WhoseFriends?
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What have I done? At this point in my life, I need to concentrate. I have stuff to do, including a sitcom to finish. Of late, I have weaned myself off two online forums: Arctic Monkeys (now overrun by 12-year-olds who write in txt language about how how hot Alex Turner is!!!!!!!!!) and NotBBC's Comedy Forum (nobody seems to post on there for days at a time any more). I have even managed to control my own blogging habit, posting only when I have something to talk about and, more importantly, when I have time. My life was getting back on track. And then came MySpace. I know it's bollocks unless you're a band trying to get famous, and I know the word "friends" has become meaningless due to its proliferation, and I know that some people use it as a kind of dating agency, and I know this is the honeymoon period you enter in the first weeks of membership that simply cannot last for ever, but I am hooked.
Look at my friends! I have 166 friends! (It's probably more than that already.) Method Man out of the Wu-Tang Clan is my friend! (He isn't.) The Pixies are my friends! (They're not!) Morrissey has yet to become my friend! (He hasn't. And even if he does become it, he won't be.) I am friends with people I have never met! (I'm not.)
Richard Herring, my arch rival, is more popular than me. He has 352 friends! (No he doesn't. Actually, he does, in real life. He does gigs and goes out to nightclubs in Hereford and plays poker and attends parties thrown by the stupid men's magazine Maxim, so he does actually meet a lot of young women and old, poker-playing men, but are they his friends really?) Like me, Richard is supposed to be writing a sitcom at the moment, yet he's online at MySpace all the time. The reason I know this is because when I'm online, his "online now!" icon is always flashing. That means he is always online. I'm not.
The Day The Music Died - the reason, after all, we got sucked into MySpace in the first place - has 226 friends. This is actually more meaningful, as, you have to assumme, they're people who listen to and like our radio show. The page acts as a meeting point for these people, and gives us the chance to interact with them, which is great. (And something new and happening to talk about on the show.) I'm almost talking myself into thinking MySpace has its uses and that it's fine for me to keep checking for the "NEW FRIEND REQUESTS!" icon, even though I know that it means "NEW RANDOM PEOPLE REQUESTS!" At least I have now, one and a half weeks into my membership, stopped accepting every new random person request. There are two people I don't like the look of, both pseudonymous, and I haven't accepted them. I accidentally accepted Noel Edmonds, knowing it wasn't really him but thinking it was quite funny, and then I deleted him, as I decided posing as famous people, even jokily, is sad and pointless. That makes me discerning and grown-up about MySpace.
I feel better for having shared this with the group. I'm actually not having a mid-life crisis. I feel quite optimistic, I still get an enormous amount of pleasure from small things like birds and the occasional tradesman who actually turns up and does the job they have been paid to do, and I think I look alright in a t-shirt for a man of 41. Also, Method Man is my friend!!!!!!!!!
posted by Andrew Collins @ 7:10 AM
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I was a member of a Morrissey chat forum for a while, until I was cyber-stalked by a lonely Morrissey fan. I was also barred from a Catholic online forum for being "anti-Catholic" (so even people who've never actually met me don't like me!) Now I talk to people on blogs, and hope that people will visit mine. Hmm.
I deleted my myspace account because of the self-loathing it generated, but then succombed and reset it all up again, then realising it was becoming too much of a distraction tried to delete it again, but I had tried to change it to a different email account previously and having mistyped the address, somehow locked the account so it can never be deleted! So there is little hope for me.(You can set your myspace account to hide your flashing 'online' you know).
Little bit alarmed by Jamie Cullum on your friends page, Andrew.
Are you a fan of his work?
I was really proud to be in your Top 8 for a day Andrew. But my heart broke when I was bumped.
This is the evil of the Myspace Top 8. Putting your 'friends' in order of preference. It's all very Mean Girls...
I too was in the top 8 for a while, until I was bumped for celebrity chums! ;-)
I'm now in the awful position of never having had the joy of seeing the 'New Friends Requests' icon, which I guess makes me a lonely loser. I was delighted, though, to see my profile pic appearing in your top 8 photograph for the 'TDTMD' page on this thread. Fame at last!
I feel like a great-grandparent looking at myspace - don't understand, but hope you're enjoying yourselves. It looks like a precursor to us being hooked up to computers permanantly, our minds being downloaded and the now-sentient computers of the web moving into our vacated bodies.
I guess you've got to admire their black sense of humour.
I succumbed to MySpace too.
I feel sorry for the people on my friends list who get my bulletins which may not apply to them...but I am too lazy to mail people individually!
I am currently too excited for my own good as I'll be at Download this weekend...which will mean a round of buletins of photo links next week...sorry myspace friends!
Apologies to any friend who was bumped from the Top 8 to make way for Jamie Cullum and the Pixies. I'm just showing off, even though you'd have to not understand MySpace to be impressed. I deliberately put your pony on the DMD page to make up for bumping you, Doug!
You're all my friends, all 5,366 of you!
I really don't understand MySpace at all. What is it all about? Can someone explain it to me?
Much obliged to you Andrew. I must tell Erik tonight when I get home!
Peter Gabriel's one of my best chums now! What are the chances? Very good of him to sit on his pc all day, accepting requests.
Also, imagine my surprise when the wonderful, but sadly departed, Sandy Denny accepted my request! ;-)
Thank you for making me your bestest MySpace friend - I am even above Richard Herring! I am the best. Although I will probably be bumped off at some point I assume...
That's just 'cos you've got a sultry profile pic Alice! Not that I'm bitter or anything. ;-)
Sultry!! I chose that one to tone down the sultry! Oh well...
What's a girl to do, eh?
