To Myspace or not to Myspace???

I am not sure if Myspace, with its really poor programming and cumbersome blogging setup, is a bad word here on blogger but in any case, that is really irrelevant to this entry. It has been quite a while-I guess I had to come down with a cold and be stuck at home on St. Patrick's Day in order to put together a new blog entry.

So, back to the subject of Myspace. I joined myspace awhile ago but never did much with it. Then friends of mine started getting addicted and I decided to check it out again. Since then I have gotten a bit addicted myself. Being home today mostly by myself has got me thinking about whether Myspace is a good or bad thing for me. While my intent is not to debate the morality of using Myspace, I just wanted to comment on the love/hate relationship I seem to developing with the interface-or whatever you want to call it.

Myspace is a really neat way to connect up with high school and college friends-especially those who now live across the United States, but I have found that I have had an easier time locating people who I now know and see every other week, if not more regularly. Of course, that isn't a problem either, at the outset.

It is fun to find people online and connect with people, the problem I find comes later. Depending on what a person feels like sharing, you can read their profile and learn a lot about a person in a fairly short period of time. While one might argue that if they post it and don' t make their profile private, it is their fault if you find out more than they would want you to know, it isn't really that simple in my mind. While the profile is intended for the general public, what about the comments that other people make on blogs. Not every comment seems to be appropriate fodder for comsumption of the public. And some users seem to think that every message, private or not, should be sent as a comment-though that is just an observation from someone who rarely sends comments...

But as I was saying, the real problem with Myspace for me is that it allows me to learn things about people with very little time investment on my part. I other words, I can read about someone's interests in lieu of actually spending time with that person and getting to know them through conversation. Granted, it would probably take a lot of conversation to glean enough information to rival some of the more comprehensive profiles, but that is what it takes to really get to know people. For someone like myself who has phases where I am more antisocial than not, Myspace is a tool that allows me to be lazy and quasi- get to know people without really risking anything much myself.

I mean as long as I am not a spammer or someone selling something, I don't think that many people would refuse to add me as a friend if they had at least met me once or twice. And if they do refuse, so what-will I be crushed? Highly unlikely. I suppose I could be upset that I don't make someone's top 4, top 8, or top 24 friends, but I only make the top 4 when the person has only 4 or 5 friends anyway. So where is the problem? Well, I have found that especially with gals I don't know well, Myspace offers a window into their lives that at times I really don't know them well enough to look into. Not that I am really doing anything inherently wrong but if by reading the Myspace profile of the girl I just met, I find out that she likes Radiohead, loves to mountain bike, graduated from UofMD, is an accountant, has a dog names Filbert, loves "Serendipity" and her favorite book is "Captivating," I have effectively eliminated the fun/challenge of finding all those things out in person. And to make matters worse, if you accidentally mention to much information, it may become obvious that you have spent some time reading the particular gal's Myspace page and then you can come off as a stalker...

But all this going back and forth doesn't really get to the central point: I don't think that anything can effectively take the place of spending time with a person to get to know them. If Myspace helps with that, great, if it takes the place of that, then there is a big problem. For a person such as myself, who tends to write more clearly than I speak, the problem is multiplied. But if writing rather than typing is the issue, I suppose email is suspect as well-and don' t even get me started on AIM...