I am about to delete my myspace, as it is increasingly rediculous how much it has become a part of my life.

Except I'm afraid to, and I refuse to do it unless a couple of my friends do it with me.

Group suicide?

Hoping to find a real social networking site.

Of course, myspace isn't really that. Just a spam board of "Look at my pictures" and "leave me comments".
I also used to to find dates (or have dates find me), but I've broken my need to find people online to date.
(Growing up queer in mighty Mississippi, I couldn't really ask guys out at school - it became a habit, but that's another topic entirely).

www.myspace.com/jubilee_please
is my page.

i think it's a mix between visual vomit and relevant information, but that's pretty indicative of my person.

but yeah, i predict i'll delete it within a matter of weeks, as soon as i muster up the courage.

knowing that i have to have courage to delete a profile is kind of frightening, but who said suicide was easy? ^_^

You know what?
I'm deleting it today.

I finished the Wired article, and it's rediculous, Myspace is.

I'm doing it tonight, after I post several bulletins with a link to the Wired article.

Thanks Nick/Momus!
You've set me free!

You'll meet much smarter people on Click Opera! We should have regular meet-ups! Hey, we do, there's one tonight at the Whitney, and one on May 20th at Tonic!

Oh no, art and personal pic stealing!

Dance, monkeys, dance!

Hum, not as good as Brian Dewan's slideshow of Leviticus.

this is hardly tangential, but what the heck.

"the monkeys know they're going to die. so they make up gods and worship them".

now i deliberately omitted "the monkeys want answers" of the beginning.
i'm just so bored with the whole concept of "of the fear of death arises religion!". since may be at the root of religion is not so obviously fear, but it could be something more like curiosity.
i'm an atheist-bigot emotionally, but with a heartfelt nostalgy for religion. my relationship to religious people is messy & complex and something i have to deal with 'most every day, thanks to my job. anyway, i feel religion as a kind of proto-science. got started out as a good, though vague, intention to interpret and understand. then later it all was of course refined into a perverted hierarchy-complex like most great ideas. think of such basic concepts as a soul or transcendence or whatever heavens and netherworlds. what would i make of a person first living, then dead, without any external modern day info? first he moves, breathes, then he doesn't. starts to decompose. something must have left. it is interesting how in many languages the words denoting a soul or spirit and the word for breathing share an etymology. as in finnish henki=soul,spirit and hengitys=breathing. i like mind games like this, if i weren't told, what would i think? like stars are so obviously some kind of holes and beyond is a world where it is always daytime.

+
"the monkeys shave the hair off their bodies in blatant denial of their true nature."
not all monkeys.
http://imomus.livejournal.com/110357.html

I have to say, I'm not an atheist. I used to think I was, but I began to notice that actually, I wasn't. I tend to find atheism limiting: "I'll think this far, feel this far, speculate this far, but no further." That kind of thing. On the one hand, I just don't think we know enough about anything to hold to such a default position as if it is some kind of unbiased truth. On the other, I feel that religion is as natural as anything else in existence, and is not the enigmatic aberration it is often painted as. I don't really think of myself as religious, but I suppose I have less objection to the notion of 'mysticism'. In the end, though, it's all interpretations of actual experience. What many atheists fail to realise is that for religious people, God actually is a real aspect of their experience of life.

So, in terms of the film, I certainly don't think it's perfect. It's a little smug, in the sense of: "We who made this film are cleverer monkeys than you, because we know we're monkeys." Actually, this smugness suggests they don't know they're monkeys at all. And, what's wrong with being a monkey? If anything, the human monkey shows how 'experimental' and full of potential the whole of life is. 'Monkey' in the sense used in this film, is just as much an artificial concept as 'human'. Why favour the one above the other? I also think there is a slight lack of compassion in the film.

However, it is interesting, succint and thought-provoking, a kind of snapshot of where the human race is now situated philosophically and otherwise.

