Screwed by Social Networking
Monday, May 28th, 2007
This week’s question:
The tiff between a MySpace user and the Obama campaign made us wonder— ever felt screwed by a social networking site?
Next week’s question:
SMITH is stuck on Stuck in the Middle. What’s your most vivid middle school memory?
I like sharing (and spying!) but I kind of hate community sites. Flickr has taken the wind out of my sails. Last year my husband and I took a trip to Shanghai. We posted photos in realtime. Look, a temple! Yummy dumplings! Pig kidneys hanging in an open storefront! Wow, I thought. I’m one of those people, posting their exotic travel pics as they go. Later, when asked what I’d been up to and I said I’d been in China, every last person said, “I know, I saw it on Flickr.” Why take photos if you can’t belabor friends your travels?
Who are Angela and Moses on Myspace? I get messages from them every day! They’re so friendly! Angela tells me about the latest Myspace skins and Moses tells me about the hottest parties in New York. Unfortunately, when your significant other is looking over your shoulder seeing a ton of messages from Angela, a bunch of her more sexual friends, and a chiseled black guy inviting you out, she can get a little suspicious on so many levels.
This is more a matter of my own blatant bad luck, but facebook, the ever expanding, ever branching young folks networking site, just so happened to make itself more revealing right when I posted a pretty embarrassing note about myself. It was the kind of note that you only want a few of your nearest and dearest friends to read. By the time it was up, though, “Rich Knight just posted a new note” was available for all to see. Too bad for me that the note I wrote was about my recent impotence in bed.
In a one-two punch of extreme nerdiness, a few of my friends like to celebrate birthdays with photo scavenger hunts at the American Museum of Natural History. One of the required items was a picture of a team member posing exactly like a statue, with bonus points for creativity. And that’s how it happened that, amidst shots of the oldest dinosaur fossil, deepest-dwelling sea creature, and largest uncut gemstone, the entire photo-sharing universe was treated to a carefully posed Rachel, grinning and topless, in the Hall of South American Peoples.
You know the end of a relationship, when you know it isn’t working, and you think the girl knows too, but you haven’t quite gotten around to pointing out to her that you don’t want to be together? So around then, I started going to parties without her, claiming family stuff, work, or guys’ nights. Turns out that stuff’s a lot harder to get away with when your friends think “great seeing you last night” and “man, you were wasted at Tracy’s party” are vital additions to your MySpace page. Even harder when you’re chatting Tracy up in the background of your buddy’s kegstand video.
My boyfriend created a MySpace to promote a bar that he’s opening. One night he told me that some woman took his logo from his profile and made him a banner, a slideshow, and other promotional graphics. He said he had never met this woman so he didn’t know why she was doing this. About a week passed and he mentioned her again. I got curious, found her among his friends, went to her page, and saw this comment posted the day following a night he had spent “working at the bar”: “Good to see you out last night. Jeff is cute! So he spent the night, did he? Glad you had fun!” Apparently, we all got screwed by MySpace.