On my travels.....

I thought I’d set this up, as it might be useful to anyone else who’s as bad with the internet as I am.

I am, for want of a better term, a cyber xenophobe. I have an irrational fear of the three W’s, especially the World and Wide ones. I like to stick to the sites I know and trust, mainly my email and the BBC. Anything else seems a bit daunting.

Recently, a certain online teacher has convinced me that it is a choice of becoming a cyber tolerant being, or perishing in the increasingly barren wasteland of offline communication. So I have decided to set out on an exploration across the fibre optic threads. I hope to broaden my horizons, and maybe even discover something about myself.

I’ll circumnavigate close to what I call the ‘Eclicktor’, a central line along which the hottest sites of the moment gather, but I’ll also try to explore the backwaters. I’ll write up my findings on this page.

I thought I’d better start close to home, and the thing everyone in north London keeps talking about is Myspace.


Myspace

Surfing the internet for friends used to be reserved as a social function for the more introverted amongst us. It’s not coincidence that the same guy who can tell you the power to weight ratio of the space ship used in the original Star Trek series, is also pretty nifty when you need help fixing your wireless connection?

Well it seems the tables have turned, the same people who wouldn’t have even made the ‘just-to-make-up-the-numbers’ list for any teenage get-together, are now throwing the coolest parties in town.

I was feeling rather left out, because not only did everyone seem to know about it, they all seemed to have a view on it. So I filled out my application form for a ticket, and surfed on up, fashionably late of course.

It was all quite welcoming, there was no awkward moment of do I know anyone here, or does everyone think I’m one of those slightly scary people who go out with the sole purpose of ‘networking’.

Tom Anderson came over to say hello before I had even had time to add a photo to my personal profile, great, they’re not judgemental. I felt quite touched, considering Tom has 75322125 friends not counting me, it was good of him to make the effort, he’s obviously what the Americans call a ‘people person’. It’s Tom’s party and being greeted by the host somehow puts one on equal footing with the rest of the guests, a sort of acceptance of your presence, giving you a currency with which to mingle.

Perhaps understandably Tom doesn’t want to talk much, but then this party has been going on for the last 3 years, so he could be forgiven for being a little drained and less than enthralled by the prospect of some idle chit-chat, I don’t think they’ve invented cyber coke yet, and anyway there’s almost certainly some more guests waiting to be greeted.

Back in July 2003, along with his friend Chris Dewolfe, Tom, wanted to create a social networking site for new bands to profile their music on, Myspace.com was born. Those for who the idea has worked include Lily Allen, slightly grumpy singing daughter of comedian Keith, who if you’ve picked up a newspaper in the last 3 months you’ll doubtless be aware of. Using Myspace.com as a spring board she’s launched what looks to be a successful career in pop music.

As of March 2006 Myspace.com became the worlds most popular English language based website, with over 20 million users in the UK alone. The site boasts a new user rate of 230,000 a day, and was bought in July 2005 for a reported $580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

The first person I meet is Tams, she’s twenty, Canadian (a fact she’s “very proud of”), and tells me assuredly that ‘The only difference between martyrdom and suicide is press coverage’, profound, but not really my kind of person.

So I go in search of someone I know to have a profile on Myspace. His space is fairly happening, there’s music, photographs, a personal profile, which isn’t wholly consistent with what I know of him, and some explanation of his opinions, particularly on London. The little bar at the bottom tells me that he has 47 friends, that’s many more than I have in cyberspace, or anywhere else for that matter. Also, they all seem to quite like him, or at least they all have thoroughly nice things to say about him, according to one of them he is the undisputed king of the London graffiti scene, who’s been ‘merking (the capital) from day’, quite an accolade.

A little jealous of his eminence, I go in search of some new friends of my own, better yet, why not look through his and poach some of them. This is where the experience begins to take a worrying turn, within five minutes I have found about two thirds of the people I grew up with. I have an encyclopaedic stew, although this is north London, so probably a risotto, with all the ingredients for learning who’s doing what, or who.

I’m terrified. It’s not the fact they’re all so connected that scares me, it’s impossible to grow up in north London, and I’m sure anywhere else for that matter, without being constantly reminded that, whilst the world itself might be quite a big place, yours is, and always will be, inescapably small. It’s their achievements, not that I am overly insecure about my own, but I’m still an un-known, and they, or at least the overwhelming majority of them, are not.

