You Have Three Million Friends

BY Lucy Morieson

I have 92 friends. 92. And counting.

But 92 friends aren’t enough. Not by MySpace standards. According to the rules that govern the virtual social realm constituted by this monster of a website, bigger is always better.

MySpace should need little introduction – yet it’s always escaping my grasp when I try to explain it to the uninitiated. Is it an online dating service? A networking tool for busy young professionals? A playground for the young and time-rich? A publicity tool for tech-savvy bands?

MySpace is all of the above, and for me, it became a toy, a trap, a time-wasting device and a genuine social form, when I dived into its inner depths, stopped rolling my eyes, and decided to give it a try for the sake of a potential story.

Now, I count among my ‘friends’ a professional New York party girl, a woman from Lexington, Kentucky, who is trying to make it big in R&B, but with whom I’ve never had any sort of exchange (typed or otherwise), some of my ‘real’ world friends who have also braved the world of MySpace, people I’ve met on the dance floor and people I’ll never stand a chance of meeting.

Some of these people are major recording artists with upwards of 20,000 friends – or ‘friends’. For them, MySpace is an effective way to communicate directly to fans, without the mediation of the media. Bands – and anyone, for that matter – can send out bulletins to all their friends, hitting thousands of people with messages about gigs, new releases and the like.

And then there’s the contentious – or so I’ve learnt – “Top 8 factor”. On your personal MySpace site, you can display a photo of yourself (preferably at your most sexy, coy, or drunk), have your favourite song start playing as soon as someone visits, list your interests, and rate your eight favourite friends. The Top 8 spot is so coveted because it means greater exposure for the lucky friend. Imagine: if you aren’t on anyone’s Top 8, how will anyone who doesn’t already know you actually find you? You could be just one of thousands, lost in a sea of friends.

I’d been told of the politics surrounding the assignation of Top 8 perches, and never believed it – till I saw it in action: friends bumped off the top spot at the request of another ‘friend’, mass messages begging for a Top 8 place, and insidious, long-fought campaigns of attrition for the prized position.

Meanwhile, the MySpace network is constantly propelling itself towards the full potentialities of its technology. To marketers, this growing beast of a virtual social network represents an audience (nearly 80 million registered users, and 280,000 joining daily), ready and waiting to be seduced in the most sophisticated of ways. Last year, the site was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for $US580 million, and already attracts the like of Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Toyota, hungry to snare the difficult-to-reach younger market.

But the latest move, by Burger King, takes the idea of online advertising a step further – the company has teamed up with the television series 24, sponsoring a MySpace site where users will be able to download free episodes of the popular series to watch at their leisure. The site will also accommodate a social network where fans can discuss the drama – as well as purchase further episodes for $US1.99.

With such potential for advertising and multimedia crossover, the MySpace purchase is a boon for the Murdoch media conglomerate, and we can expect to see them capitalising further on the medium’s potential. Already, the Murdoch-owned Fox Studios has exploited the MySpace audience, establishing a site for the upcoming instalment in the X-Men movie series, where users can not only view the full-length movie trailer, but also then choose to include the trailer on their own site, download X-Men skins, add X-Men as a friend and gain the option of turning your Top 8 into a whopping Top 16, and join an online discussion forum on the film.

And so, on it goes: a living, growing, heaving, virtual tangle of humanity, hurtling ever forward, ever bigger. The goddess of MySpace, the American success story of the website, Tila Tequila, has now clocked up one million friends (not like a million friends, but actually, a million friends). American comic Demetri Martin gave birth to a delicious case of irony after the performance of a song about MySpace on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (“I got 9,000 friends yeah on MySpace and I cannot keep up with all these friends, oh not face to face,” he sang) – only served to see his friend requests blow out to 39,000 over the course of a few months.

And me? I have 92 friends on MySpace and I can’t keep up with them – oh not face to face! I see some of these friends anyway as it is. But others… I talk to them on MySpace, and then I see them when I’m out, and it’s as if my social life has evolved into Jean Baudrillard’s complete simulacrum. And I think to myself, “I have 92 friends on MySpace, and when I talk to them in person, I don’t know quite know what to say, without a keyboard and a screen.” Bigger might be better in the MySpace universe. But give me one person I know, a few spoken words, and a cup of tea any day.

Note: Despite the sentiments expressed above, the author is suffering from a severe MySpace addiction that doesn’t look like abating any time soon. You can “friend” her at www.myspace.com/l_u_see_why