2006: A MySpace Odyssey

This may be difficult, perhaps impossible, to believe, but until a few days ago I didn't exist. Sure, I had all the vestiges, properties and trappings of someone who could pass for being real: an apartment, a Social Security number, consciousness, outstanding college loans and a truly enviable collection of Xbox 360 games. Now, maybe that's enough to satisfy anyone who wants to reside in just boring old physical reality, but on the only plane of existence that still matters anymore, the Internet, this somebody wasn't anybody until I created a profile for myself on MySpace.

With a simple blue-and-white logo resembling a line of armless, neckless people receding into infinity and a slogan that simply promises "a place for friends," MySpace.com is the web's most wildly successful experiment in social networking, offering an environment that's sort of like an electronic Rolodex crossbred with pubic lice. By establishing a personal home page on the site and inviting other users to link their pages to your own, you not only create a chain of lifelong chums, fraternity brothers, ex-girlfriends, co-workers and vague acquaintances you can view at a glance, but you instantaneously connect yourself to everyone who inhabits those people's networks. With each new face you add to your gallery of friends, you open yourself to a new world of potential pals, hookups, tastemakers and creditors.

While that may or may not describe how MySpace works, it doesn't explain what MySpace actually does. When you consider all the diverse technologies that have crossed your radar screen in recent years, you'll likely find that the innovations successfully embedded in your already complicated routine are those that perform specific functions—whether the novelty is a search engine like Google, which in half a second calls up more than 30,000 web pages matching your "sexy greased midget" search, or a device like the iPod, which allows music to infiltrate every last square inch of your life that was once blissfully silent. MySpace may be the lone exception to this rule: It doesn't tell you what you're supposed to do with it; it just offers itself and lets you figure out what the hell it's for.

In the meantime, a virtual nation of MySpace cadets is hooked on it. As of this writing, the website is home to more than 64 million different profiles. Parents fear it, at least one college has considered banning it, and Rupert Murdoch liked it so much that in July 2005 he paid $580 million to add it to his News Corporation media empire—not bad for a company that web entrepreneurs Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson founded less than three years ago, in fall 2003.

Still, is there anything MySpace can do for me that I didn't know I wanted it to do? Can it make my life simpler or better in any way? Can it make me a more popular, dynamic person and maybe even help me meet a few Playmates along the way? There's only one way to find out. I need a MySpace odyssey of my own.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that I created a MySpace page for myself some months before this story begins. I put my name on it, attached a picture of Boba Fett, the fearsome bounty hunter from the Star Wars movies, and then I let it sit there. Not a single fellow MySpacehead invited me to be his electronic friend. But late one Sunday night, as I prepared to create a proper profile that truly reflects me, I realized that this humiliating lesson had taught me the most important rule of MySpace exploration: Always let your fellow users know exactly who you are—or at least who you wish you could be.

This rule is reinforced by the sheer amount of personal data the site asks you to submit when you create a profile. The requested information is broken down into eight different categories, including "Interests & Personality," "Background & Lifestyle" and, strangely toward the end of the list, "Name." These are further divided into dozens more oddly generic and shockingly precise categories—everything from your gender and zip code to your personal heroes to your sexual preference and marital status ("Swinger" is one of the options) to your religion ("Wiccan" and "Scientologist" are among the multiple choices). There's even an innocuous tab labeled "Body Type," essentially a euphemism for "Are you fat?" The numerous requests feel tedious and intrusive until you make the same realization I did: You can answer these questions however you want, truthfully or otherwise. Want to reveal to the world that you're a five-foot-six Jew who's as slender as a washboard? Go for it. Would you rather tell everyone you're a six-foot-three Hindu who's built like an ox in springtime? No one's stopping you.

The bigger stumbling blocks for someone like me, who has spent the past 30 years defining himself by his cultural likes and dislikes, are the sections that ask me to codify my favorite music, films and TV shows. With every decision I make, it's impossible to avoid feeling guilty about the beloved pop artifacts I knowingly add to my roster and the ones I deliberately o+mit. I probably haven't watched my copy of Taxi Driver since Jodie Foster reached adulthood, but I like the adrenalin rush I get from telling people it's in my home video library. And while deep down I may still harbor a childlike affection for old Scooby-Doo cartoons, I also don't want millions of Internet surfers to think I never finished puberty.