If they’re not musicians, usually a rapper, it is because they’re a hotshot in some industry, a documentary film maker, model, actor, graffiti artist, or all of the above, and if they fall outside of any of these categories it is because they are too busy ‘keeping it real’.

I thought Ali G was supposed to be a comic character, not a genuine persona on which to model ourselves? But it’s not just the employment details, it’s not even the Heat magazine just-stumbled-out-of-the-most-happening-party-in-town alike photo’s, hair beautifully ruffled in just the right way to show a perfectly made up, defined cheekbone. It’s the writing, the mantra’s, the ritual denunciation of anything that could be understood as normal. Considered language, normally reserved for the conversations of the intelligentsia, is cast about loosely, forming statements drunk on there own sense of original thought, that suggest their speaker to be an exponent of the very theorem of ‘coolness’, and therefore in a position to teach the rest of us about what is, or isn’t.

‘Thre’, pronounced three, has a page that plays tracks from his forthcoming album, it’s all very hip-hop, and while he sings out of the computer at me, informing me all about life’s hardships, and ‘keeping it raw’ (a sort of ghettoised version of keeping it real), I read about him, his music and his upbringing.

Now I know for a fact that this kid grew up in a quiet, predominantly Jewish, corner of north London, not ‘London’s notorious East End’. Notorious? I’ve been to his house for god sake, and there is absolutely nothing notorious about the area. But he apparently has been gaining notoriety, spending the last few years ‘moving through London’s anti-capitalist squat party scene’, where he found himself amongst the Underground Alliance crew.

Here again I’m confused, because Thre, along with most of the crew in question were at the same university as me, and living a good 60 miles outside of the capital. I guess it’s not cool enough to have met in a social sciences lecture.

Lots of the girls I went to school with are on here, people who I was sure would laugh hysterically at me if I told them I had become part of an on-line community, and what’s more they all seem to be doing a lot of pretty high brow socialising. One of them informs us all that she might not be able to join in until later, “Bugger and balls, might be late champs and shoes tomorrow, we’re signing a band and can’t not be there… :( ”. Another one when asked, presumably by herself, if she believes in herself, tells us “Yes copiously”, well good for her, but so would I if I had 107 friends.


After another half hour of mingling, I have polity introduced myself to eight people I went to sixth form with, the younger siblings of two of my friends, three people I have slept with, and have discovered a network more entangled than I could ever have imagined.

I found my friend Harry. Harry has never met any of my other friends, he lives on the other side of the city and I’ve only known him a short while. However it looks like I could easily be saved the trouble of introducing the two parties, He is friends with a rapper, who knows, amongst others, the girl who was going to late for champs and shoes, now she knows a girl who is friends with my friend who got me involved with this mess is the first place, who other than Tom, is the only person I am cyber friends with. The world really is shrinking.


I’m almost ready to leave the party, it’s not been a bad night, and the lack of a cloak room queue, the fact my clothes don’t’ smell like they’ve been borrowed by a chimney sweep, and that I don’t need to make the choice between a taxi and the night bus, are all big pluses, oh yeah and I won’t have a head-ache and bad breath tomorrow, just the sore eyes.

I’ve seen loads of people I had completely forgotten existed, some who I wish I had never met, and quite a few who made me nostalgic for the way that growing up loans us things but never really lets us keep much. All of them assure me are of an ‘eclectic’ personality type.

Myspace gives a fascinating insight into how people use a veneer, to develop themselves, both outwardly socially, but also in understanding themselves. I don’t think that most of the people I’ve met are lying, I think they have set up dubious personas, and have, or are least along the way to, realising that person.

In a world where celebrity and status are synonymous with the idea of success, and people will do increasingly debasing, and disturbing things to obtain these social commodities, Myspace seems to provide an important facility. In the real world our dreams and ambitions are subject to the worst sort of ridicule, but in the Myspace party we can be whoever we want, we’re all equals, even if some people do have bigger entourages than others.

I quickly went to say bye to Tom on the way out, and found he had posted a blog all about Myspace parties that were going to be taking place in different cities. He’ll need a big venue.