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quote:
Originally posted by bobby:
I haven't figured out how to add anyone. Boo Hoo I have no MySpace friends.


Hi Bobby, just go to the person's page that you want to add and then press the "add to friends". It's in the box usually under the main pic that also has the "send message". Press "add to friends", Then they will either accept you or reject you,, I have rejected quite a few people and some that I don't even think were people.


Lol, I hope you weren't joking about not being able to add a friend. Surely you should have Tom as one of your friends, unless you deleted Tom.
Last edited by Yvonne
am i the only one who's grossed out and through with myspace? to me while it is an ok way for anyone w/ access to have a webpage and stay in touch with friends - even promote music or shows - it seems to exemplify the utter self-absorbtion our culture has come to embody. It seems less about connection/communication that it is about me, me, me... plus its corporate owned and operated. maybe its just ME.
Call me Pollyanna...

The corporate thing does bother me, but still, I find it so helpful. I just did a gig in Colorado and I met the local queens in advance via MySPace. I also hired one as an assistant.

I think those of us who are not super consumers ride along for free when it comes to ad driven media. I don't buy cars, soda, junk food etc, so when I see these ads on TV I feel like I just got a free show. The Internet is full of banner ads that I never click on. So hey, Murdoch isn't getting much back from me. I'm just riding in his boxcar.
Here are some thoughts from the blog area of my myspace page that kind of address what people have brought up in this string here on the Mboards:-



buying frenzy in digital ghostland

(UNIVERSAL INTRO: In this zone where there is only the almost real, distance becomes a kind of torrential everywhere. One ends up living in distance permanently.One's body no longer has a physical relation to distance. In this distance one's body becomes the screen not over which but into and through which distance rides. Think of all the radio signals going right through you now. The EMS call that is circulating in your knees. The pizza order that has been phoned through your liver. The air traffic control instructions that just rode into and out of your thyroid gland. Distance is seething all through you right now. Just shut your eyes and ride child. You've never been so far away from yourself before.)
________________________________________________

Alright. I've been resisting this one.

Friends as a kind of capital.

Your zone in this almost real space is a kind of bank deposit account of telelectric relationships.

A my space as a sort of stock market of (dis)sociability. Your cybersocial net wor(k)th measured in photoicons collected through a type of techno game of tag-your-it. You, an exploiter of synthetic neighborliness. The entire world of computer-owners a 'natural resource'. Each zone owner's worth calculated as a sort of retail outlet for that impossibly elusive commodity from the actual world, the 'friend.'

All of the similarities are so uterly blatant and over-easy to make it is not possible to deny an element of flat out truth. And, so what?
To live blind of some forms of truth is to be only half alive.

What can be actually beautiful about this almost real myspace place is just that, how it magnificently distorts the woeful shortcommings of the disappointing actual world. You can be happy here in a place that does not really exist. You can find friends by interacting with their electronic shadows. The principal social advantage here is being alone. It is wonderfully liberating, isn't it, to have stuck one's self down, immobilized, in front of a plastic, glowing box. All the human world now alive, only in the mind.

Hello Li Guo Liang, how is Mongolia today, so happy to have you invested in my relationship fund. Now, besides yourself, do you have a product, talent or service to offer? Never mind Liang. Just that you are even there is worth something.

Funny how a cold pleasure is so intensely promising. Almost like the feel upon one's hand of money.

This my space can make you rich and happy. And that is a form of truth.
________________________________________________

What we occupy as the cybernetically re-educated is a digital concentration camp. A camp tricked out as an availability resort for technopersonalities. But in this digital concentration camp there is no suffering at all. None. Only a radical reduction to a list of ingredients that facilitate perpetual examination according to criteria of a 'browse.'

And it is the very quantification of all of one's most unique, individual traits that lays one open to being absorbed by the data clinic.

Having the uniqueness of the individual personality converted in to an extreme standardized uniform, to uncritically worship a digital concentration camp is to be unwilling to acknowledge one's demotion to being a joyous robot, a standardized impersonality whose outlook and awareness have been absorbed in the statistic clinic. It is the degree to which your humanity has been polluted by the dream the happy cyborg has to be re-humanized. A dream you need not yet have.

Yes, one's self-aggrandizement through the statistic clinic may amplify a naivete about the attractiveness of the self and the marvellous efficiency of a statistic-based information dump. But the most important collective function of this almost real place is not how it persuades all to subordinate to continuous examination but how it acts as a barricade against disappearance.

For if you don't know, here it is possible to exercise an acute form of imprecision, wordless intuition, to speak with affect, to require code to continuously sound struggle against divisive power.

The primary merit of this place is its status as a temporary solution. An heroic postponement of your total erasure.

(c)pskiff 05
Last edited by seven
seven, what part of that post did you write and what part was copy-pasted?

Just curious about the concentration-camp metaphor. You are in there forever, you will never get out, to act within the world.

Living away from New York I agree ... suffering from/enjoying the strange sense that distance is a fiction. It actually still is not. Just try it... try to break out of the cyberspacial zone and call someone or write a snail mail ... and be met with dead silence.
I get what you're saying but I think it's an exaggeration.. well again that depends upon the individual I guess. This whole concept of "cyberspace" has always seemed odd to me. I don't think of myself as being in a simulated place when I communicate online. It's just a more organized and efficiant way of making a phone call or writing a letter. I don't see it as a replacement for human interaction. I can't imagine staying home from a social engagement so I could get together with people online. The new hype about Second Life also baffles me. I mean, I can see enjoying it like you'd enjoy a game, but moving cartoons around on a screen is not like going to an event. Maybe some people are lost in the world of pretend but I think many of us are just touching base with eachother.