"What many atheists fail to realise is that for religious people, God actually is a real aspect of their experience of life."

despite usually identifying myself as an atheist, or maybe more accurately a kind of fervent pantheist, i've a very weak and adaptable persona that easily yields to more powerful forces. like being constantly exposed to hard-core catholics causes uncanny, at times wonderful shifts in my mindset. i might find myself pondering through such things as "what a funny, beautiful thing, god created sleeping!" maybe kind of like as conversational raw material, but almost completely fogetting the ifs included, you know, what a wonderful thing if i were to believe in it.

i don't know. i reconcile myself with religious people or constructions and place myself in those systems by thinking of myself as possibly a reprobate, a person with no soul injected, who just happens to be predestined to doom = no afterlife. to my mind it is all in a fairly nice accordance. anything could be.
believing is just something i don't do, it's not a rational choice.

all that said, some people still might find me religious after all. i'm very ritualistic, which to me comes out as investing meaningless things with lots of meaning and an overall devotion to things. my almost daily sauna-rituals would be superfluous if the purpose were just not to stink too bad.
life itself is one big meaningless ritual, though.

Here's an early encounter between Japan and America:

American Stories.

I never caught on to the myspace phenomenon. I can't say it ever intrigued me.

Those magazines do intrigue me though. I'll have to take a gander.

I see MySpace as a fad; there's a lot of fluff and eyesore design that turns off anyone that isn't a musician or is over the age of 30. The ease with which one can vomit forth content on that place is attractive, but it'll reach a critical threshold soon and drop in popularity.

I seriously contemplate LJicide at least once fortnightly.

Hype:

There's also Unruly, which features great small-press writers like Pia Z. Ehrhardt, Kevin Sampsell, J. Robert Lennon, Deb Olin Unferth, Kim Chinquee and more, plus comix from myself, Alex Robinson and Shannon Wheeler.

http://www.batemania.com/unruly

Liked the wired article.

Speaking of ghosts on the web...

I do have a myspace... but I practically never use it. I maybe use it once a day, if that much. It's good for keeping track of bands you like and ... well... I'm not sure what else. The only reason I've not deleted it yet is because a good chunk of my real life friends don't use LJ and I don't really bother with Xanga, and everyone has MySpace, so if I want to put up a bulletin that says "beach trip over spring break", chances are everyone and their mother do have the ability to check it out.

However, most of the bulletins that I see are wasteful and quite frankly, annoying chain bulletins that I refuse to take part in.

I've almost deleted it on occasions, but can't get rid of it on account that I'd be using my time better if I didn't have it. So while the positive is fairly miniscule, it's enough to keep me from being putting my page out of it's misery.

my Barnard friend committed MySpacecide, then LJcide....then, in a freak car accident, she DIED. so....using my special breed of logic [or lack thereof], i've decided i can NEVER kill my myspace, livejournal, or for that matter, Mixi. Friendster on the other hand, i'm all about suicide bombing.
&hey i recently befriended Digiki and Toog via myspace.
i will also be at Tonic, so i'm covering my virtual and real-life bases.

i'll check out A Public Space for the Murakami interview.

actually, this post has inspired me to go find more click opera denizens on myspace!

I saw you added me at MySpace. How nice.

what would a free alternative to myspace be? i mean i have to say that buying magazines at around 8 to 9 a pop is hardly a convenient replacement, especially considering who is on myspace.. mostly either kids under 18 or kids with bands who need a place to put up mp3s and not worry about bandwidth... not that it will survive forever either way.

I just deleted my Myspace account.

I never really used it much anyway. It was just something I started because like you, I felt I was herded in to it. But now I'm glad it's gone.

How long are you going to be at the Whitney? I ask because some time in June I'll be heading down from Toronto to Connecticut to visit my cousin and I think I may make a stop in New York to go to the Whitney to see the exhibits and meet you.

It's all over at the end of May, I'm afraid!

Then in that case I'm going to make the trek to NYC next month just to go to the Whitney and meet you. And perhaps catch a broadway show. I've read about some of the exhibits and I'd be a fool to miss them.

The Colonial est un plagiat total de Purple !

-O.

Too bad your Friendster profile is real. If it weren't, it could be friends with Harold Pinter.

Ok, MySpace needs a serious visual makeover, Tom hasn't got great musical taste, and shock! horror! - giant corporation thinks they can use it to buy into the viewpoints of influential teen and young adult tastemakers.

Why do I have the feeling that if MySpace originated in Japan, "Tom" was some equivalently taste-free otaku who invented it in his 2-tatami, and the investors were, I dunno, Softbank or something like that, we'd be reading a long treatise about how it was an extension of the Japanese construction of the social self (as in Momus' own review of that movie recently, where the man is guided on his date by voices from the Internet, basically an updated Cyrano de Bergerac innit?) Because it comes from the West and embodies some aspects of Western culture (particularly the aspect of starting off a business quick and dirty), does that make it worthless?

