A Scientific Approach to Myspace’s Failure

by Daniel

Related posts: An Emo Exploration

Myspace.com A place for utter crap

Using the power of Google searches, I hope to prove why Myspace.com is a failure of humanity. I’m not debating whether Myspace offers a good system or service, I’m only lamenting the place it has become thanks to its user base. There are good and bad uses for social networking websites. Most are useless and waste more time without contributing to the social good. Myspace is the worst. Before TV, people thought it would be an incredible tool for education and it would be used for benevolent purposes. It turned out that what people wanted to watch was crap, so the people who made TV made crap. This is what’s happening to MySpace. It’s a great tool at first glance, but the desire to produce crap by those in control of the content (the users) overwhelms the networking aspect almost 5 to 1. A few things to note before we begin:

  • These searches were conducted with Google using [site:myspace.com] input before each search. The words you see are exactly what I put into Google on April 7th, 2006. Though these numbers may seem large at times, keep in mind that of the whole body of profiles (72,200,0001) they represent a small percentage of total people.
  • Yes, MySpace is a great place for bands. I’ll get to that.
  • Some people are capable of making good profiles, pages and blog posts. But I wish there were more. See the conclusion.
  • This is not science.

It all started when I wanted to find a reason why the core of my Internet-saturated being hates Myspace. For fun one day, I searched within Myspace’s profiles for the following phrases:

  • 9620: “I’m going to kill myself”
  • 72,000: “I’m rick James Bitch”
  • 3,100,000: wierd
  • Man! This is fun, thought I.

This got me started on a torturous hour of minimally scientific research to discover exactly why Myspace is for the most part a heaping pile of hot garbage. I started writing.

I must disclose that I am a recent member, but I can’t stand navigating beyond my own profile’s simplicity for fear of contracting an epileptic seizure. My delicate retinas cannot survive the persistant attacks from animated images created by eight year olds who probably blink every 10 nanoseconds. This intensive research was conducted on an aging laptop with a faded LCD screen from the safe distance of 10 feet with thick billowing smoke between me and the faint rectangular object in the distance.

I lumped my findings into digestible headings:

Spelling and Literacy: The Language Factor

MySpace has created a safe haven for a scary phenomenon. It fosters a snowballing language deterioration led by the youth. New dialects and minimalist communication conventions appear among friend groups. While I know there’s no ‘one American dialect’ and I can’t force my opinions on what communication is, I do know that the acceptance of minimalist text message-like language on the web is about five steps back from the middle ages.

Here’s a selection of actual profile names:

  • Lookin Like A Star Bytch Wen U See Me Make A Wish [link]
  • dats y yo moma suck my dick [link] (441 html errors on W3C html validator)

Millions of IllteratisWords of deep visceral meaning:

  • “wut up”: 2,310,000
  • “alot” : 19,300,000
  • “luv” : 25,100,000
  • krazy: 704,000
  • wierd: 3,180,000
  • thier: 1,120,000

From a Profile [link] [static]

Your Best Physical Feature: ThE fAcT tHaT i LoOk LiKe A fRiCkIn TuRtLe!
Your Bedtime: NEVERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
Your Most Missed Memory: FiRsT iNtErGaLaCtIc BoNeR!
Pepsi or Coke: I dOnT dRiNk My OwN uRiNe AnYmOrE
MacDonalds or Burger King: I dOnT eAt ThE cRuStY bOoGeRs FrOm UnDeR My DeSk AnYmOrE
Single or Group Dates: CaN yOu Say MiNa-ShA-tWa?
Lipton Ice Tea or Nestea: TeA iS fOr PuSsIes!

Now that’s what I’m talking about.

Cookie Cutter Phrases? Grade for Originality: D-

Rick James Bitch T-Shirt
I’m Unique

Next on my checklist of Myspace Googledatabashing is old and overused pop cult phrases. I recognize that some things are funny and should be repeated. This very website is a testament to that universal fact. However, there are exceptions to this rule when it comes to the factor of time: when you beat a funny phrase into the street of language over many months, it dies and stagnates in the gutter, slowly passing from irritating to annoying. Soon its festering carcass flows to the ocean of dead phrases. It’s best to let these corpses lay.

