[Lancaster] Fwd: myspace: murdoch's tool

[Ken Walton]

Oops, forgot to press "reply to all" so it would go to the list too...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ken Walton <ken.walton at carandol.net>
Date: Aug 30, 2006 3:54 PM
Subject: Re: myspace: murdoch's tool
To: mp <mp at aktivix.org>


On 8/30/06, mp <mp at aktivix.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 13:51 +0100, Ken Walton wrote:
> > Well, from the people I know in Lancaster who are on MySpace, it's
> > very much the social networking and sharing music that is important.
> > The ability to put songs online (particularly your own songs, if
> > you're a performer or a band) is something most of these sites don't
> > have. And there seem to be a lot of unsigned bands that move around
> > the pub circuit who use it for getting people to listen to their music
> > and encourage them to come to gigs. It's certainly not the media hype,
> > because if you believed that, you'd think everyone on myspace was in
> > their teens, and most of the people I know are in their thirties and
> > forties.
>
> Does media hype only apply to teenagers?? I don't understand....

What I mean is, if you listen the the radio, or read articles in the
newspapers, you get the impression that it's a place exclusively where
teenagers hang out. If this were true, then no middle-aged person
would dream of having a MySpace account, because it would obviously
not be for them. So the middle-aged people who *are* joining, are
doing it *despite* what is says in the news, rather than because of
it. News of it passes by word of mouth, because the people using it
find it genuinely useful.

>
> > > SOme of it I guess is the 'success breeds success' thing - lots of
> > > people have heard of it so people want to be part of it, but there must
> > > be something that keeps people joining.
>
> quote from:
> http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/march2006/160306myspace.htm :
>
> "MySpace isn't cool, it isn't hip and it isn't trendy. It represents a
> cyber trojan horse and the media elite's last gasp effort to reclaim
> control of the Internet and sink it with a stranglehold of regulation,
> control and censorship.
>
> Since Rupert Murdoch's $580 Million acquisition of MySpace in July 2005,
> it has come from total obscurity to now being the 8th most visited
> website in the world, receiving half as many page hits as Google,
> despite the fact that on first appearance it looks like a 5-year-old's
> picture scrap and scribble book."

Fair enough - I didn't know about the censorship. Although to say it
isn't cool, hip and trendy is one person's opinion; many would
disagree. Something can be cool, hip and trend and still be dishonest,
deceitful and manipulative. Look at Nazism!

>
> >  Another thing here is that
> > > myspace is (I've heard) owned by Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Sun - does
> > > he want to use this site to have political influence in the same way as
> > > he does with his newspapers or is he just out to make money?
> >
> > I can't actually see how he *can* have political influence, since
> > people on the site talk to each other - there's no input from the site
> > itself, unless you count technical support! I think he's just in it to
> > make money -- it's more like a telephone network than a TV station. (I
> > was going to say, I don't see how he makes money either, since I don't
> > see any ads. But then I remembered I've got ad-blocking switched on,
> > so I wouldn't!)
>
> Political control is as much a potential as it is an exercise. To answer
> the question concerning political control for yourself you could set up
> an account that has as its focus to distribute/share investigative
> journalism into the dodgy dealings of the Murdoch empire and other
> capitalist ventures, including anti-capitalist music and so on, and then
> wait for a reaction. To say that he cannot have political influence
> makes no sense and the links are accumulating as we speak:
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=murdoch+myspace
> +censorship&btnG=Search
>
> Results 1 - 10 of about 374,000 for murdoch myspace censorship

We're not talking about the same thing here. Andy said, and I said,
"political influence." By that I meant (and I think Andy meant, though
I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong), Murdoch's ability to put his
own political views across, in the way he does in his newspapers.
Political *control* is a different thing, and yes, you're right, he
does seem to have that. And when it's such a huge site, that's a
dangerous thing.

OTOH, if I were to stand on the table in my local pub and start
slagging off the beer and saying rude things about the landlord, I
doubt I'd stay in there very long. That doesn't stop it being a
valuable social space for certain kinds of interaction.

I got a job last week via contacts on LJ, from someone I've never met,
and probably never will. I also met someone on MS and we're planning
to meet up in real life fairly soon. Sites like MySpace and
LiveJournal do perform a useful social function. It's a sad but true
fact that most people don't want to spend their time talking about
radical politics. They want to talk about movies and music and cats
and books and health problems and kids' birthdays and... But there's
no reason they shouldn't be able to share the same space with those
talking about radical politics.

Which is why Andy's talking about the possibility of setting up some
sort of alternative that would not be owned by an individual or big
company, but will provide the same networking possibilities. Sadly,
not being a programmer, there's not much I can do to help. Except
perhaps persuade people it's cool, hip and trendy when it's
finished...

--
Ken Walton


-- 
Ken Walton