I’m taking a little different turn then in my previous and completely serious blog posts from last week, I am going to have a little fun this week and talk about something most anyone with a computer and a high speed internet connection are familiar with… I call it the MySpace Effect. If you like the term feel free to use it, hell steal Dane Cook’s “Rock and Roll Quotes” and use it in conjunction with the “MySpace Effect” and you’ll look like a really, really hip cat. If you aren’t sure what “Rock and Roll Quotes” are then you might not be cool enough to read this blog… but we’ll let you stay anyway, just get your act together and study up on your pop-culture you slacker. YouTube is your friend.
The MySpace Effect as I call it is the feeling you get when you log into your MySpace (and for you crazy kids Facebook) to find that you have “New Messages” or a “New Comment” or “New Picture Comment” or any of the other pretty bold letters you see when you log into your profile. For some reason when people log in and find that someone, one of their beloved friends has left them a new comment or sent them a message they get a feeling of euphoria if even for a split second… because at that very moment they are thinking to themselves… “Someone likes me!” Why in the hell as a race of intelligent beings do we let something so small and trivial have an emotional impact on us? We’re just silly bastards that’s why.
The funniest part about it is the message or comment could be stupid or simply derogatory like when you lovely ladies out there get the messages from 20 random men using their smooth pickup lines like “I think ur hot, wanna fuck?” People still feel special when the see the most idiotic or random messages from others, crazy indeed. I know I’ve logged into MySpace a few times and not seen a new message or comment and been like “WTF nobody loves me?!” Yeah, I know it is sad but I sure as shit know I’m not alone when I do that… in the end we are all shallow and trivial bastards. Okay, maybe that was a little harsh… but we do all just want to feel loved, or at least want to know if people are thinking about us.
If you think the MySpace Effect is something new you are sadly mistaken, because the same types of messages and feelings have been around since the dawn of civilization… I guess this is where the whole gift-card market really comes into play. For me it all started when I was a kid and friends would call on the phone or leave a message on the answering machine or even write a short note and slide it through the vent of my locker. Then it moved on to having a beeper/pager and getting paged by your friends, it was especially cool when they entered in numbers and you tried to either flip the pager over or decipher the code using the alphabet on the phone numbers… then it moved on to emails and now we’ve moved on to cell phone calls, text messages and the beloved MySpace messages.
In the end I guess the fact that we are social animals is the main reason for needing this trivial interaction with one another. Sure it is great talking to people but when you receive a note from a friend, a card from a lover or a MySpace message from some random tramp wanting to show you her hot webcam we just can’t really get enough… it just makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Like all things the feel-good of the MySpace Effect probably has an expiration date coming soon, the home phone gave way to cell phones, notes gave way to emails and texts, emails gave way to MySpace messages so what is going to push the “social networking” messages out of the way? I’m just pissed I wasn’t around to invest in Hallmark.
Hurry, someone send me a MySpace message and help me pad my ego a little more. KTHXBYE
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