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| Vianna Davila: Here's a real-world confession |
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| Wednesday, 18 July 2007 | ||
I'm not proud of this fact, nor do I want to advertise for this oh-so-infamous Web site — a place for friends, they say! — where even dead people and burning piles of mulch can have their own profiles. I'm just here to start a discussion based on one question: Is MySpace ruining our relationships? I didn't join this little networking cult, I mean village, until about a year ago. I resisted partly out of some stupid principle, the same way I still won't watch “Top Gun” or “The Matrix.” Then suddenly, I was selecting which photos to put up and thinking about how to describe myself. Soon, I signed in on a regular basis, wondering if someone left me another message or posted another comment about my blog. MySpace is an excellent place to advertise yourself, keep up with friends, spy on your exes or — better yet — spy on their new significant others, passing swift judgment on them based on their choice of page layout and interests. My MySpace whims change on a regular basis so that my music choices and headlines are essentially like mood rings. I suppose there's nothing wrong with that, but what about expressing these things to, oh, I don't know, actual people? But where do we draw the line between our real selves and the selves we create in this virtual world, the self we want people to see rather than the person we really are? When do we get a real life? My cousin and I recently were sending messages back and forth to each other via MySpace when both of us were suddenly locked out of our accounts, an embargo that lasted a full 12 hours. It wasn't pretty. More than once my cousin called me in a panic, long-distance from New York City late at night, desperate to know if my e-mail to the MySpace technical group had finally been answered. It's not just this site. I can surf the Net for hours, downloading music, reading the New York Times online or watching “Charlie the Unicorn” or “Kelly Loves Shoes” clips on YouTube. Is this about not dating or is it about not knowing how to get up and go in general? Earlier today, I was sprawled on my bed, thinking about the million and one things I needed to do. Then I felt bad because I wasn't doing them. Then the idea for this column came for me. I hopped up, ran to the computer and started typing without stopping and got excited — EXCITED — about having something to say and wanting to say it. And I gotta tell ya — it felt pretty damned good. So take that, Tom. And if you don't know who that is, then I think you're doing pretty well in life.
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