Momus Bashing MySpace

The problems of political correctness:
"To join MySpace or not to join MySpace...?"

You can read Momus bashing MySpace here. Gee, I guess now I'm supposed to feel guilty about having our own presentation there. Mike Not's and my friend Sakke called MySpace "social ring porn". I suppose it's another fad like iPods now and hula hoops in the 50s.

I don't know about this, then. Face it, the sad fact is that the whole world is these days owned by megacorps and greedy oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch. It has an effect on everything: what you read on papers, see on TV and movies, what you eat and drink, how you spend your leisure time. And so on. Everything bears a corporate stamp in these glowing halcyon days of neoliberalism and market economy. Politicians keep flapping their gums about the virtues of entrepreneurialism and free enterprise, which is a big joke when corporations do their best to swallow the small fry (that is, private entrepreneurs with their own small businesses) in the end, and we are eventually heading for one McDi$neySoft megacorp ruling it all. You can do your best to put your filters on, but mostly there seems to be no running away from that.

Then, could we also see a positive side too here? Sociologists keep talking about New Communalism (as opposed to old-fashioned Communism), which has its various incarnations everywhere where people put their collective efforts together to create something benefitting all, and -- this is important -- not necessarily gaining personal profit out of it: Linux operating system and Wikipedia as some of the most obvious examples. Could it be understood that even corporate-owned communities like MySpace could potentially create similar links to empower people: for example, in MySpace's case connecting private citizens, musicians, artists, fans and so on, in putting them into direct contact with each other, and letting also those voices to be heard that might otherwise be shunned, making people aware of those? Browsing MySpace I've noticed it's far from any homogenous community: everyone seems to have their own little slots there in the sweet spirit of anarchism -- alongside music and arts people already mentioned the whole political and religious spectrum and all possible mainstream and fringe and hobby groups represented from American gung-ho Republicans and Jesus freaks to Greenpeace, gays and Satanists. There are also loads of spoof pages doing nasty parody of people like Murdoch, Bush and their ilk. There's no way to put a lid on or control all that motley crew.

Well, before you get me wrong, I don't want appear as any MySpace apologist (or a Murdoch fan, vade retro!), just trying to weigh both the positive and negative sides here. OK, I know I'm naive. And us with our little Kompleksi duo, we do have our own selfish and opportunistic reasons involved here at the end of the day: to promote our music, which happens by creating contacts and also possible fanbase. Damned if we try, damned if we don't?

Comments:

DJ Orion (in Finnish)

PCL Link Dump

Oh well (blows a raspberry). Why do I get a feeling that people are taking these things far too seriously? We can live with MySpace, we can live without it. For us it's just the icing, it's not the cake.