rediscovered their MySpace profile didn't delete their profile-- is there something nostalgic about it?
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