But what kind of sadist would ask me to boil down the contents of my CD collection to fit within a box no bigger than an index card? Each addition to or subtraction from the inventory of bands that will now permanently represent me in cyberspace is more heart-wrenching than Sophie's Choice: Even though I've been to a dozen Phish concerts in my life, is it really a band I enjoy? Will Sid Vicious rise from the grave to hunt me down if I leave the Sex Pistols off the list? Will my MySpace neighbors think I'm over-the-hill if I confess to liking Neil Diamond? If Franz Ferdinand makes the cut, will I look like that one college kid who still hangs out at the high school parking lot?

After more than three hours of this cultural calculus, and after shedding a silent tear or two, I have reduced my roll call of (continued on page 130)MySpace(continued from page 62) musical surrogates to some 26 artists (including Neil Diamond). I round off my profile Èith a snarky, self-referential quote from Woody Allen's Manhattan: "He was given to fits of rage, Jewish liberal paranoia, male chauvinism, selfrighteous misanthropy and nihilistic moods of despair." Now I think I am ready to blast off into MySpace—and I am probably wrong.

In return for my creating a profile on the site, the kindly folks at MySpace reward me with one token friend on my page, the same friend everyone starts with: MySpace president Tom Anderson, a handsome fellow with a cleft chin who looks reasonably happy given that he's exactly my age but probably 1.2 billion times wealthier. On his own home page, Anderson (a.k.a. MySpace Tom) says he's into, among other things, "WWI aviation," "Whitney Houston (particularly The Bodyguard soundtrack)" and communism (its history, though apparently not its practice). He seems like a nice enough guy and I think I'll keep him, but I don't want to depend on MySpace's charity. I want some friends of my own. Specifically, I want to meet the people I already know.

But as I type their names into MySpace's search engine, many of my known associates from the three-dimensional world don't appear to be on the site. Of my friends who are old enough to remember Family Ties and Reaganomics, the ones who have MySpace profiles also tend to have superhip, youth-oriented jobs; they work in public relations, run their own record label or (in the case of one lucky bastard) are employed by video game companies. I'm a bit astonished to discover how many seem to be closet Goths, their home pages decorated in jet-black color schemes with slogans declaring, "Nihilism is hot."

I'm also humbled by how polished and lived-in everyone else's profile seems when compared with my own. Whether they possessed a latent genius for creating perfect home pages on the very first try or honed their sites through months of trial and error, many of my friends—even the unemployed ones—have MySpace profiles that feel like the people behind them. One especially enterprising go-getter self-deprecatingly plugs her most recent efforts by commenting about herself, "I wrote a book, but I hate to read." (Of course there's also a link on her page to buy that book from Amazon.com.) Another thoughtful, literate pal has perfectly encapsulated his laid-back sensibility by setting the Talking Heads song "This Must Be the Place" to play quietly in the background. And all of them have evidently put great care into selecting photographs of themselves in which they look attractive or cool or at least unself-conscious about the potential for millions of people to be looking at them this very second. I just slapped on an old picture of myself in a T-shirt that reads Tijuana: City of the Future.

What really concerns me about the minimal effort I have put into choosing my photograph is a little icon labeled "Rank User" that appears beneath it. Anytime I click on this icon, I am whisked away to MySpace's answer to Lord of the Flies—a kind of shooting gallery where other MySpacers' photos appear at random and I must impulsively rank them on a scale of one to 10 (10 being hot and a sad, lowly one being cold). I've spent hours on end playing around with this feature, and I don't mind telling you I am a shallow son of a bitch. I can't recall ever giving anyone a 10, and only the finest female specimens can hope to receive even a nine from my fickle trigger finger. Without so much as a second thought, I've given out fives and sixes to cheery sorority sisters in floppy college sweaters and mousy, modest types doing their best to look sexy for the camera, yet any woman in a bikini is certain to receive at least a seven from me, as is any man who clearly appears to be serving in our military (at least until I figured out one can customize the feature to avoid looking at dudes). I have also turned up some truly scary shit in the course of these random searches—photos of guys in gang colors flashing their guns, photos of people doused iÈ what I hope is fake blood, photos with captions that read "~*~Homecoming night at Brttanyz!!!~*~"—but what scares me most is that each time I shoot down a fellow MySpacer's blurry, halfhearted portrait with a two or a three, millions of equally superficial users out there could be doing the same thing to me.

As of this writing, the woman with the site's highest average ranking—a solid 9.0, with more than 1.2 million votes—is a MySpacer who goes by the handle Laila69, an exotic, long-legged brunette of Middle Eastern ancestry whose photo depicts her in a provocative stance, dressed in a delightfully small terry-cloth bikini with tassels dangling in all the right places. The picture is so polished, a professional photographer must have taken it, yet in her profile Laila69 claims she is "working on my Ph.D. in Epidemiology & Biostatistics, and I work for the CDC as an Epidemiologist." Though she is sorry if she doesn't answer your messages, she explains, "I AM VERY BUSY and got talked into this MySpace thing by my cousin. " How many epidemiologists do you know who put smiley faces at the end of their sentences?

