MyPlace Analysis

Real Unreal World Copies Sci-Fi Models, But With More 'Chillin' August 22, 2005

Science fiction often becomes science fact, though sometimes the accomplishment isn't recognized for what it is because of the prosaic manner in which it takes place.

Think about one sci-fi set piece: the computer-generated, alternate-reality world, where people spend their time playing and interacting, like the Metaverse in the novel "Snow Crash" or the Holodeck on "Star Trek" or the "Matrix" movies from Hollywood. They create environments so real, so immersive, that users lose themselves in them.

It is becoming clear that the collective Internet is growing into that immersive reality, even if it doesn't have the animated "avatar" guides and realistic 3D graphics that these places have in science fiction.

How else can you explain Web sites like MySpace (www.MySpace.com)? There, untold tens of thousands of young people spend many hours a day wandering around as if in a suburban shopping mall, looking for friends, expressing opinions, acquiring trends and, in general, leading a life that at times seems to have more reality to it than the life they lead when they log off.

MySpace is a "social networking" site. In fact, it's currently the hottest of the scores of such sites on the Web. Last month, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought its parent company for $580 million, bringing unimagined wealth to the group of California twentysomethings who started the operation two years ago, and who are now busy trying to assure their users that nothing about the site will change.

In a social-networking site, users create a home page for themselves, with pictures and descriptions of their interests, and then go off and look for other like-minded people. You ask these other people if they will be your friends. If they say yes, you get to put their picture on your page, along with a link to their page.

Some Internet brands -- Yahoo, Google, eBay, Amazon -- seem to grow only stronger with each passing year. The social-networking sites, though, seem to come and go like boy bands, going from hot to cold on the whim of the crowd. Some of the arrivals at MySpace told me they came there after spending time on TheFacebook. As for social-networking pioneer Friendster, well, that might as well be the Atkins diet. It's so 2003.

Analysts who try to follow this world say they are continually amazed at the apparently random manner in which a site becomes popular. MySpace professes to have a music orientation. It jumped on the blogs trend early, and it makes it easy for users to pile all manner of graphics and multimedia onto their home pages. As a result, many of them come to resemble a scrapbook put together after a long night of drinking, during which everything looked good so everything got added in.

MySpace's technology doesn't explain its success. Instead, some unpredicted perturbation in the cultural atmosphere seems to get a few people interested in a particular site, and that quickly snowballs into a full-fledged viral phenomenon.

Companies like Yahoo see social networks like MySpace as the long-awaited antidote to useless Web sites that have ads but nothing else. That's because they hope that you will go to a social-network site and develop a trusted circle of acquaintances you can turn to for, say, product recommendations.

I am dubious. In a few hours on MySpace, I learned that Jenny Boom, Zolom and Shantastica were all in my Extended Space. I don't think I will be asking them about mortgage refinancing any time soon.

So what are the kids that frequent MySpace like these days?

They are -- stop the presses -- interested in sex and attractive sexual partners. They have exhibitionist tendencies, though in a PG sort of way, at least on MySpace. They claim to spend much of their spare time "chillin." They don't seem to read a lot. Part of the standard MySpace questionnaire asks about favorite books, and a common answer is, "I don't have time to read." Who would with all that time spent chillin?

Much of MySpace is open for all to see, meaning you can read many of the notes that users leave for each other even if you haven't been more formally inducted into their corner of the social network. The most common rhetorical style you'll find here is the sort of MTV-esque feigned inarticulateness that, one fears, only masks the genuine article.

"Me and Jamie going to getz some groceryz ok so your food is in the fridge," writes user Ria to user Ish. "Im leaving the Bambinoz with Chale so youz know."

The male-to-female ratio on MySpace seems three or four to one, so women, especially attractive ones, quickly get attention. (The friend-acquisition process on MySpace is connected to the attractive sexual partner pursuit mentioned above.)

Donna, a 22-year-old New Yorker with Sarah Jessica Parker styling, got hundreds of friends requests within a few days of signing up. She reports to me: "I'd say about half seemed gentlemanly and polite, and the other half was just to say things like, 'You're hot.' I obviously deleted those messages."

If only real life had a delete key.