The battle for my(voice)space

Musings on myspace

This post below on myspace is interesting for a variety of reasons. After my initial excitment about Rupes buying myspace, and extolling the virtues of buying the holes in the digital cheese.

I stopped and wondered if the the mogul of command and control had really changed his spots?

What most of the trendy wendy's remain blissfully unaware of is the fact that MySpace is Rupert Murdoch's battle axe for shaping a future Internet environment whereby electronic dissent, whether it be against corporations or government, will not tolerated and freedom of e-speech will cease to exist.

MySpace has been caught shutting down blogs critical of itself and other Murdoch owned companies. They even had the audacity to censor links to completely different websites when clicking through for MySpace. When 600 MySpace users complained, MySpace deleted the blog forum that the complaints were posted on. Taking their inspiration from Communist China, MySpace regularly uses blanket censorship to block out words like 'God'.

Earlier this week Rupert Murdoch sounded the death knell for conventional forms of media in stating that the media elite were losing their monopoly to the rapid and free spread of new communication technologies. Murdoch stressed the need to regain control of these outlets in order to prevent the establishment media empire from crumbling.

Danah Boyd writing in an essay on Myspace says

MySpace has grown so large that the needs, values and practices of its users are slamming into each other. It's facing the archetypical clashing of cultures. Yet, interestingly, most users are not that concerned - they're trying to figure out how to live in this super public. The challenge is that outsiders are panicking about a culture that they are not a part of. They want to kill the super public rather than support people in learning how to negotiate it.

No one knows how to live in such a super public, but this structure is going to become increasingly a part of our lives. It is no wonder that youth want to figure it out. And it is critical that they do, especially since our physical worlds have become more segregated and walled off, partitioned by age, race, class, religion, values, etc. Yet, it is the older generation that did that segregating and they're not really ready to face collapsed contexts at every turn or to learn how to engage with people who have very different values on a daily basis. Because of their position of power, outsiders are pushing the big red emergency button, screaming danger and creating a complete and utter moral panic. Welcome to a generational divide, where adults are unable to see the practices of their children on kids' terms.

So there is an interesting contradiction, in how we as a community and as individuals feel about having our voices controlled and censored.

My thinking is cynically that, big business and media understand the old way doesn't work anymore, so hey lets just and buy into this community thing and then we can get back to business as usual, right? Wrong.

This is the crux of a new socio-economic model, companies cannot exert control over individuals and communities in the way they did in an industrialised age.

Censorship, is about control, DRM and spyware are about control. Just reading Robert McChesneys Book The Problem with the Media , and his chapter on events in 2003, when the then FCC President was trying to deregulate big media, so that it could become more monopolistic, demonstrates how deep this notion of command and control goes. And, how the interests of businesses are often in conflict with the interests of consumers. You have to give up control to gain control, this is what Danah explains in her essay on Myspace.

And the implications, are far more wide ranging than just a media mogul buying an online community.

Comments

[Lalit Sarna]

I am a strong believer in an individual’s right to express one self. However I also believe that a business has the right to protect itself. Myspace’s primary source of revenue to this date has been Advertising dollars. Unpredictable user generated content is highly undesirable vehicle for advertisers. I can understand why.

So now Myspace has a predicament, Impose censorship on users and make it obvious that it’s Myspace who owns the content not users or scare away the advertisers. So myspace goes where the money is, it decides to hire a safety czar and 100 people team to police user generated content.

IMHO I think it’s a disaster waiting to happen primarily because of 2 reasons
1) Manual monitoring of 78 million (and growing ) user profiles is not a scalable method and comes with prohibitive resource requirements.

2) I believe that majority of MySpace users are characterized as fickle and rebellious in nature. I some what agree, and I also believe that these users will not tolerate censorship.

So what is the Alternative ?
As Jeff Jarvis says in his blog , Let the community own the sins of the community. He suggests “You want to leave control and responsibility at the edges because that's where it is anyway and bring people together with information and each other”.

I think he is on the money. Censorship by the corporations may not be tolerated, but censorship by peers? Now that can work wonderfully.

Community aided classification (tagging) combined with community promoted reputation of content and the author can provide excellent scalable filtering mechanism for users and advertisers looking for suitable user generated content for advertisement.

[Lancel]

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[supra shoes for boy]

I love your blog very much, more more info, I will concern it again!

[Secret Commission System]

Great article Alan, thanks

[Lisa Strutton]

I think Myspace is dead since Facbook and Twitter... even if I must admit that I liked the freedom it gave its users to contact and friend all the people they wanted

[ノースフェイス]

金正日の教示は、また平和な新しい世界を構築し、世界の人々の間の団結と調和を強化してまいりますと述べた。

[グッチ]

亘理町によると、荒浜地区の堤防沿いは町の集団移転の対象となる「移転促進区域」に含まれていない地域も多く、建築制限もかかっていない。このため流失を免れた自宅の修復を終えた住民もいる。