[Lancaster] Fwd: myspace: murdoch's tool

[mp]

On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 15:57 +0100, Ken Walton wrote:
> So the middle-aged people who *are* joining, are
> doing it *despite* what is says in the news, rather than because of
> it.

It is funny that you should use the term middle-aged, since it seems
only reasonable to suggest that people who are "middle-aged" would be
interested in what youthful people find hip.

> News of it passes by word of mouth, because the people using it
> find it genuinely useful.

Or "Because I am worth it"? 

> > 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."
> 

> 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.

This is twisting the facts a bit, init? A better analogy, IMO, would be
somnething like you was sat in a corner of the pub telling mates that
the landlord was lying to his customers to cover over his and his
friends activities, over charging for the beers, and using his profits
to manipulate in cahoots with dark forces exploiting little children in
Africa, Asia and elsewhere etc etc. - and then the landlord would throw
you out because he had people employed to monitor the conversation on
every table via microphones. Would you go to that pub (again/ever?)?

>  That doesn't stop it being a
> valuable social space for certain kinds of interaction.

It is in the word "certain" that the real issue is buried. Where is the
public space for interaction? All spaces, whether in cyberspace or
elsewhere, or becoming privatised and as such subject to the whim of
capital/profit interest.

To say there is nothing wrong with MySpace is to say that there is
nothing wrong with the fact that social relations, relations between
human beings, are increasingly controlled by the "logics" of capital and
that the disappearance of public space is just fine.

> 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...

And why is that? Does the egg or the chicken come first? 

>  But there's
> no reason they shouldn't be able to share the same space with those
> talking about radical politics.

Of course there is: it is not good for business.

And that is why MySpace is shit: it perpetuates control and increases
limitation/destruction of the public (spaces).

-m