myspace isn't mine

Myspace--a line in the media holdings portfolio of media magnate Rupert Murdoch--is a hellish collection of animated advertisements that hail you through such common slogans as "would you like to meet her?" I don't like writing amid a massive scrawl of advertising space that virtually crowds out mine. So who's space is this? It surely isn't mine.

When I'm greeted with numerous options to 'personalize' my space with skins from popular movies, drinks, and the like I'm only adding to the advertising environment that IS myspace. I understand that people like to stay in contact and use these social networking environments to stay 'present' while remaining afar. At what a cost it comes. They become the avatars for some consumer paradise that hails all who use said product as "happy" and "satisfied." No object could come close to fulfilling desire. A person cannot fulfill desire. Death fulfills desire because it ends the lack that motivates desire.

Rupert Murdoch was featured on a Time magazine front page in the late 1970s as a caricature of Godzilla. His head was grafted to the monster's body as he stood amid the high-rises of New York. The article and the premonition that the picture posed suggested just what we've come to believe: here's a guy who's swallowing up small media outlets, storming their viewership, crushing the locale, breathing fire, and inspiring fear in the denizens.

Rupert Murdoch is old and he will die some day. But his dream will live on in the Fox News Corporation. Myspace and other sites like it serve his agenda to take over the modes of communication. With the help of the sponsors to whom he sells his ad space, our very words will soon become the very stuff of advertisement.

As if it hasn't. Oh, but it will.

From the head, to the mouth, to the throat. That's how one professor I had described the process of automation outlined in George Orwell's "1984." The localization and co-optation of the mechanism for speaking is central to the mechanization of individual consciousness. As speaking is a component in the process of cultural reproduction, gaining access to that co-opts the process of cultural reproduction.