Just a couple of notches below Laila69 in the MySpace rankings is fineasshaylesexycaitlin (read it slowly), whose photo is simply a supertight close-up of her breasts and whose profile boasts, "Im 5'9, 125 lbs, blond, tan and i have a set of double D's. i love to have a good time, which can mean just about anything you want it to ;)." And a few rungs further down the ladder is Hot Angel, whose topless bikini photo gives MySpace's no-nudity policy a healthy, well-deserved challenge and whose profile clearly states that she would like to meet "bitches that will please me." But before you get any ideas about sending her a love letter, her profile also includes this note: "FUCK OFF, GUYS! STOP WRITING ME!"

Though it may be impossible to have any meaningful communication with such ladies as Hot Angel and Laila69, and equally as hopeless to determine if they actually exist, you shan't be disappointed if you come to MySpace to see photographs of women in various stages of undress or casually flashing their goodies at the camera, because it seems to happen more frequently here than at Mardi Gras. And while MySpace's mission may be to help bring people together, I have to believe the opposite principle happily encourages these women to behave so daringly. The extra layer of protection the Internet affords—that women can put these pictures out there without ever having to interact with the people looking at them—empowers them to do all the things they'd never try even behind the protective curtain of an arcade photo booth. It may be undercutting the central philosophy of the site, but I have to say I like it.

Still, none of these side explorations has resulted in my earning any MySpace friends. It's actually a somewhat daunting process to ask people to join your network, because there's no way to communicate with them in real time. (While I was reporting this story, MySpace's instant-messaging feature was listed as "busted.") This means that the only way to bring a new companion into your virtual circle is to send him or her an add request—an electronic missive asking your prospective pal to agree to the invitation—and then hope you get a response in the affirmative or else suffer the slow, silent sting of rejection as hours and days pass without your ever receiving an answer. There's a kind of pleading desperation inherent in these requests (not to mention the short e-mails that often accompany them that almost inevitably read, "Add me!") but also a corresponding sense of satisfaction that comes when one succeeds. By far the most frequent comment posted on every user's home page is the MySpace mantra "Thanks for the add!"

My ability to make these requests under a digital cloak of anonymity gives me the freedom to invite whomever I want, and if they don't want to be my friend, hell, that's their problem. In a fÈurry of activity I fire off add requests to people who genuinely are my friends, then to people I e-mail from time to time, then to people I haven't seen in months or years, then to people whose social circles I move in but to whom I'm too intimidated to speak at cocktail parties, then to a guy who lists Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts as one of his favorite books, because it's one of my favorite books too. Then, Summoning the kind of courage I can never seem to channel in real life unless alcohol is involved, I send out some exceedingly optimistic add requests to a few Playmates who I know are in the MySpace system. And then I sit back and wait for the responses.

Now, I could recount to you all the garden-variety associates of mine who quickly respond to my requests—about a dozen of them in a 48-hour period, which is the fastest I've ever made friends in my life—and the well-meaning if occasionally mysterious comments they leave on my profile as if they were signing my high school yearbook. ("We'll always have the Chateau Marmont," one writes, alluding to a story I dare not explain here.) I reconnect with old friends, revive some dormant connections and even get invited to something called the Olympics...of Evil!

But let's not kid ourselves; things don't really get exciting until the Playmates start replying. Julie McCullough, Miss February 1986, is the first to answer my invitation, which is appropriate since she's Playboy's unofficial ambassador to the MySpace nation. Julie openly refers to MySpace as cybercrack and has been happily addicted to it since she signed up to stay in touch with friends in America while she filmed a movie in Canada. She also maintains the site's Playboy Playmates Only group (trust me, you're not getting into it). After calling me on the phone to make sure I am who I claim to be, she offers some helpful advice for electronically enticing members of the opposite sex to join my network: Don't tell them they're hot. "Hot is what you say to a 15-year-old," she explains. "If you say, 'You're hot,' you must be under 25, and I'm not e-mailing you back."

