Beauty or the Beast? Some say it’s tacky, but maybe that’s the point! The pages look just the way users WANT them to look. And THAT is the glory of MySpace.

Testimonials

16 Comments on Digg.com:

  • Most people on digg do bash myspace because they look at it from a technical standpoint instead of a cultural and social one. Digg users have no friends and thus, have no use for myspace.

  • I disagree... I hate MySpace. I like Facebook. Myspace is ugly, Facebook looks nice.

  • I hate it when people customize their Myspace, it always looks awful.

  • I have plenty of friends that I speak to daily and do not feel the need to lower myself to the ranks of myspace

  • The Lady doth protest too much, methinks—Shakespeare.

  • Dude, I knew MySpace was "uncool" the week it was released...

  • If you're going to have a web site, really make a web site... This point and click stuff is n00bish... I say just shut it down!

  • MySpace is what happens when you make teenagers take virginity pledges

  • I don't use MySpace because it sooooooooooooo amazing. It's not. I realize it guys. However, my MySpace is about keeping track of my friends (the ones I talked in person first, not the internet)

  • "Lacey and I have used it as a way for students to climb inside of a fictional character. By creating MySpace pages for characters in the novels we're teaching, students can think about how identities get constructed and what kinds of interests their character might have that are not explicitly mentioned in the text."—Teacher Jim Brown

A philosophical moment

In his book Media Unlimited (2002), media critic Todd Gitlin suggests that this torrent of visual and electronic stimulation has replaced "real feeling and reflection" with "feeling lite". That we use technology to cycle quickly and selectively from one event or sound bite to another, searching not just for a sequence of feelings, but for the feelings we want to experience.

"The kind of feeling that's delivered over by the incessant media flow is not a particularly deep feeling; it's not a binding feeling. We may consider it a form of connection,but it's rather easily relinquished and that's part of its point, that it doesn't really demand very much of us. Now what that does to the coloration, the gravity of the rest of life, is an interesting question when we spend so much of our time in a sort of emotional holding pattern, where we are invited, and feel disposed, to accept the invitation to feel nothing much of anything but some snippet of feeling that we can put on and off with ease."

Gitlin goes on to talk about the effect of "feeling—lite" —that it diminishes our very ability to bring our "deepest strongest feeing" to bear on human relationships.