Myspace. Is it really addictive?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Myspace, it is an online community of over 14 million people who have joined up since it’s creation in 2003. You can make a profile and display general information such as photos, messages and even videos of yourself as long as it is relatively ‘appropriate’. Once you have done this, you are able to post comments on your friend’s pages, which prompt them to do the same in reply, and the vicious cycle begins.

Two years ago, Myspace in my school was practically unheard of. Now however, every typical teenager has their own profile, including myself. It is almost as common as the infamous MSN messenger which is similar, but seems to be slowly dying out after being the craze of 2002 for people of our own age group.

When you first create a myspace profile, I can see why people do find it fun. Not only do you get to fill in a fascinating form about yourself, but you can also personalise the whole graphology of your page, for example, you can change your background, text font, and general layout to suit your personal likes and dislikes. However, the novelty does gradually wear off. After all, how many times can you really change the way your profile looks and why is it considered fun?! Admittedly, I did mine however I can honestly say it was out of pure boredom and I will not be doing it again. In contrary, many people that I know will change their own profiles weekly and some even daily. These people potentially could be categorised as ‘Myspace addicts’ – a term which is becoming more and more popular within our society today.

Myspace is the new way of communication. As technology grows, changes in such things are inevitable, and at present, Myspace is in. Text is arguably too expensive, phone calls require a certain amount of effort and now, email is just old school, takes too long, and is too private.

What I really want to know, is what is it that makes you need to check your homepage for comments everyday and once you’re on it, why do we feel it necessary to refresh our homepage every five minutes to check for any replies? When asking people why they did this, I often got the same reply – “Myspace is addictive, it’s like drugs” Why do we feel that surge of happiness when we see the ‘friend request’ icon flashing up immediately after signing in on to our accounts? The only explanation I can think of is that all of this makes us feel more wanted in society and that other people are actually interested in our mediocre lives which for a growing minority of people, is spent sitting at a computer waiting for someone to talk, whoever that someone might be.

On top of the exciting prospects of sending random comments to your friends (or not) there are some added risks to myspace. It is growing more popular with our generation but also with adults who wish to get to know our generation, for better or for worse. Myspace, as with any other online society provides an excellent opportunity for certain people who want to hide their true identities, for one reason or another, to do just that. Myspace makes it too easy for people to create accounts using fake names and fake photos – if you don’t know the person outside of the internet, it is impossible to be sure about who you are talking to. In recent years, police have had reports of up to 60,000 missing people under the age of 18 each year, which in my opinion, is enough cases to deal with without the added number of potential victims as a result of myspace.

Of course, creating a profile on myspace does not automatically mean that you will become a victim of paedophilia. If you are aware of the risks involved then hopefully you will be cautious enough to only accept people that you know as friends. This is true for many newcomers to myspace but it is a well known fact that the more you use it, the more you disregard the potential dangers of strangers. Be warned. Just because you use it a lot, does not make you any less liable to the risks involved.

All in all, I do believe that for some reasons that nobody can really explain, myspace is addictive and will continue to be used as long it remains to be so. I do not think that this is a particularly bad thing if you are careful and well aware of the risks involved, as the majority of people simply grow out of their ‘addiction’ to myspace and for the majority of people it really is just a way of extending their social life by that little bit more, and therefore harmless.

Do you think that Myspace is addictive? Why?

Jo Marsden 12KC