Courtney Rachel Culkin, Miss April 2005, is also on the site as much as an hour or two a day, responding to messages from fans and keeping up with the 1,732 (and counting) people connected to her profile. Of course they're not all really her close personal friends. As she explains to me in an e-mail, "I let people I meet along the way know that I'm on here, so some are, and some are just people requesting me. You know the deal." When you look like Courtney, guys will inevitably say some pretty provocative things to you, a phenomenon she says MySpace only exacerbates. "They have more balls on here! lol." But she says it's also easier for her to handle on the website than it would be in the real world, for one simple reason: Delete.

Kimberly Holland, Miss October 2004 and quite possibly the hottest (sorry, Julie) woman alive, got involved with MySpace for a very different reason, though it's one that consistently presents problems for Playmates. She was fed up with all the women on the site who were pretending to be her. Though she still encounters imposters from time to time, Kimberly says, "I just drop them a message—not a rude one—letting them know I'm aware of what they are doing and that I have already contacted the authorities. They usually disappear mysteriously the next time I check. Ha-ha!"

But Kimberly's strangest online encounter may have been with the current girlfriend of her ex-boyfriend, a woman the creep cheated on her with. Rather than engage in a virtual catfight, Kimberly and the new girlfriend met and actually became pals on MySpace, and Kimberly eventually invited her to a Halloween party. "She came as a good, sexy nurse in white, and I was a sexy Goth nurse in black," she says. "It wasn't planned!"

I suppose it's possible that the Playmates are responding to me out of sympathy or pity; they see a faint glimmer of innocence iÈ the eyes of that eager boy in the Tijuana T-shirt, and they're just trying to be polite to him. But isn't it also possible that MySpace offers them an additional layer of protection, one that lets them pick and choose whom they interact with on whatever terms they want? Even if it means spending hours a day on the site—a chore they clearly don't seem to mind—they really are reading the messages sent to them, weeding out the pretenders, the players and the picture collectors and, at least in the case of one respectful, slightly awestruck fan, writing back. All I know is that I now have three Playmates added to my circle of friends, and there's probably a lesson in there somewhere.

But not everyone I encounter on MySpace is so eager to sing its praises. A longtime friend of mine who lives in Los Angeles and whom, for reasons that will soon be obvious, I'll refer to as Judas insists the site is not merely a dangerously time-consuming distraction but the end of the evolutionary process as we know it. As Judas explains in an e-mail, it all has something to do with MySpacers who casually agree to join each other's networks even though they've never met in real life. "You can't just let someone who doesn't know you add you; once the social contract breaks down and you've got ugly people mixing with good-looking people, what's left but social anarchy?" I thought the purpose of the site was to help connect people who wouldn't otherwise make eye contact with one another, but Judas predicts that casual MySpacing will one day lead to the network's downfall and that "there will come a moment when, like deer quivering and flicking up their ears toward a noiseless noise in the woods, the first adopters will suddenly realize they're spending their time blog-ging and adding and gawking at the same alarming photos an army of 14-year-olds are and, quick as deer, they'll dash to the next trend. And before you know it, we'll all follow."

In the few days I've spent immersed in MySpace, I've already noticed how the site has begun to permeate every second of free time that remains in my schedule. I check it first thing in the morning, a few times at the office, a few times when I get home and even when I get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. My increasingly uncontrollable compulsion to see if anything new has popped up on my profile—new friend requests, new e-mails, new testimonials—has also yielded a new repetitive-stress injury to my right index finger.

I've also noticed how some potentially disturbing and just plain fraudulent people manage to cross my virtual path even when I'm not trying to find them. While I am on a completely innocuous quest to find some of my old college classmates, a MySpace search engine leads me to an alumna who now goes by the name Mistress Kalyss and is currently earning her living as a BDSM mistress in Amsterdam. I can't say I knew Mistress Kalyss at school, which is probably a good thing since her profile declares that she is "a true believer of Womon Supremacy" and, though she is currently in a relationship with a live-in slave, "a Goddess should live surrounded by slaves to obey Her every whim." Just one click away from Mistress Kalyss is her friend Fetischiska, a fetish model from Germany with 4,270 friends of her own, many of whom look like characters from Clive Barker horror movies and atleast one of whom posted a picture of an actual—possibly human—heart on Fetischiska's profile as a Valentine's Day note. In cyberspace no one can hear me run screaming from Fetischiska's site.

