Goodbye, MySpace! Inspired by Miseryguts, who cancelled his MySpace account in October, I decided to cancel mine. At 11.22 today, I pressed the fateful button. It already feels good. I considered shutting my account at the beginning of the year, but the mercenary within convinced me that it would be a useful way of publicising That's Me In The Corner, so I stayed on. I duly sent a bulletin out to all of my thousand or so "friends" (some of whom are actually my friends, or at least acquaintances, or pop stars and comedians I have met or worked with, so I don't wish to insult anyone with those speechmarks), saying that my book was out. This clearly had no appreciable effect on sales, and in fact made me feel a bit dirty. I'm not one for group emails, so why I thought this was OK, I don't know. The demons of commerce had infected me. (Hey, I thought, struggling indie bands send me news of their latest gig in Harlow every day on MySpace - why not do the same? There's no harm in it.)

Anyway, I found the strength of will today, and I'm free.

To be fair to myself, I only opened a MySpace account in May last year in order to have a race with Richard Herring, to see who could get the most "friends". He overtook me almost immediately, and had doubled my tally within a month. He is more popular than me. I accept that now. (Mind you, his job is to stand in pubs and clubs and try and get people to like him, so he tries much harder than I do, hiding behind the printed page and other comedians.)

I don't have a problem per se with social networking sites, and I certainly have no problem with the people I know who use them, but for me, it had turned into yet another timewaster. I am my own boss; if I spend work hours tinkering about on the internet, it's only my money I'm losing. And anyway, having a blog is enough of a commitment, and far more enjoyable and personal in terms of keeping a dialogue going with like-minded souls. (And some unlike-minded ones.)

That said, deep down, part of me suspects we're all going to hell, and convincing ourselves that random people are our "friends" when they are merely collecting the equivalent of football stickers, just like we are, is not only insane, it's detrimental to the national conversation and to the useful evolution of the species. I love the internet, but at least with personal blogs and specialist forums, you choose where to go and whom to converse with. On MySpace, especially when your "friend" total passes the couple of hundred mark - and it does, as these things are truly viral - it's just unmanageable. In light of yesterday's controversy about touting for work with group emails, I'd say it's actually a bit more focussed to do so via MySpace, because you have to be "accepted" by someone to be their "friend" first (just typing that sentence made my head hurt). At least when I shamelessly sent a bulletin about my book coming out, those who received it had either requested my "friendship" or "accepted" my request of the same human concept. We had something, however tenuous and virtual, in common. It makes sense to get involved if you're constantly gigging, as a band or a comedian, but I'm not. Also, and this is the crucial factor, MySpace looks fucking terrible. It's slow and ugly to negotiate, and those who "pimp" their pages are only doing so within fairly strict aesthetic parameters. Also, the more complicated the design, the slower it is to load. I've been on people's MySpace pages on a BBC computer and they've crashed Explorer.

So farewell, then, "friends" who don't know me, or think I still I have a show on 6 Music and want me to play their record. Farewell to unwanted messages from soft porn webcam sites which have nothing to do with "friendship" and to people who replace their avatars with messages about Madeleine McCann. It's been real.



Actually ...

Labels: MySpace