Tuesday

Recently, Sunshine decided she was interested in investing a little time in the social network MySpace. She'd been signed-up there for a while, but never had the time to really begin the arduous process of persona management until last week. She seems to be enjoying herself immensely.* Then, a few days ago, a friend of mine devoted a little text to condemning MySpace over at his own public forum.* Fair enough: I have once upon a time spit vitriol in the name of social network franchises like MySpace (or Friendster, or Facebook, or many others). They all just seem so fictional and time-consuming. But this recent one-two helping of opposite opinions made me want to examine my feelings about the subject. I blog, the components of which can be boiled down into three parts: there is content consisting of produced material, an ability for users to create public interplay through commentary, and a contextual user profile. Importance is apportioned in roughly that order: content, interplay, context. If I were to force an arch nuance between my blog and the classic network site model, it would be that, while the content is by far the largest of these parts here, within MySpace, etc., the profile assumes the lead, closely followed by comment interplay, with content distantly trailing. These sites also employ a fourth, rather more meta, component: the ability to also orchestrate information by the subtle but public control of what information goes where. Within MySpace, users have the ability to limit group interaction as another method of persona building. This is interesting to me, but nothing with which I am interested in taking part. I want to create content, and let that content stand alone. I do not want to manage a persona of crafted group interactions. Therefore. [Cavin]