SPANKING MY SPACE

After noting the morally dubious nature of My Space yesterday, I picked up the Wall Street Journal this morning to read an article by Julia Angwin and Brian Steinberg about News Corp’s move to defend its expensive new acquisition. According to WSJ, My Space is full of “swinging” teenagers.

Well, surprise, surprise.

Apparently, “My Space users post sexually explicit photos and list activities such as swinging and spanking among their interests. Oh my God. Kids these days are SO much more depraved than their AOL chat room addicted parents.

The problem, as the WSJ says, is that News Corp wants to “retain My Space’s cool factor.” So Rupert Murdoch has two choices: either maintain the sexually dodgy nature of My Space and retain its 36 million users (8th most visited site on the Internet); or do-the-right-thing and instigate a moral clean-up, thereby losing most of those 36 million users and recycling that $580 million he paid for My Space in one of his uncharacterically all-too-human moments of irrational exuberance.

“We’re going to take some pretty dramatic steps to provide industry-leading safety,” said Ross Levinshohn, president of News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media unit.

Cool, Ross, cool. A firm hand, that’s what needed, with the swingers, the spankers and the spanked. Here are some dramatic, if not necessarily pretty, suggestions:

• Spank the My Space swingers.
• Swing the My Space spankers.
• Spank Rupert Murdoch in real-time – as a new media spectacle on behalf of all those poor little old ladies who own News Corp stock.

Speaking of public spankings, everyone should read Saturday’s Financial Times flogging of the blogosphere by the very talented Trevor Butterworth. At long last we are seeing some more intelligent media coverage on the Web 2.0 nonsense.

Butterworth sent me a most entertaining note yesterday about the great Web 2.0 seduction:

“I was reminded of Richard Rorty's liberal utopia where everyone was a poet constructing stories that are useful and interesting freed from metaphysical illusion of truth...Yes the blogosphere, a giant mfa program where all effort is equally applauded. LOL. However - -if you noted some of the comments on the hastily conceived FTMag blog - my guess is that there's a couple of asteroids assuming a trajectory that will obliterate the Internet as we know it... the telecom clamp down and the media corp crack down on content aggregators...

Butterfield nailed it: the blogosphere as a giant mfa program. And not a very good one at that. Iowa State or, worse still, Stanford.

And to learn more about those asteroids which will obliterate the Internet, a spankingly entertaining conversation with Butterfield will appear on afterTV in the next couple of weeks.

Comments

[Will]

Came in via your Weekly Standrard piece. How did you miss this?

http://longorshortcapital.com/how-do-you-know-if-something-is-web-20.htm

A Web 2.0 classic and up your alley. Their MySpace fears seem different than yours. The wave is turning against Web 2.0, isn't it?

[Tim Draper]

what's wrong with Stanford?

[Markangelo]

A masters of fine art from Stanford, a business school, was the implied joke. Iowa state i suppose
has a good agriculture department. Both appear to be Republican implying that conservatives cannot
be artists.

[William]

You know, Keen, I've been in to a lot of your observations. Your ideas about digital narcissim were right up my alley, something I've been thinking about for over a year now. The funny thing is, I started thinking about this kind of stuff while reading Jean Baudrillard. You know, hyperreality, disapearance, the processions of simulacra. Correct me if I'm wrong, but MFA students would probably have him as some required reading and would definately look on the blogosphere as being too unaware of itself. Good artists are not going away. There will always be people who are aware of the systems they are operating within and create works that expose the system for what it is.

See, but here's the thing. Unlike yourself, most intellectuals, if they're going to get in to ethical or moral questions, will at least expand on their notions, and not resort to saying things like "porn is bad".

Do you have any evidence that there is an increase in teenage sexual behavior due to the Internet? Is this talk of swinging or spanking nothing more than fantasy? Is this actually even happening? If it is happening, is there anything wrong with it?

I'm not even going to comment on this idea of the Internet going away.

Please, if you're going to comment on the idiot masses having a voice and drowning out reason and truth, please make sure you're not one of those idiots first.

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

Danah Boyd's presentation on MySpace data
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2006/02/19/aaas_presentati.html
http://www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html

[Chris Hallett]

I especially liked your ³A Nation of Paris Hiltons², since I share your distaste for the omnipresence of porn on the web. It is
probably the web's most off-putting feature for a parent.

And it's important to emphasize, as you did, that we are not just
talking about a few pictures of naked women, or the equivalent of the Playboy channel or something, but the most extraordinarily degrading stuff. I recently had to fine-tune and test the "Content Barrier" that I installed on
my son's minimac, and visiting some of the sites that he had been
prevented from accessing was enough to make me wish that the iron curtain had never fallen! I never saw so many glamorous Czechs, Poles, Hungarians
and Ukrainians, eagerly degrading themselves with a kind of bestial
frenzy-- performing the most sordid acts and smiling for the camera at the same time!
This is what capitalism and technological progress has brought eastern Europe? (It reminded me of the sequence in Goodbye Lenin when the young hero crosses to west Berlin to go into a western-style sex shop. It
was funny. But it was surely calculated partly to make western audiences wince. And it worked!)

In any case, I am impressed by your outspokenness. In an age of
political correctness, when "democratic values" are touted with equal fervor (and opportunism) by both right and left, it is a hard thing to speak up for any part of "elite culture". (Although by this stage of the debate, when the
team-written audience-tested mass-marketed products of Hollywood have been defined as "elite culture", one is inclined to despair.)

[Danny Motion]

that Boyd piece is very good. Shows the conceit of Keen's argument. He simply doesn't understand young people. He thinks they should be reading Orwell or Plato or Machiavelli. Truth is that kids are more mature these days than adults. They use My Space responsibly. Boyd has really researched the material. She's a real scientist. Keen has no evidence to back up his points

[ron]

I don't care what anyone says,you are the freshest voice come out of Silicon Valley since Paul Krugman

keep up the good work!!

[Tony Narlock]

Yeah, we need to get the evangelicals down there to clean stuff up.

The internet has this "dirty" feeling about it. Not from a moral stand point -- it's just so many people, and they all get a full-access package to everyone. They have those emoticons and make comments about those poor misguided girls shaking their booties. Look beyond those MSN smileys, we don't have loser and winner anymore. It's either the person likes you, or they are a hater.

I vote AK for internet pope.

[sam]

Never used it to look to be spanked..lol...We use it for viral marketing of our software that automates emails and adds friends. But they need help in keeping the site from all those errors that come up
sam
http://www.myfriendbuilder.com/

[Jeni]

My biggest complaint about the pornographic material that takes place is it conflicts with the call for equal rights that women want. However, if women insist on degrading themselves for the pleasure of men how on earth will we ever receive equal status!?!? I would like to have equal status and it infuriates me that there are women out there who are degrading me by making all of us objects. Anyway, I fully agree that Myspace needs a spanking, my children certainly aren't going to be allowed to use it.