September 13, 2006 News & Views » Cover

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MySpace, MyA@$#! 

Giving away personal information? Being digitally dissed by old friends? Taking part in Rupert Murdoch's scheme to dominate the media world? No thanks.

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On the other end of the spectrum, some MySpacers use the site strictly to find serious relationships. Can love be found traipsing through someone's favorite TV shows? If the recent online marriage proposal by Limp Biskit frontman Fred Durst to a Rhode Island woman is any indication, it will get much, much worse.

Day 4. Today is yet another MySpace low point. I received a message from an old friend today who found me on the site. A former cheerleader at my Iowa high school, she says MySpace is an easy way for her to contact friends back home. But she declines my friendship, because she is working for a US senator and does not want anything remotely damaging to appear on her site. I have been digitally dissed.

I respect my friend's wariness, though. Despite a new survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers suggesting 27 percent of employers check out potential employees on MySpace, the site's users do not seem to get it: If your friends can find you and see it, so can a company's human resources department.

The list of people fired because of MySpace indiscretions runs long:

• Marion County Sheriff's deputy Brian Quinn was fired over wearing his uniform in a MySpace photo.

• Administrators at a Las Vegas Catholic high school permanently sent home a teacher after they discovered he declared himself gay on his personal MySpace account.

• St. Petersburg Times' upper management fired writer Gina Vivinetto after she posted comments on a Ronda Storms parody MySpace page.

How long until my bosses figure out I like the movie Office Space? With MySpace, any employee's days are numbered. Or at least their staplers are threatened.

Day 5. The mass invites -- MySpace's version of junk mail -- have gone from a trickle to an all-out waterfall of chain letters, band invites and random "u r soooo hottt" missives. From Internet-savvy politicians in states I've never visited to bands with a particular heinous brand of sonic mayhem, everyone seems to want to be on my friends list. But there are no true friends in MySpace, only self-absorbed users collecting friends like baseball cards. The cheapening of friendship has made me cynical, so I make Burger King my No. 1 friend.

The rest of you can go to hell.

Day 6. One of my new "friends" tries to pressure me into starting a blog. But I know better. Rupert Murdoch did not purchase the site for its ad revenue potential; he wanted to mine the profiles for marketing data. Every time a newcomer signs up, News Corp. has the profile of a real consumer complete with age, marital status, education level, occupation, salary and interests ranging from music to television. Since MySpace attracts a larger, and more valuable, demographic than any phone or mail survey could hope to achieve, it's not too outrageous to suspect that clothing and record companies could use this data, along with ideas culled from photos and blogs, to advance their bottom line.

In fact, it was just a couple of months ago that MySpace changed its terms-of-use contract from claiming ownership to anything posted on the site (including music) to allowing artists to retain their rights. If not for the keen eye of musician Billy Bragg, and the firestorm he started after pulling his songs from the site, MySpace might still be claiming ownership of every piece of music, video and text uploaded. Is it too far-fetched to think they might surreptitiously change the terms again? I won't take the chance. I don't need to advance someone else's business or marketing scheme through my blog. Especially not a blog on MySpace.

Day 7. With just fewer than 100 profile views and 24 friends, my week exploring the virtual juggernaut is over. I'm happy to escape with my life. One can't argue the success of the site in just three years, but at what cost? MySpace is like an untested drug distributed to the masses; we won't know its vicious side effects for years to come. Its success has already resulted in a number of Frankenstein sites, the worst being Wal-Mart's recently released "The Hub," a sanitized version of MySpace allowing users to show off photos, music and their favorite Wal-Mart gear. The site's members, affectionately called "Hubsters," also have a chance to win an appearance in a Wal-Mart television commercial. As if being a "Hubster" wasn't embarrassing enough.

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