I’m finally ready to admit that I have a problem: I’ve been addicted to myspace.com for quite some time now. Since I registered and created a myspace.com profile early in the spring of 2005, I’ve had many an afternoon pass in which I accomplished little more than refreshing my profile for hours on end, just waiting for that next comment to come rolling in. Now we’re a year into my myspace.com membership, and the magic has worn off. I feel like an alcaholic that’s been sober just long enough to question why he’s been looking for happiness at the bottom of a bottle. Wether or not I’ll have the will power to end this obsession by deleting my profile, that’s another story.

There isn’t anything inherently wrong with Myspace aside from the fact that Myspace Tom is apparently about as good a programmer as he his a friend. He only talks to me when he needs to tell me his site is broken again. What an asshole! The problem with Myspace is that it is a social network, and a particularly juvenile one at that. Myspace is what happens when you take a world full of degenerates and put them at one another’s fingertips. What was conceived as a fun way to make new friends has taken a downward spiral into a cesspool of drama and electronic whoredom.

Myspace has everything that high school did, except authority figures charged with the task of keeping the bullshit in check. Don’t think that because the majority of the site’s members are young adults that they act responsibly or respectfully.

My first problem with Myspace.com is more of a personal grudge against some of it’s members. Myspace.com opens up a whole new world of possibilities for those with promiscuous tendancies. Take any person whom friends would describe as someone who “sleeps around” and put that person on Myspace.com, then sit back and watch what happens. It’s like some twisted version of match.com that pairs exploitative men to naïve and vulnerable women. I could cop out right now and say it’s not my place to judge this sort of behavior, but fuck that. I think its despicable and irresponsible on a number of levels, but I digress.

Another one of my gripes that falls along the same lines is that some people have exploited the very nature of Myspace.com by turning it into their own personal popularity contest. Apparently more than a few people out there actually have the time on their hands to send friend requests to thousands of strangers. So many strangers, in fact, that they can’t intend to actually speak with any of them. It’s a bit pathetic if you ask me. Especially those people that populate their “friends list” with only models and porn stars. I wish they were my friends too, but I’d rather not torture myself by pretending.

My biggest problem with Myspace is actually an issue I might have with my own friends, and if saying this angers them then I apologize; but I think the problem is more widespread than just my small clique (see the life is pain Myspace group, full of sarcastic bastards). It’s easy to watch drama unfold on Myspace: by watching the comments posted between friends and acquiantances you can tell who is angry with whom, whose sleeping around, who is stalking whose profile, and any number of other banal “high school” situations. What angers me is when I post an innocent comment to someone’s profile and it gets censored (i.e. outright deleted) because someone else may see it and get the wrong idea.

There are two ways to solve the problems I’ve got with Myspace.com. One involves cleansing the blood that flows through it’s very veins: get rid of the people that make it suck; however unless you’re a relative of the Hitler family, you may not be keen on this idea. The other solution is for people to quit behaving like teenagers. It seems like when you take a perfectly responsible adult and put them online, the impersonality that is inherant in the very fabric of the Internet makes them act like a different person. I used to think that the Internet “isn’t real life,” but I’m beginning to rethink that notion. It’s obvious to me now that relationships can begin and end online, love can blossom, and feelings can be hurt. Its up to the individual to recognize this and treat people respectfully, both on Myspace.com and elsewhere.