[Lancaster] myspace: murdoch's tool

[mp]

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....

> > 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."

>  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

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-m