I guess we’re getting a bit personal (and graphic) with this category, but perhaps some part of you agrees with me. Keep in mind that Google’s search results are generated on a monthly basis.

For the phrases: “is that your final answer” OR “kicked off the island” OR “rick james bitch” OR “I pity the fool” we get back 209,000. Imagine a baseball stadium full of people cackling to themselves self-assuredly after aiming one of these hideous catchphrases at the pitchers mound. If my calculations are correct, this would cause Crocodile Dundee’s cliched spirit to form from the mist of 209,000 gutteral abortions and ride an H bomb straight to the center of the earth, KILLING US ALL.

Filled With Goths? Sorta.

I'm so Goth I shit BatsThe established Goth population looks like roughly 20,805 from adding the ‘Goths’ and ‘Goth’ group together. The the more popular Goths Group has 12308 members while the less popular Goth Group has 8488 members; this equals about .023% of the population. Searches for “I am a goth” OR “I am goth” gave me only 677. Were so few ready to admit their pop social identity?

Probably due to musical references, occurences of the word “goth” was very high: 2,180,000, and results returned dropped to only 2,170,000 when I required that “goth music” be removed from the results. This means that only 10,000 were discussing the literal string “Goth music”. Anti Goth sentiments hit only 366.

I mention “The Goth Problem” not because I believe it to be a real “problem”, I just notice that Goths tend to screw up the internet by filling its limitless pages with poems describing how dark they are. Doesn’t the makeup smear when you cry? How do you sneak up on/strangle small animals with all those chains? But this is not the time nor place for such unanswerable questions. Moving on.

MySpace on Suicide Watch?

Suicide Watch MYSPACE!
Hello Look at my Tears

Google returned 9620 results for “I’m going to kill myself” on Myspace alone. I know this is a common end of the day confession for those hard working teenage mothers of five and should not be taken that seriously, so I expanded the search to general discontent: “I hate my life” gets us 134,000 and the general string I want to kill returns 11.5 million!. “Razorblades”quickly gives me 47,300. I do not know a reason why that word should show up at all.

The War of Good and Evil

  • “hate” : 28,900,000
  • “love” : 68,300,000
  • “I hate” : 19,800,000
  • “I love” : 52,200,000

If break this down, we get 2.36 times more love than hate on Myspace. But for you Kwazy Conservative Cwistians out there, here’s the Myspace Unholiness Index (MUI):

  • satan OR devil OR 666 -jesus [these results do not contain "jesus"]: 6,240,000
  • “I read the bible” OR “I go to church” OR “Bless Jesus” OR “thank you jesus” OR “jesus saves” : 191,000
  • which means: 32.6 times more Lucifer-related tomfoolery than Jesus speak.

As the greatest representation of America’s youth ever consolidated on one domain, Myspace can teach us a lot about the trends and beliefs of the youth. If someone were crazy enough to take these results seriously, then we might have what’s known among certain circles as a ‘godless swarm of satan spawn’ on our hands.

OMG I hate my parents! Elder Angst Central

Search: “I hate my mom” OR “I hate my mother” OR “I hate my parents” OR “I hate my dad” OR “I hate my father”

  • On the web: 275,000. | On Myspace.com: 46,100.
  • Myspace’s parent angst level (PAL) represents 16.7% of the Global Whole.

As a new outlet for parental angst; no, as THE outlet, I would recommend that the Family Research Council [link] start advertising for its many uber conservative programs on MySpace’s notorious $35,000 a day advertising leaderboard. I think a “Kill the Mom” animated banner with 9mm cursor-hijacking gun replete with sound effects would target a delicate and growing demographic.

