MrCrassic's Journal: MySpace and Slashdot

Yes, I changed my official website to my MySpace profile. On Slashdot.

From what I have been gathering from the Slashdot community over the last couple of months, it seems as if one reads/writes on Slashdot, it is forbidden law to have a MySpace as well. There are many reasons for why people here prefer this: bad HTML/CSS/JavaScript coding, the emo/depressed majority populace, and so it goes. Slashdotters know of the flaws that are inherent to MySpace and deem the social networking site too amateur for "our" use.

I hope I'm not the only one here to believe this, but I would like to stand up and denote this ideology as clean-cut bullshit.

I have been experienced in computers and information technology (in a roundabout sense) for nearly 13 years now. I have dealt with the many types of common users many people here have dealt with: the jock who thinks the monitor is the computer, the mother who forgets the function of the power button from time to time, and so forth. So because it is these types of people that somehow find a way to create, "pimp-ify," and publish their MySpace, I can't do this too? Is it that my knowledge of computers, electronics, and science in general forbids me from wanting to be "sociable" online?

I like the site. Despite all of the convolutions that exist within its framework and the amount of inconsistencies that users must deal with daily, I think that MySpace is a great place to make myself known to other people outside of my personal network. Now that I am starting to work, I will need a medium that I can be contacted in outside of Facebook or my school. Furthermore, I do not want to be restricted to other college students, since I have my pet peeves against the "college nature" that is sustained in our universities. I like being able to talk to all sorts of people and hear, not deal with, other people's stories and situations. This doesn't imply that I am going to befriend lost teenagers or jocks; I don't associate with them in real life, so why should I make that exception online?

What really bothers me about the Slashdot groupthink on Myspace, however, is the perception that every MySpace user abuses the power of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. I think this is quite harsh, especially for people who prefer not to partake in this kind of customization and especially to the people who actually code their MySpace profile well. Most of the people on MySpace who do design their profiles are the same people who are probably not familiar with the concept of bandwidth or that there actually is a processor inside of a computer. Therefore, they would not mind sacrificing speed for "beauty" as they see it because in their mindset there is no sacrifice to be made. Then again, if most Slashdot users created MySpace profiles today, they wouldn't make friends with those people in the first place, so why does it matter to them how they mess up their web space?

My profile is http://www.myspace.com/over-engineered. Check it out. It's pretty clean, safely informative, and gives a pretty decent detail about me. You will not be killing kittens or losing brain cells looking at it (most likely), I promise. There's nothing wrong with MySpace aside from technical details, so in my mind there is nothing wrong with embracing the subculture, even for a techie-nerd like myself.