Your Ghost Will Have a MySpace Page!

A while back I was listening to NPR. There had been a dramatic rise in deaths in Iraq of armed forces. NPR was reporting on one soldier in particular, rather his MySpace page. This particular man had maintained a page before he was assigned his tour of duty and kept it updated as best he could while serving. Over time he had acquired a bevy of friends, most of which he’d never met—as MySpace goes. All were in support of this soldier and wished him luck as well as express their gratitude. This soldier who had died was not famous. Other than two minutes on the radio program he passed on with no publicity. So for a lot of supporters it came as sort of a shock when they logged on to express their support and found posted on his comments by a real life friend that he was dead. His page then transformed into a memorial.

Two days ago I was driving and listening to NPR. This time the dramatic rise in deaths was the Virginia Tech slayings. This time they were reading victims’ MySpace pages so that the listener can get a grasp on what sort of innocence was lost. The page they chose was typical for a young female yet jaded to this world. She loved her school. She loved learning new things. She wanted to meet good, fun, honest people. So on, and so on.

MySpace as a tombstone: it feels ridiculous. Mostly because for the large majority of us MySpace is not necessarily the place where we try to be ourselves. For us adults it’s a creative space to take the place of rock posters, and magazine tear outs of bikini girls we had on our bedroom walls and in our high school lockers. I mean I get to call up a list of my friends and see TV’s Jerri Blank and video game goddess Morgan Webb counted among some of my nearest and dearest. I leave opinionated trivia all the place. As of this writing I have a Jordy video posted on my site—a goddamn infant popstar! If I die tomorrow then a lot of you who do actually know me but not so good that we hang out will log on to find me dead. You’ll have a vague notion of who I was but the only tangible thing will be my Nick Cave video entitled “No Pussy Blues”. What new meaning will that take on then? My headline is “Eliminate the ninnies and the twits.” Will you tell your friends that, yeah, he sure was a major advocate of the eradication of nincompoops? Will you then be flamed by another friend of mine who will tell you, no, asshole, the headline is a quote from a Devo song bearing more subversive meaning than you’ll ever know?

What of those of us who stack up celebrities and panty clad “college girls”? What of those of us who use the site to spread all myriad of propaganda and personal belief? What if our mamas caught wind of our pages, and in the shock of our demise wish to find and see something new of us?

On the one hand our MySpace legacy will show a version of ourselves as how we wished to be. On the other, it’s largely comprised of our pop culture preferences and very little of our actual selves. I mean I’ve only looked at that Jordy video once before adding it to my page. Why? Because it’s fucking stupid and ridiculous and not really worth any extra attention.

So, just like the fact that our bowels evacuate themselves at our death doesn’t need to be in our eulogy, please, on that dark day you learn of my passing delete me as your friend, and ignore my MySpace page, because it’s just a bunch of shit.

Jody