Ads from the Seventh Circle of Hades

Appealing to the limited attention spans and a queer desire to accomplish simple tasks divorced from reality, Myspace’s assclown quality advertisements are a spectacle of immense consumer-targeted suffering. It goes without saying that this is just what works. ADvertisers must have tested thousands of ad campaigns on high traffic youth sites to find what works best. It’s a sad reality of the intelligence and judgement of Myspace’s user base that simple goal-oriented games involving tools of destruction and the oppression of the defenseless generated the most revenue. If you take the time to shoot the bunny, push the kid on the swing, or even outlift Arnie, you’d find that these websites often require time-limited commitment-based trial memberships with vile third party services and/or the volunteering of personal information. Here’s what I’m talking about:

(these ads have been shrunk and deanimated to fit on your screen and mind)

Here’s an example of some fine print:

For a ‘free ringtone site’ which offered 10 free tracks after which the user received a $9.99 bill (that’s almost too little to argue about), this fine text was appended: With respect to ringtones, artist names are mentioned for the sole purpose of enabling the public to correctly identify the
track and in no way suggests that the ringtones were produced or performed by that artist. The songs are midi quality synthesized 8-bit pieces of crap that you tend to hear in movie theatres only during the good parts of movies.

BANDS. The Saving Grace

Two Gallants Rock outWith 1.4 million bands hosted for free, MySpace has by nature of its massive youth saturation made itself a venerable resource for musicians. A heaping mound of steaming dung becomes a whole different animal if it also links people with artists in a democratic medium. Thankfully, many bands have a user-oriented sense of style when designing their page that does not afflict their fans with a rare form of mental stigmata due to illegible flashing abortions.

Conclusion

The numbers speak for themselves people. Communication and expression, use and abuse within this MySpace land is going someplace sour. On the positive side, we can thank Myspace for corralling the perps, pervs, pricks and princesses in one place. Can the swamp be saved? Can contemporary forms of community for the youth improve or will MySpace continue to degenerate into a

When we look back on Myspace 20 years from now, we’ll realize that it was the first succesful online community that indirectly allowed its users to sell themselves to each other. This endless self-advertisement is unstoppable and addictive. It’s simple and strangely satisfying. The question is when will the users realize this? The first website that promoted a presentation of self on the net was HotorNot.com. From this point, the floodgates of possibilities opened into unlimited prostitution for the purpose of collecting admirers (and satisfying certain needs). This reminds me that my mom always says MyFace when she means MySpace.

Though I can never fully perfect my comfortably unscientific argument (and don’t comment on this page without reading the previous words, which have been here the entire time), I hope this page will give people who can’t put their hatred of Myspace into words something to send to their friends. I understand that MySpace when used correctly is a fantastic tool for networking and finding like-minded people. I wish it was used for that by everyone. Let’s stop the madness.

It seems this is only the beginning chapter of MySpace’s life according to a New York Times article:

To expand ad sales, especially to big brands, Mr. Levinsohn plans to supplement the MySpace staff with a second sales force linked to the Fox TV sales department. He wants to expand one of Mr. DeWolfe’s advertising ideas €” turning advertisers into members of the MySpace community, with their own profiles, like the teenagers’ €” so that the young people who often spend hours each day on MySpace can become “friends” with movies, cellphone companies and even deodorants. Young people can link to the profiles set up for these goods and services, as they would to real friends, and these commercial “friends” can even send them messages €” ads, really, but of a whole new kind.


Related Links :

continued misc:

Every day there’s a news article where the victim or perpetrator is represented in the article by their stupid MySpace account picture and some tasteless quote from their profile. Do people think police don’t know about Myspace?

From here:

€œIf you don€™t want it to be my business, then don€™t post it,€ Barrington, Ill., police officer James McNamee said.

McNamee, who specializes in Internet safety, said it€™s his job to keep tabs on anybody posting possibly incriminating information on MySpace. It€™s very easy to do so, he said.

He just goes to the €œbrowse€ section, types in criteria for age and gender, then searches for anything suspicious in a five-mile radius using Barrington€™s ZIP code as a guide. MySpace doesn€™t require entering a city or ZIP code in your profile, but McNamee has found that many users do.

€œEverything pops up,€ he said. €œWe€™ll look at the pictures and the names. We€™ll punch up on their site and see what we get.€

In response to the Comments:

April 26th, 6:50am (-8:00)

Serena says:

If all you can or want to say is summed up in handy little acronyms (omg, wtf?), there€™s very little room for original thought. Because myspace is so easy to take at face-value, with nothing to question other than whether these pics are hott, users can get used to approaching their whole life that way – and I think that is a serious mistake.

Thanks Serena. I hadn’t thought of that. I guess the depletion of expression and words longer than three letters go hand in hand.

posted 10:43 on April 24th.

