There is a whispering among the computers. "MySpace is over!" they say. "It's rife with sexual predators," hiss some. "It's lost its edge," say others. In the land of MySpace, it's backlash o'clock.
MySpace is the reigning champion of "social networking" websites. It's fairly simple: Users sign up for free, and make themselves a home page -- kind of an extended personals ad -- with some pictures, some blurbs of self-description, and maybe a song playing in the background. There is a box for favourite TV shows, one for favourite music, and one for favourite books. Fewer people use that one.
The most important part of a MySpace homepage, though, is the list of links to other peoples' homepages. The point of social networking websites is to allow users to beg other users to become their "friends," thereby adding each others' names and mugs to their homepages, like trophies. So you can surf networks of friends, clicking from one face to the next, posting notes for your friends along the way.
It proved catchy, especially with the young'uns. Nowadays, MySpace is dealing in the kind of arbitrarily large numbers that the Internet seems to specialize in: More than 80 million homepages at last count, followed by 80 million newspaper articles and TV spots (give or take) on the subject.
But a new line of thinking is starting to ripple through the ether: that MySpace might have peaked. You can see it on the blogs of Net thinkers like Om Malik (http://www.gigaom.com) and Nicholas Carr (http://www.roughtype.com). The evidence so far is scanty. Some of the speculation stems from the observation that Alexa.com, which offers a rough index of website popularity, recently registered a downtick in MySpace's traffic. But even if these figures are accepted at face value, they could simply reflect the end of the school year.
Others note that MySpace could be bogging down in the bad press it's been getting over the ever-present smut-peddlers, spammers and sexual predators who haunt its recesses. Perhaps most damningly of all, others still observe that when a service for teenagers starts showing up in their parents' morning paper every other day, its cachet starts to suffer. Teens, never renowned for their attention spans, could decamp for cooler pastures.
So is MySpace over? I don't know. What I do know is that a lot of people seem excited at the prospect. The speed with which the "MySpace is dead" vibe has spread speaks to one of the service's less-reported qualities: its remarkable hateability.
This isn't to say that MySpace really is loathsome or dangerous; merely inspiring of a profound sense of animus. Its format doesn't lend itself to constructive exchanges; rather, it flaunts shallowness in a way that makes blogs look like Proust. A system that relies heavily on mug shots as icons will be biased toward the young and attractive. Despite this, MySpace pages are often places of unparalleled garishness. Sometimes, its primary service seems to be reminding you that you're not 19 any more.
It's doubly awkward because it makes public what should be private. MySpace doesn't just create social networks, it anatomizes them. It spreads them out like a digestive tract on the autopsy table. You can see what's connected to what, who's connected to whom. You can even trace the little puffs of intellectual flatus as they pass through the system. Things that used to be fleeting and private -- the nothings of telephone calls and idle chatter -- are made permanent and public.
As a result, an awful lot of people wind up looking at these conversations, relationships, banterings that they can't take part in. Maybe they're too old, maybe they're too shy, maybe they just live in the wrong part of the world to ever really engage. Some might say good riddance to all that. Others might harbour a regret or two. MySpace might really be in the business of selling yearning.
So when word starts to circulate that its star might be on the wane, a lot of ears prick up. It's always appealing when a club you're not in folds. (Plus, MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch; people love to hate that guy.) But even if MySpace loses its dominance, other sites will take its place; the most bandied-about names include tagworld.com and bebo.com. They are, at best, variations on the same theme. The hoopla will pass, but the idea's not going anywhere -- even if the kids have to go someplace where we're not all staring at them.
