Say It To MyFace

BY Jasmine McGowan

With the creation of the hundred-millionth MySpace account in August of last year, can the immense popularity of this online forum be acceptably put down to good advertising? Or does it point to something more significant? Providing the user with the ability literally to design their own identity, the MySpace phenomenon is a particularly self-indulgent enterprise. And it seems to have tapped into the collective imagination at a time when Western civilisation is suffering a bad case of narcissism attributable to an inordinate overinvestment in youth and beauty. Good advertising? I don’t think so…

Anyone who has utilised the vast expanse of communication possibilities offered by the internet will be familiar with the fact that online discourse, by default, offers immunity from contemporary social mores under the blanket of anonymity. The phenomenon of MySpace, on the other hand, exists for the sole purpose of making oneself known. The dissonance between the two is glaringly obvious. In a chatroom one has the opportunity to create an ideal identity completely based on fiction and free from outside judgement; an online profile on MySpace is, however – by its very nature – directly attributable to the user who created it.

What is curious about MySpace is that, despite this obvious difference, the same strategies of identity idealisation are being utilised. The MySpace forum is a virtual extension of real life subcultures. It functions in almost cartographic manner – the user can surf from one profile to another, literally mapping out the interconnectedness of one subcultural enclave to another. These multiple and various online communities, in matrix fashion, serve to mirror the users’ deluded fantasy of subcultural unity and clique chic that is the prerequisite of the ‘indie’ enclave.

You don’t need a psychology degree to figure out that the MySpace phenomenon is a hyper-exaggerated example of the natural human impulse to fictionalise our circumstances and aspects of our identity in order to attain the assurance and unity that our ego so desperately demands of us, but how far is too far? Apart from basic identity facts, a MySpace profile boasts the user’s music preferences, favourite movies, interests, influences and people they would like to meet, providing said user with a fertile bed within which to lay the seeds of hyperbole. Perusing the online profiles, I am reminded of the silly little questionnaires my friends and I used to write to each other in our youth. These questionnaires, handed surreptitiously from student to student during class, covered the spectrum of “what’s your favourite colour, TV programme, actor?” to, “Which boy would you most like to kiss?” It was during this nostalgic digression that I realised the inherent infantilism in the MySpace continuum.

It is, of course, only now in adulthood that I can retrospectively appreciate those questionnaires for what they were – youthful attempts to construct and project an identity one hadn’t quite fully formed. While it may have been perfectly acceptable as a child to establish friendship groups based on arbitrary commonalities such as favourite songs, I’m not sure that as an adult it’s as convincing. Outside of the MySpace forum, in the realm of actual face-to-face interaction, frivolous exchanges such as these would be considered relatively socially inept. For example, would you follow up an introduction by telling somebody how many friends you had? Unlikely. However in the MySpace forum your number of friends is part of your quotidian identity details, and it is very much a popularity competition.

The path to popularity (as we all remember from high school) is to make yourself attractive to others through the construction of an ideal identity. This is the sole function of the profile, whereby site design and personal preferences are carefully selected and agonised over for maximum contemporary appeal. It is almost as if users believe that the right background song choice and musical interests list will somehow confer cultural capital on to them by way of association. In this fashion MySpace abounds with people trying to out-quirk each other: “Check it out – my favourite video clip, Tina Turner, ‘Private Dancer’” or even better, “Everybody Dance Now” by C&C Music Factory.

These blatant attempts at kookiness are of course completely facile; however in the matrix of MySpace, they are thoroughly validated by the sycophantic postings of other users. It’s the unspoken rule of MySpace: “We all know how shallow, self-indulgent and narcissistic this is but I won’t say anything if you don’t”. If ever questioned about the absurdity of the MySpace forum, a user will most likely agree that it is inherently superficial. But these people need to be told – flippant self-reflexivity is not an alibi!

MySpace is a testament to our increasingly narcissistic and soulless society; its deliberate construction of identity amounts to nothing more than psychological plastic surgery. In the words of my favourite cultural agitator Bruce LaBruce, the MySpace phenomenon can be characterised as nothing more than “soul[s] lost in [an] abyss of artistic self-reference [and] material overkill”. The supposed cultural capital garnered through the infantile communications on MySpace is as meretricious and vacuous as the discourse of the bourgeois affected mainstream that many of these ‘indie kids’ are attempting, not just to disavow, but to counter. In this sense, the continued popularity of the MySpace forum will become a symptom of increasingly impotent social skills. Those individuals whose sense of identity must be shored up by virtual popularity will struggle with ‘traditional’ interaction and will continually retreat into the deluded, mutually masturbatory realm known as MySpace.