The Plague that has Consumed Us: MySpace

One fine morning about a week ago, I had the lovely kick in the nuts that is most easily described as the last words that I heard Johnny B (from WLUP 97.9 radio) speak before I left my car. Those fateful words, words that lead me to discover a fact that made me sick to my stomach;

I have a question for all of you teens out there - what is the attraction to the myspace website? It was listed as the 2nd fastest growing website by Google and has over 47 million visitors.

Now, I walked into school after those words and refused to believe them. It must only have 4.7 million visitors, after all... with only 300 million people in the US, there's no way that A. this website could have as much popularity overseas and in other countries, and B. that that many frickin people were consumed by this disease. But no. I checked the facts and was very disturbed. First of all, in this article on MacObserver, I discovered that in terms of "the fastest growing Web brands... MySpace came in at number two with 752 percent growth. Its visitors for November 2004 came in at 2.87 million, and 24.49 million in November 2005." Also some disturbing things I found include a USA Today Article with more disturbing facts and figures. But perhaps the most disturbing is this;

Edwards is so into MySpace that he and fellow high school senior Joyce Pace, 18, recorded an ode to MySpace — rewritten lyrics to the Black Eyed Peas' song My Humps— and posted it on the site.
"Whatchu gonna do with all them friends, all them friends that's on your page," the song begins. "I'm m-m-m-m-make them comment, make them comment on MySpace, MySpace ... OMG (Oh My God) its MySpace, MySpace."

Yeaah. Fitting, I suppose. A shitty song for a shitty website.

It's not just the fact that it's popular that makes me hate it (Yes, I have a myspace that someone made for me because they have nothing better to do evidently. I don't use it and only "sign in" when I'm curious to see who the annoying friend requests are from when they appear in my Gmail inbox.), it's the fact that myspace.com is such a broken website. The whole thing flat out sucks in terms of ease to use and quite frankly, it's a place for underage Internet prostitution rings and a location for pedophiles to hone in on their next target. ..shudder..

Girls use myspace to prostitute themselves by dressing like whores and taking "naughty" pictures of themselves. Yeah, I guess if you want to become a porn star, good start. Otherwise, you're a freaking 14 year old, that's disgusting. Just stop, please. Some people use myspace to "meet" others and start relationships... ookay. That's borderline creepy stalkerish.

People across the world; don't be coerced into a world of scumminess and despair. Don't use myspace. Do something else with your time. Even conversing with people in AOL Instant Messenger is more worthwhile than that...