Now as for MySpace, yes collecting people is like collecting trading cards. They are not really my real friends. But they are likeminded contacts that are there should I need them. If I'm visiting London and want to find the local freaks, I now have a shortcut... which is a lead to real world interaction. Not so creepy. Besides, isn't it cute that we can all be a star with our own trading card. It's a democratization of fame. Fame is surface, fake, image, sure. But when you do decide to meet someone then real things happen. I just don't see it as such a bad thing.
Last edited by Miss Understood
I wrote the whole thing S'tan.

I agree that communicating other ways can seem just as airless.

And I like your sentiments too Miss U. I have a high level of ambivalence about being cyberfied.

Myspace as it stands is of course a very facile promotional or marketing or networking tool. I know a web designer who has gotten loads of clients from being on myspace. The site itself holds itself out to the public as being a promotional tool. I think there must be ways to do it that are not as harsh or capitalist as myspace. For now myspace is just the service that figured out how to do it quickly, easily and in a way that is relatively simple for the vast majority of computer users. But I think the harsh drawbacks are more than obvious. And a lot of what I posted from my myspace blog above applies to any cyberpresence one could take up.

Myspace didn't invent dehumanization. But it has made a singularly phenomenal contribution to it.

The total agglomeration of technology promotes alienation, and paradoxically that is what myspace in part remedies -it is a technology that itself tries to provide a repair to the effects of being severed from eachother that are imparted to humanity by technology itself.

But a closed system of loss and repair can be viscious in ways that are no less mean than they are subtle. Just consider Daddy's experience of being accosted in public by shunned would be 'friends'.
Last edited by seven
Seven, I always like what you write, OK, I am not always able to understand what you say, but when I do understand what I'm reading then it is some very good writing.

I don't know if what I am going to say will make any sense but I'll try.

For some people like myself, loneliness is a harsh condition to be in. Even when I went to clubs like Pyramid and Area, I was sort of living in a vacuum of loneliness surrounded by crowds of people. And being a t-girl the loneliness can be amplified because quite a few "straights" want no part of a t-girl, you know, people on the street, stores, just everyday people, at times they treat me as a disease. Also there might be other mental reasons that I am the way am that I am in no control of. Maybe I am also to blame for putting myself into this solitude.

As I am getting older I felt that I needed something to break this cycle, so a friend got me a computer which took me 6 months to figure out how to work it. I got the computer to help me break out of a depressed state that I was in, sort of a therapy thing. I also felt that I needed to belong somewhere before I disappeared completely from everyone's eyesight. I needed human contact, I mean humans like myself and not the idiots that live in my area, and not the people I have to meet for work. I needed contact with people like myself, even if it would be through the colorful plastic box in front of me.

So I went to forums such as Myspace to try and find what was missing in my life. I was grasping for anything I could reach out to. I wanted to belong to something, I really didn't know what I was looking for but I thought myspace could have something of interest.. But as you say seven, it is kinda like a concentration camp, I get really nothing out of it, but I can't resist going there. It's like I am forced to go there, like going to a miserable job, I don't want to go, but I have to, this is the feeling I get from Myspace. OK, posting pics and having guys ask me out is kinda fun, but it's not real, I will never meet any of these guys. Especially the guys from Iran or Mongolia.

Seven, this statement says it:

-it is a technology that itself tries to provide a repair to the effects of being severed from eachother that are imparted to humanity by technology itself.

I feel that I went to myspace and other forums in order to repair the effects of loneliness, maybe not because of technology itself, but then again, it could be because of technology, it's just that I don't understand these things to know any better.
Maybe I shouldn't use the plastic glowing box to try and solve my problems.


Thanks Seven for your well written post.
Babette, I really identify with a lot of what you say about being isolated because of what others ascribe to you as your social 'type'. I've had to deal with this in subtle ways and very blatant very harsh ways most of my life. I'm given to periods of intense introversion, I'm what used to be called effeminate and since the early 1970's 'crossdressed' (what an olde fashioned term). My mind takes off on total flights of reverie even in broad daylight on the street so at any moment I can be vocalizing what appears to others as total trippy nonsense. And more. During one intense long stretch of my life I never even went outside except for maybe twice a month to go to the store to buy food! I still think a really good day can be one where the only communication I do with a live human face to face is when I just have to hold two fingers up to the token booth clerk and fork my four dollars over. So going on line to connect -I wouldn't really call it socializing per se myself- was a kind of half-natural thing for me to do and I do find it very fulfilling in some ways -like now, here, on the Mboards. I think this forum though is obviously more rareified than myspace. But I guess what I am saying is, the cybersocial realm has not solved any of my social impediments, because, mostly, as you suggest, the impediments are really the outlooks and awarenesses of other people. However, I feel a kind of release and ease a lot of times being online in contact with other people. I don't have to become self-conscious about the way I look or talk or think or dream. There is a kind of comfortable zone here in a lot of ways.

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