Social Media Disease
Saturday, August 9th, 2008
Before the clock rolls over to midnight, I thought I’d get a post up for today. I just made some substantial updates to my MySpace page. Now you can listen to Ginsberg perform America or Kerouac read from On the Road while scanning my hobbies and a descripton of the type of music I like to listen to (go ahead, knock yourself out.)
I’m not sure what it is – maybe it’s the format – but when I’m making additions to my page, there’s a voice that comes in that sounds awfully familiar to my internal editor. He whispers that this business of joining the social media discussion is especially trite and trivial. Maybe I don’t understand the medium fully yet. Or maybe I don’t care to see my identity as it’s spilled out on the page – a hodge-podge of incongruent thoughts and random media selections.
My friends’ pages capture who they are and what they believe in so powerfully and succinctly that I imagine them clicking save with a sense of inward pride in having expressed themselves so fully – and humorously. But I’ve managed to create a dull bookworm with poor taste in music and film, who idolizes popular literary figures to a point of worship, which is a latent indicator that he might never become one himself.
Part of the issue I have with my page is that I want to keep it somewhat professional, so I’ve excised a great deal of MYself from MySpace. I think that seriosuly undermines the purpose of the site. You won’t find any photos of my family or me on our recent vacation excursions. Comments that friends post will be genteel and far from profane given their understanding of why I began the page. Most of my friends that I will link to will be serious-minded professional colleagues who are interested in establishing connections, not seeing images of my kids heading off for the first day of school. This is all in addition to another fact: I have a bit of an identity crisis as a writer, living in the suburbs and writing magazine articles about happenings in the urban core.
So, the troubled MySpace saga continues. When I’m comfortable with myself, the page will come together. Until then, MySpace is the perfect realization of who I am at the moment.