As another commenter said, it's just a tool. It seems to have found its niche - kids, bands and music fans - and is successfully launching bands into the popculturesphere with its MySpace Records imprint. No-one is forced to use it, much as we're not forced to blog, either.

As for buying a new magazine, i cannot help but think "yet another rich kid's Nathan Barley-esque navel-gazing, clique-promoting hobby that really doesn't add anything new to our cultural discourse," but I've seen maybe a few too many of those around these days. Plus, do I want to contribute to deforestation? No.

agreed.

Now that's some good, clear thinking.

Fuck's sake, I really get angry when people's hipster-hate makes them trumpet Rupertfucking Murdoch as something preferable. To me, that's the worst kind of inverse snobbery.

I actually *like* hipsters (how unhip of me!)--so long as they've got decent manners and aren't too smug. However, I have yet to meet anyone under the age of 30 or so who I would truly consider "hip", simply because the definition of the term has been perverted (as I wrote about here).

Does it make me an inverse-snob? -a reverse snob? I dunno, but I'm not pleased about MySpace and the way that it's essentially banalized communication. And don't even get me started about how much I hate music clips that automatically start playing when you visit someone's page. As if no one is already listening to their own music!

I'll be the first to admit hipster-hating can be like that pot/kettle cliche. For some reason over the past decade or so people mistake the creative, nervy weirdos for those super-trendy, catty types (the ones who roll their eyes at anything that's not their reflection and make sure you know it). I'd blame Suck.com for that, just to dust off an old Internet chestnut.

Right on.

I'm not hating on anyone. And god knows I'm not defending Rupert Murdoch. Sure, it would probably better if MySpace had Khoi Vinh in charge of the design, or the Flickr team (no ads then), and for it all to be owned by the Dalai Lama. But it ain't, it's in the world, you can deal with it or not, use it or not.

Sure, MySpace is full of banal genre-specific clone bands, but in reality, all these bands were already out there, MySpace just sort of collects them all in one virtual place. I will say there are some people out there making good use of MySpace - small galleries, artist-run spaces and events, etc. - as a cheap and cheerful way to manage address lists, inform people of upcoming gigs, etc.

It would be lovely if it were all free and anonymous (or completely user-supported and ad-free) but someone has to pay to keep the servers running. And anyway, no-one's forced to use it or look at it, but if you want in, the price is kinda posted at the door.

It seems disingenuous to knock it, because obviously *some* people find value in it, and the arguments presented really seem down to a question of taste. To tell people to give up the admittedly populist MySpace in favour of something relatively obscure and probably only of interest to a very few people living in the gravitational field of New York City seems a trifle...I don't know...elitist?

I mean, if you think the premise of MySpace is good but it's not done well, then get some programmers together and start your own competing social-networking / music-sharing site...and nothing says people can't be on MySpace *and* read The Colonial, culture is not a zero-sum game.

very nice podcast. the idea of cyber death is really interesting.

i added you on Friendster. I felt dirty just logging in. ugh.

I don't see why I would delete my MySpace to read the magazine swhen I could much more easily just close the window.

Most people with a clear grip on reality do not spend hours and hours on it. I average maybe twenty minutes a day. I average about fifteen minutes a day staring at my ceiling and eight hours a night sleeping, during which I am completely useless.

It's just a website. I like giving my friends cute and uplifting comments. I still find time to read poetry and study and other activities of superior artistic worth.

Anyway, weren't you defending Japanese food blogs a little while ago? I don't see that much of a difference.

Despite these protestations, I must agree with you that the MyDeathSpaces are really frightening. I think that I'm going to entrust a friend to delete my internet apparatus if I die.

From the looks of the last few months, your persuasive powers are showing a record yield. Have you considered leasing yourself to a political consultancy?

Number 4 this week on the LiveJournal hot 40, baby! Hillary Clinton can call me any time she likes.

You deserve the ranking. Your journal is consistantly well-written, and interesting, and often quite amusing.

Been meaning to do this for some time, actually. Thing is a damn nuisance.

(click)

There, that's better.

wasn't the connection between mark e. smith and wyndham lewis brought up in the last issue of dot dot dot? i'll have to go out and find it again, but i'm pretty sure about it. anyhow, fun writing here!

~r

social network vizualisation - "map" of LiveJournal
http://ljmap.net/index.jsp?name=imomus&zoom=50 - you on the map

Hey People!
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