Hey, MySpace or Yours?

When I was a kid I was always looking for my spot. When I was young it was a tent made out of blankets, which hung around my bunk bed, complete with a handy flashlight so I could still read The Poky Little Puppy. As I grew older it was a tree house, a miniature Indian wigwam built out of small pine trees, my own Coleman pup-tent and finally my first car. Each of these places was all my own, my own sanctuary with either a secret password, a strong knot to bar intruders or a shiny new key.

This desire for a place uniquely our own is a longing that the creators of MySpace understand. They have carefully created a place that parallels this hideout, while including networking, music, blogs, photography, and lucrative ads. They have created a site worth a reported six billion dollars(http://tinyurl.com/6j3vmh).

From a scholastic viewpoint, I have found MySpace to be a valuable tool. Winter of ’07 I took my first Creative Writing class with Professor Bill Teem here at Chattanooga State. After completing each writing assignment and revising it in class workshops, I would post the story on my MySpace blog. (http://tinyurl.com/6djpap) There I would get even more feedback from my MySpace friends. The next semester I took the Advanced Creative Writing course. In this class I was able to share some of my older, improved stories with new friends.

MySpace has also proven to be a great form of communication. In several classes I have taken, my classmates and I communicated through MySpace when we were working on a class project. Sometimes we did this because E-learn was working slowly, but more often it was because we knew the other person was going to check their MySpace, and the message would have no chance of going unread.

Another benefit I especially enjoy with my MySpace is keeping in touch with my older friends. One of the goals I first set in college was to make at least one friend in each class I took, and to keep in touch with that person. Though some of them have graduated, moved or simply changed completely from the time I knew them, MySpace is a friendly medium for us to keep in touch and share about where we are and how our lives are going.

The “arts” section of MySpace is also immensely helpful. As small local bands (http://tinyurl.com/6f3mos) have their own music on their site and they can include show information and news with hopes for the “big break”. These sites are just as important as the written arts that set a pattern in this community. Some of my friends who are incredible amateur photographers (myspace.com/av8tqr) artists, (myspace.com/sourgasm) and playwrights (http://tinyurl.com/6e57ld) can broadcast their work to the masses or just to their friends. Either way, there is so much rich talent ready to be stumbled upon.

In every spot you claim as your space there can be some trouble and sticky situations. I got into trouble for reading past bedtime in my bunk-bed tent, and fell out of my tree house numerous times. I stumbled into a nest of wasps while building my wigwam, almost got sprayed by a skunk in my pup tent, and wrecked my first car.
I have had some bad times on MySpace as well, friends stab each other in the back, ex’s causing drama, and the flood of spam, often pornographic could be disconcerting. However in any situation we adapt. We learn to live and learn to block the unfriendly, filter the mail and make something great out of a simple networking site. We make it a space uniquely our own, a place to blissfully waste hours, and a place to carve a niche for our talent.

MySpace. Where’s yours?