Webupon

As Myspace has continued to increase hits per day and revenue, I’ve come to ask myself one question…  WTF?  Myspace has overtaken the almighty Google Empire by more than double the visits per day, and thereby placing a firm but loving stranglehold on the family jewels of the American youth.   How has this happened?  I have one possible scenario that could have lead to the current dominance by The Almighty Tom.

Please, correct me if I am wrong, but would it be too much to assume that teenagers living in our generation are suckers for instant gratification?  Be it communication, gaming, or “blogging”, everything that we do nowadays really does require a very minimal amount of work.  Just think for a minute of the difficulty it would take to revert to the primitive lifestyle of, let’s say, 1990.  I bet that we can also agree that humans are complicated and at times difficult to understand and deal with.  So, considering how easy things have become in our lives, it would be easy to suggest that the effort required to make a connection with a person will become increasingly difficult in comparison.  We will always be sophisticated and complex beings, requiring more than minimal effort to truly feel a deep connection with somebody on a personal level.  Now, if Little Billy can turn on the television from 20 feet away while eating cheese doodles and downloading pirated music, how come he can’t create deep and meaningful relationships with the click of a button?  Well, he’s gonna damn well try; but not too hard.

After a quick photo shoot involving a mirror, a dark room, and a pose that can only be described as “emo”, (which stands for emotional, but it’s too long a word for our lazy mouths to pronounce.) Little Billy joyfully drags his slightly pudgy butt over to his lazy boy recliner and plugs in his digital camera.  After a frustrating 2.8 seconds, his pictures load and he is able to start his Myspace account.  He fills in the required fields with great anticipation, which soon turns to impatience as the sign up sheet has exceeded his 14 second attention span.  He finishes the application with a sense of pride and accomplishment, and hurries to the kitchen to reward himself.  Halfway through scooping out the ice cream with his electric heated ice cream scooper, the voice of his mother graces his mind, reminding him to eat right, and quickly devours three baby carrots before finishing scooping his ice cream.  After leaving the scooper in the sink for someone else to clean, he returns to his computer, scarfing down his ice cream with a sense of well being, accompanied by a struggling liver and a slightly increased chance of heart failure.  Billy signs onto Myspace for the first time and smiles while he reads the welcome letter he receives from the Almighty Tom, feeling as if he’s already made a friend.  Billy is then asked to do one of the hardest things that can be asked of a person.  He must think.  The question must be answered: Who am I?  After a couple minutes of silent ice cream eating, he cannot help but question his lifestyle.  After spending so much of his life on cruise control without participating or even observing what’s passed him by, he feels as if he doesn’t even know what makes up a little Billy.  So, in this time of mental stress, he does what he does best.  He takes the easy way out.  While he writes his short description of what he looks like and what he enjoys, he intentionally leaves out who he is, because after all, he doesn’t know, and it’s not like anyone else really knows how to describe who they are online anyway. 

So, as our hero fills up his profile with shallow, attention seeking pictures and blogs, he posts a bulletin begging people to comment on his masterpiece.  He quickly learns, as most of us already have, that it is way easier to communicate with a larger quantity of people if it is done online through bulletins and chat rooms.  With a thin layer Cheeto film covering almost his entire body, fat Billy finishes his socializing for the night, and falls asleep at the computer.  Dreams of popularity, and girls aplenty filled his unconscious. That night, in an unfortunate and unforeseen turn of events, Billy passed away.  The culprit: a cheese doodle carefully wedged in his esophagus that arrived during one of his casual sleep-snacking episodes Billy was quite familiar with.  He is not found until three weeks after his death, when his parents noticed that the kettle corn that would usually go by the bag was stacking up in the pantry, and it would be best to check up on him. I think that’s how it happened.  Or maybe some “chick” from online was really a 45 year old guy with a lust for chubby boys and came over and killed him. I’m too lazy to decide.  But the point is the same.  Billy’s life was tragically cut short by his own habitual snacking, and he will miss opportunities to converse with some of the greatest bloggers the world has ever seen, such as FoxxySwtyBrbieAngelSoccerHottiGalHunyPinkRoseSxyChicaBabyQTLuverGurlPrincessAngelfck264 and her boyfriend, PlayaBallaGhettoThugGunitComptonMaddenRappaMuthaFckaDawg311.

The moral of the story is… Get outside.  I know the weather can suck.  I don’t care.  Suck it up, QTbabyprincess.  Develop healthy living habits now, cause in ten years, your metabolism wont be able to keep up with your chocolate intake, and your intake will slowly become sufficiently more than your output, if you know what I mean.

The world changes quickly.  People don’t.  My version of Microsoft Word doesn’t even recognize the word “Blog”. Blogging wasn’t important 5 years ago.  We were fine without it.  People met new people, and people became friends with people, and people found boyfriends and girlfriends.  It wasn’t that long ago that people were washing their clothes by hand in the stream, and yet those people had more spare time then we admit to having.  Increases in technology have raised efficiency, giving us more time to have to ourselves, but also forcing people to use that spare time just to compete socially and otherwise.  Please, from one human being to another, please, do not make Myspace or other electronic devices necessary to compete socially.  I am confident enough in myself that I am convinced that people would be willing to call my home phone to get a hold of me if I didn’t have my cell or instant messenger.  However, I don’t know how much longer it will be before being obligated to ask a parent “Is Luke there?” will be entirely obsolete, and anyone without a cell will be entirely left in the dark.  Our society is entirely askew when it comes to understanding who we are as individuals and I’m not the first to say, place far too much value in our possessions..  It takes only one night of pure intellectual discussion under the stars with someone you care about to begin to discover who you are, past all of society’s influence.  I was lucky enough in my childhood and beyond to have many, many of these nights and they played a large part in shaping who I am. 

There is a wall about three inches thick of societal personality that has shaped you into something you aren’t, and it sometimes it can be hard to get past the fake personality that this culture has shaped.  We’re all very different, but the bigger that wall gets, the more similar we become.  The MTV generation shaped a decade of teenagers, and we cannot allow the Myspace generation to change who we are.

All I’m saying is: find out who you are and be that person no matter what the TV or your friend or your dad says you should be.  If you’ve ever played a game like Sim City or Sim Theme Park, it’s easy to see how easy it is to see people as just numbers, to do things to create the largest profit, completely regardless of the true happiness of the people you serve. It’s simply ignorant to deny that to the operators of nearly any successful company in this generation, the peasant class must be categorized by numbers in order to be efficient enough to compete in a painstaking capitalist society.  It is easy to see why money grubbing government officials and media powerhouse owners such as Rupert Murdoch (who just happens to own Myspace) don’t care about you as a person.  They can do enough testing and surveying to find out what makes a person willing to give up their own ideals for what is “socially cool”, and therefore makes it easy for them to manipulate what is “cool” into the cheapest, simplest thing with the largest profit margin, considering that they only have to pay their Malaysian workers six cents an hour (Shoes, Jewelry, Televisions).  It’s up to us to declare our individuality before we become whatever they want us to be. 

For those of you whose cultural walls are too thick to care for the real, more hard hitting stuff, don’t worry, you’re well adjusted. But, as philosopher Jiddu Krisnamurti wisely stated. “It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”. For those who feel a deep acceptance of this reality, go spend a warm, clear night outside with a good sleeping bag and a great friend.  Try to find the third dimension in topics often thought of two dimensionally. Reframe your reality. Cause to me, you are just a guest in mine.  Welcome.