I Don't Get It, But I'll Try

While at GenCon last week, where I had a great time catching up with tons of great illustrators and selling lots of stuff (thank you!), I had a few conversations, often at the Alcatraz Brewing Co.. Alcatraz is not the best thing going in Indianapolis, but they tend to host large groups of people with little fuss and the food is alright. If their beer rocks I couldn't tell you. It tastes like beer to me.

I commented to some other illustrators that I feel I have done a pretty good job these many years of keeping abreast of technology and changes in how technology affects culture. I got online in 1995 and immediately spent a lot of time on Usenet, began programming Daydream Graphics by hand, and have generally tried to stay abreast of various technologies in the intervening years, even if I don't utilize them all. I like to at least be able to understand things.

It occured to me a couple years back that I simply do not understand MySpace. It's obvious that it long ago became an important fixture in the interwebs. But I don't understand what the fuss is about. I also know that among the younger generations it is especially important, such that some young people spend all or most of their internet time on MySpace. It has become something of a sub-internet for a group of people.

My comment, as I considered MySpace when I started this blog, was that MySpace is a website that does a lot of things, poorly. Even the most tamed of pages look terrible. Information is jumbled, music jumps out at you on every page that you immediately turn off, the race to get friends to add you dilutes the purpose of the friends list, comments include giant advertisements that take up entire screens to scroll past....It really seems like the internet took a step backward when MySpace took off.

I can always stand to be corrected and to fall in love with this particular internet phenomenon. What I don't want, to borrow an analogy Raven Mimura made, is for MySpace to become my first instance of the blinking VCR clock--that simple bit of tech that everyone gets except for the old or out-of-touch. To this end, I've tossed up a MySpace page and will be putting some content on it. There won't be anything there that isn't also here, and I will keep Exit Within where it is because it looks a whole lot better than it might on MySpace.

So go ahead and send your add requests. I swear I will put the hammer down on giant-image comments though, so help me God. Convince me that MySpace rocks.