Then there's the baffling e-mail I receive from an inquisitive MySpacer who claims to be a blue-eyed blonde named Kristen, even though it's addressed from the profile of a short-haired, bespectacled brunette named Alice. Kristen tells me up front that she's surfing the site using a friend's account and that she "enjoyed reading and looking through" my profile but what she's really looking for is "someone cool who can spendÈtime with me, hang out, go dancing, just having fun. And sometime, maybe even sharing some intimate moments." All I have to do is write her back at a Yahoo e-mail address, which, like a salivating dog, I do almost immediately. Then just as immediately, Kristen e-mails me back another tantalizing message saying she wishes "we could have gone on a first date on Valentine's Day. That would have really been romantic!" She also includes a link to what she claims is her personal blog but is really a shrewdly disguised solicitation to get me to sign up for a series of commercial porn sites. You may not be real, Kristen, but you still found a way to break my heart.

The more time I spend on MySpace, the harder it becomes for me to ignore all the unsubtle methods the website employs to get me to part with my money: the banner ads for external dating sites and the links to profiles and video clips that are generally nothing more than commercials for that weekend's new 20th Century Fox movie release or the latest half-baked Fox sitcom that will be canceled after four episodes—precisely the kinds of promotional opportunities that had Rupert Murdoch salivating over his purchase of the site, I'm sure. Even MySpace's much-celebrated music section, where major artists and unsigned indie bands alike can post their songs and connect to new listeners, seems like a marketplace that's heavily weighted in favor of record labels rather than musicians. How does it benefit a bona fide icon like, say, Bob Dylan to have an official MySpace page that offers only short clips of four of his most overplayed tracks and links to the profiles of such irrelevant performers as Living Colour, Journey and John Denver? And why should the official profile for a breakthrough act like Britain's Arctic Monkeys, who owe their rapid success to Internet promotions and viral marketing, carry a disclaimer that reads, "This site is not set up or managed by the band. Therefore this site should be classed as a 'fan site' and nothing more"?

The more I think about what my friend Judas said, the more I realize that MySpace will probably, eventually, inevitably undermine itself. But before I explain why, let me first tell you a story.

Way back in the summer of 2003—ancient history in Internet time—I signed up with a website called Friendster, a once wildly popular social network that was trying to do exactly what MySpace is doing today. I created a profile for myself, attached a photograph, listed my favorite movies and TV shows and connected to a few friends. Then I realized I could do nothing else with the site, and I—and what felt like several hundred thousand other people—promptly forgot about it.

Many months went by uneventfully until I received a totally random, slightly scary, slightly exciting e-mail from another Friendster user—an adorable blonde girl who wanted to know if I'd meet her for a drink some night. For reasons I can't yet articulate, I said yes, and nearly two years later she and I are together and very happily so. And we still don't use Friendster.

None of this is a problem, of course. The problem is, now that I'm on MySpace, she is on MySpace too. And with the click of a mouse she can see when I'm logged on and when I'm logged off, who my friends are, how many Playmates are connected to my networks and whether I am a member of a MySpace group called NYC Hookupz. She can post adorable little notes on my profile at any time, and when I don't leave adorable little notes for her in return, I get not so adorable notes that read, "Someday Dave will write a comment for my page. Oh, am I giving you a guilt trip? You're dating a Jew from Long Island. Deal with it." What was once supposed to be my gateway into a universe of infinite possibility is now, in her hands, a highly sophisticated boyfriend-monitoring device.

This is ultimately my problem with and my verdict on MySpace: Not only does it not simplify my day-to-day existence, it actually complicatesÈmy life in ways I could never have anticipated. It gives vast multitudes of people—some desirable and some unwanted—instantaneous access to me without actually giving me the time in my schedule to maintain all those relationships. And as far as I can tell, it doesn't offer me any new services that my cell phone and my e-mail account don't already provide, except that it emboldens me to contact some people I would never otherwise reach out to and enables some unsavory characters to do the same to me.

After about a week of immersing myself in the site, I reach a kind of tipping point in my MySpace usage. I no longer feel the need to check my profile every minute or every hour, and when I see a new message or friend request pop up, I don't feel compelled to respond right away, if at all, and I don't feel the slightest pang of guilt for letting it gather a little dust. When my real flesh-and-blood friends need to track me down, they know how to find me, and when they post clever comments on my profile, they don't give me any grief if I take a few days to acknowledge them. And at long last, a solitary MySpacer has finally rated my profile photograph: a solid 7.0. Not the hottest of the hot by any standard, but still a score that means I'm 70 percent as attractive as a MySpace surfer can be—and a score I'm sure can only go down if I stick around much longer.

So maybe it's time to go out on a high note. Good-bye and thank you, MySpace, for everything. We had something really special together and I learned a lot about myself, but for now I think I just need my space.

What kind of sadist would ask me to boil down my CD collection to fit on a digital index card?

Her photo is simply a supertight close-up of her breasts, and her profile boasts, "I love to have a good time."