2008: a myspace odissey
Myspace has recently launched impact, an online space for U.S. presidential candidates to show how web-savvy and socially connected they are. Most candidates (15 as of today) have created their myspace profiles and quickly started accumulating “friends”. Clinton, for example, has 132,191 friends, McCain 40,890 and Obama a record 167,175. Giuliani has a private profile: you have to add him as a friend to access his page.
At first glance, this initiative might appear modern and in line with the current social networking fever: myspace can be thought of another campaigning tool that has, in a way, a more democratic and less obtrusive feel than many other media vehicles. After all, everyone is allowed to open up myspace accounts and politicians will do anything to reach voters. However, looking at things in a little more detail, you realize that nothing about myspace impact is actually fresh.
Myspace is no longer simply a service for underground bands to showcase their music or for friends to connect online. Recently, it was acquired by a media giant that performs business in a “Citizen Kane” fashion - the way of the tv, the radio and the newspapers. The profiles of these politicians thus exist in this paradigm, not in the open world of the social web. They are sad and 100 years old.
When referring to social networking sites, Danah Boyd talks of “loss of context”, referring to the fact that being myspace friends does not represent any longer a meaningful connection. Therefore, a user’s myspace account loses context as the user keeps adding friends with whom there exist neither a virtual nor a physical relationship. For this reason, myspace cannot be longer used to perform a relevant social network analysis: it has no context. The very popular (and lame) comment “thanks for the add” is just a result of this. If Danah laments user profiles progressively losing context, the myspace profiles of politicians go way beyond: they are born out of context. For example - Mr Giuliani: what is the rationale behind accepting my friend request? Do you really think I would vote for you? I am not even a registered voter in this country! Or, Mr Obama: did you manually accept all the 167,175 friend requests you received, or is there a grad student in the backstage clicking away “accept” for you?
Browsing these candidates’ myspace profiles reveals another - even more disgusting - feature: all the comments left by users on their profiles are supportive and affectionate. Stuff like: “Hillary, you rock”, “I love you Rudy, you got my vote”. This is pornography. The great Zizek often refers to movies as “pornographic” when their plot and screenplay are constructed according to the conventional cinematic narrative: you know what to expect next - just like in porn movies - you may get a couple of unexpected twists, but in the end, you know where it’s all going. Politicians’ myspace profiles are pornographic in the same way.
