Finally got a facebook!

I got my Westridge email account back, and we all know what that means. Staying in touch with everyone from SYA just got so much easier! No, of course I won't bother with the silly old email account. The gold -what I really wanted- is a Facebook account. And baby, I finally got it. And I'm addicted! It's so much prettier than myspace, so much cleaner and more ad-free and less crowded.... oh wait, that's because all the people who used to flock to friendster and facebook and the like are now swarming in troves to myspace. They even have a little handheld myspace now, so you can check while you're in gridlock traffic, or as your airplane is pulling off the runway when the flight attendant announces that you may turn back on all electronic items, or when you're in a dreary conversation and you can pretend you've been paged..... the possibilites are endless!

But really, where is the real winner? A nice, clean site where you might have a couple other friends, like Facebook; or an ugly site with dozens of pop-up ads attacking you with flashing colors and scantily clad women, but which offers a network that includes pretty much every single human being with access to a computer. Myspace is allowed in public libraries, as a testament to its cultural impact; it's not just tied to the upper middle class, or even to the very talented, musical upper class - this allows people without computers of their own to still have an account and check it. Movies no longer just have site pages at warnerbros.com/movietitle - now they have their own myspace, as do celebrities, bands (oh wait, that's the long-forgotten original purpose of myspace!), and even a few politicians (Check it out - I am so serious).

I wonder if there were people who refused to use the telephone? Or refused to drive cars? Or refused to take airplane flights? Women who refused to vote? And yet those were all cultural phenomena that took hold, and are obviously not going anywhere soon. Well, maybe cars will soon be disposable with rising fuel prices and this stubborn disinterest in creating hydrogen fuel cell cars, but that's beside the point. These are all things that society basically relies on. I guess the telephone is the closest example, and now things like video conferencing.... they're methods of communication that have really taken hold. Is Myspace the next email? Once upon a time it was snail mail, then telegrams, back to snail mail, and then someone finally invented the computer, and shortly thereafter internet came along, and with it, email. Which has served everyone quite well for the past decade. But I've got a hunch that email is definitely going to suffer a blow in favor of myspace. It's a pretty powerfully advancing fad, and I still can't decide whether or not I'm opposed to it.

posted by Holly @ 10:52 PM