WTF is Myspace?

 

To begin with, my pop culture artifact isn’t really an object but it is a website. It was way before Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and the other social media sites we know today. The website I am talking about used to be a hit in the early 2000s and now it is considered a joke now. If I was to even mention it to the kids of today, they would be as very confused as to what it is. I’m talking about good old MYSPACE! Remember when life was all about who was in your top 10 friends list?  Seeing that weird creepy guy in front of a board, smiling. Now, it’s all about tweeting, posting photos, and “facebooking” we forgot all about Tom’s website. This was a website where you could share your pictures, opinions, update your moods, post statuses, blog, and listen to music. You can describe it as the pre-historic version of Facebook honestly.

In middle school, I barely had a Myspace! I wasn’t really allowed to have one but I always sneaked behind my mom’s back to create one. Everybody at school had one and I felt like I was the lame one out the bunch. Back then, me being a pre-teen and trying to fit in, I made it my duty to create my own profile if I was going to survive at having a social life. When I did finally decide to create one it was actually a waste of time, but when my mom found out it really wasn’t worth the punishment I received for it. Besides that, the two main things I did remember doing was changing my background and profile every second of every day. As well as constantly changing around my friends top 10 list. The site was really popular when I was 12-14 years old and now I’m finally realizing it wasn’t “all that” to begin with.

I want to take it back to how I use to surf the internet all night looking for the PERFECT background and what music I should put on my page. I used to spend all night doing this because it was really a competition amongst me and my friends. The dedication and commitment behind having the best profile was real. The goal was to have the CUTEST Myspace page, and if you didn’t well your page wasn’t visited as often. It got really bad because I believe this is where all the social media addiction had first occurred for me. Ever since then, it blossomed into an obsession now!

Second, don’t let me get started with the “My Top 10 Friends List”. Basically out of all your friends on your page you had a choice between 5, 10, or 20 of your closest friends on your profile. After you chosen those special few, when anyone would go to your page they would see who was at the top of your friends list. You being in someone’s top 10 to middle school kids meant you were the one, not just an ordinary person, but you was one of the CHOSEN ones. This meant you had instant popularity or you was somewhat cool.

It was everything in my eyes then but at one point in time Myspace began to get lame. When I was transitioning into high school that’s when everyone was transitioning onto new forms of social media and they completely left Myspace behind. I believe the new thing was tweeting and whenever anyone brought up Myspace it was all jokes. My generation revisits the topic of this old site to remember how lame and ugly we used to be when we were kids. My friends took it as far as finding my old Myspace and posting old pictures of us when we was going through puberty, and seeing how far we’ve come as people. It’s still funny when we do it, but I lost all of the information to my old page so I really don’t visit mines all that often but when my friends do it’s embarrassing for me.

This website had significant influence on pop culture, every one used to have one! Myspace would be the place to connect with your friends, meet new people, listen to music, blog about anything, and watch videos your friends or anybody else posted. If you needed to find out what was going on in the world, MYSPACE was your go to! As well as, it was the start to some celebrities. It was a big way for up and coming artists or any form of talent to network themselves. For example, in previous readings we read how Soulja Boy was discovered from Myspace and use it as a platform to network his dance craze across the world.

 

To conclude, if you visit Myspace today it’s nothing like it was when I was growing up. It is now considered lame to all generations and it resides as a way for people who have musical talents to network their music. It’s not really a place where you’ll find everyone and be able to connect with your friends or family. It is now mainly a website that revolves around music. This was an important artifact to me because it really opened the gates to me having social media and seeing how media spreads. I believe this opened the gates to all my fellow classmates too! It just goes to show that just like clothes, a trend of a specific social media site can also die out. When Myspace plummeted it fell behind bad. If Myspace was to be brought back from the dead today? I would probably design my page one more time, for the one time! LOL