Things like this are common: (comment 77)

dereck Says:
April 24th, 2006 at 8:31 am e

There is nothing scientific about your €œexperiment€. Objectiveness not subjectiveness my misguided little friend. I do understand why you went this route, ADHD does have its drawbacks. For if you had gone a more objective route, your hits would not be so numerous, and you would sink back in to the wasted space to join your so labeled myspace. Everyone has to start somewhere and and from what I observe, you are still at the bottom.

I’m not a scientist and I don’t claim to be one in this article. It’s true that I started with a conclusion and found data to support it, but that doesn’t change the fact that millions of people agree with me and have this tickling sensation in their sense of things they can’t put into words. My Google searches undoubtably returned results that have nothing to do with my topic. It’s impossible to make a value judgement of the people on Myspace and how they use the service, so I relied heavily on rhetorical fabrication. If were to have lied to myself about how I feel about MySpace I think that would have been a greater crime. But as it turns out, I don’t like it all. Maybe I should write an unscientific article about it or somethin.

Wish there were more comments like this:

dirtyJ Says:
April 24th, 2006 at 6:30 am e

First off, I€™ve already seen several comments that call into question the validity of this €œscientific study.€ I don€™t suppose that any of you though, for one minute, that it might have been called scientific in a sarcastic tone? That maybe, just possibly, he was writing it as such to bring out the few people that would completely take it the wrong way. It€™s a very well written article, with some interesting stats. As a minimalist myspace user, I€™ve seen first hand what he is talkin about. Both sides of it. I have several friends in bands that have used myspace to get their music out there, and I have several friends that have the seizure inducing pages. To each their own. As for the language barrier, €œalot€ is not an acceptable €œspelling€ of €œa lot.€ One word does not equal two in this case. There isn€™t a full blown internet language yet, just a shorthand version of bastardized english that people have come to understand over the years. It is by no means perfect, and I personally hope that it eventually fixes itself, otherwise, I forsee a future where the NY Times #1 bestseller is written in nothing more than 13375p34k, (leetspeak for those of you that aren€™t fluent in it.)

DJ

Comment 22: Anthony Says:
April 23rd, 2006 at 11:41 am

you forgot to search for €œemo€ :-)

Emos are too easy to make fun of. Aren’t they a species of Tasmanian flightless bird?

How? Why? I want details.

  1. How I found total users: Google’s spiders are actually unable to cache every Myspace profile, but this is a very close approximation. It has returned results on the profiles that link to other profiles in any way. This means that people who have no friends listed and are also not even one way friends with anyone do not show up in the 88.1 million figure. This does not adjust for the fake profiles, and I’m sure it’s off by quite a bit. In Google, I typed [site:profile.myspace.com inurl:user.viewprofile]. This (I hope) returned all the active profiles. The official # of users in March of 2006: http://www.micropersuasion.com. My numbers include all of myspace, not only within the profile.myspace.com domain, but to more properly capture the entirety of MySpace’s user base I felt it necessary to include the forum posts and general excrement scattered on the beast.
  2. Advanced searches in Google require the Advanced Cheat Sheet.
  3. I didn’t use Myspace’s search because it is slow and doesn’t allow specific searches like Google. It does not give # of results returned. I also hate MySpace, so I limited my time on the actual domain to a bare minumum.
  4. Q. Why did you do this? A. Because it’s what I do.
  5. Q. How get you percentages of thingies? A. Division, dummy.
  6. Q. Are you serious? A. This was done absolutely tongue in cheek. The responses to this article have made me aware that there are people who hate MySpace with every molecule of their being.
  7. I have Greasemonkey and I want to get rid of Myspace custom profiles. Ok, right click here for the script. And here for ALL SCRIPTS relating to myspace.
  8. Ads. Don’t click on them because you can’t. If you must shoot the strawberry go here: Myspace.com.
  9. I hope alienated your cultural identity, social group, or dialect. Tell me how!
  10. “I commented but it didn’t show up!” I disabled comments because there are too many. If you have a thoughtful thing to say, I’ll approve it. Also, some people were doing tricksy script kiddie code that screwed up my website. Grow up.
  11. I installed a comments page plugin so comment away!

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