What's a girl to do, eh?
As I said in a previous blog reply I am a friend of Larry David thanks to myspaz. The good thing about this is that is genuinely is him. (I'm now friends with three of the people I list as heroes on my profile.) The bad thing is that he is not really my friend.
And Alice may be sultry, but I am windswept!
I had my first bit of Myspace spam from somebody called 'sexikatya' who is, apparently, a 'striper' ... :-)
ians - I was looking to see if Larry David was on myspace, but couldn't be sure when I looked (is it the account named 'jewishcomedy'?). I'm not sure if it's just me getting old, but I find searching on myspace a complete pain in the arse - I never seem to quite get the results I'm expecting.
I like the way that friends of friends can make friends, like a friendly fractal...
I'm now friends with Tom Robinson, Billy Bragg, The Divine Comedy and the whole of 6Music, including your good self. And yet, I bet none of you will pop into the Nevisport bar for a pint on Thursday night. Mines an Extra Cold Guiness by the way.
The only thing that causes me to worry is...
Isn't myspace part of the great empire of Mr Keith Rupert Murdoch?
Hello Prudence...please keep going to gigs so I don't have to.
To go back to Jon's question: what is MySpace? It's an online community that's free to join. Once you are a member, with your own home page, you can request the friendship of other members, which, of course, includes famous people. No band worth their salt doesn't have a MySpace page, usually run by a lackey if they are famous, or by themselves if they are not, as it's a great way to get your music out to people, with a facility for anyone to make tracks avaiable to listen to for free. Once someone requests your friendship, you decided whether to accept or deny. There's nothing to stop a 14-year old boy requesting that Morrissey be his friend. There's nothing to stop whoever runs Morrissey's official page denying or ignoring that request. Or accepting it. This creates umpteen networks of friends. Yes, it is owned by Murdoch, but unless you click on the ads, of which there are many, mostly for dating sites, you are at least giving him no financial recompense. If you're the sort of person who thinks that inputting your details on any website is akin to signing up to an ID card, stay away. Also, avoid if you have work to do. It's hard not to get sucked in, even if you an intelligent, grown-up human being, as I believe everyone who posts here is, and look how many of us have been corrupted. Easy to avoid, hard to get out once you're in.
I'm not getting it.
I have a profile (had it for around a year now) but am only linked to people I have met or swap work with (or dead literary heroes - or rather their estates)...
I don't really get the part about making friends with strangers or with famous folks' management companies.
Also - is it ok to like Jamie Cullum now?
Thanks for putting me straight, Andrew. I'm not sure I need any more distractions. But there's always room for one more isn't there...
MySpace is probably harmless enough, though I hate the popularity contest/picking teams aspect of it; that was bad enough at school. But it's not a question of giving Murdoch money, it's a question of giving him information in a ready-to-use format (read the very interesting MySpace small print...). It seems pretty clear that when News Corp bought MySpace last year, they didn't altogether realize just what they'd got their hands on (it was more a 'we're not a major player on the net, everyone else is getting ahead of us' kind of kneejerk). I don't think though it will be long now though till they do. It raises all sorts of interesting questions about the internet and cross-media ownership. Witness the Murdoch press's ceaseless promotion of the myth (at first not acknowledging their ownership, although to their credit they have now finally started to do it) that Arctic Monkeys/their fans used MySpace to distribute their demos. This myth, for instance, has now achieved the status of accepted 'fact', to the extent that even the Guardian wouldn't correct it when I pointed it out to them (despite another article in the same edition of the paper making precisely the same point!).
Doug, Larry David's profile is at (oddly enough!) http://www.myspace.com/larrydavid
MySpace could save you all a lot a time if they just made you all friends with each other. What a wonderful world it would be.
Emily, you make a valid point about cross-media ownership. As an official friend of Friends Reunited (I wrote the official book about the site and know Julie and Steve Pankhurst from my association with that project), I was alarmed when they sold up to ITV. Part of me wants to cancel my membership as a protest, but I haven't done it yet. (I don't know if you read the old post about a linen basket, but I went to a lot of trouble to have my name taken off the John Lewis database after mistakenly giving them my details in order to collect an item from their depot when I didn't need to.) I get so much spam anyway, even with a mail filter on, I'm almost of the mind that, what the hell, they've got me just by dint of having an email address.
Incidentally, call me thick (as I am thick) but I had no idea that the Top 8 Friends on MySpace were actually in order of preference. No offence, Alice, but I kept you up because you were the first to be my friend, but I actually don't think of the Top 8 being in any "order", it's just eight "friends" selected from the pot to be displayes, hence my shallow enthusiasm for putting up the famous bands. Moving them about is now surely one of the more pointless activities of my life.
At the end of the day, it's pointless, but fun. What enthuses me is the was this blog is growing into a little online community of its own. Modest, but intellectually stimulating, respectful to others and witty too. Thank you all for continuing to lurk here. (And you don't have to give your details to me to post!) The Murdoch/ownership issue requires further discussion . . .
ians - thanks for the larrydavid pointer. Kind of proves my grumble about the damned search facility. Entered 'Larry David' and didn't stumble across the correct site. Hey ho.
I don't really keep my top 8 in an order of preference either. People would start to moan about that if I did!
I've been sucked into MySpace and I'm not yet sure if it's a good thing On the one hand I have managed to find a couple of old friends on there that I'm now in touch with after too many years. On the other hand however, is the feeling of anti-climax I get when, having been informed by Outlook that I have a new MySpace message and getting all excited, I find it's a half naked man with a minimal grasp of the English language who 'lovs u and wants to be you freind.'
I still keep checking though.
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